• Omniture is going to continue to support the HBX product line and will continue to invest in Platform 5 and its applications under a new brand, Discover OnPremise.  Additionally, Search and Publish will initially be integrated into Omniture SiteCatalyst through Omniture Genesis while we develop a comprehensive integration plan.
• A migration program is available for all HBX customers – providing a package of complimentary migration services and technology tailored to the specific needs and requirements of each customer. Counters the earlier highlight of “continuing to support the HBX product line” (should read “until we can kill it off).

You can view more on the Omniture site around the product direction, the migration program, support and training, etc.

BTW: if you are an HBX client, the login for HBX has moved and is well hidden on the Omniture site. You can login to HBX and other Visual Sciences applications here.

Omniture completes acquisition of Visual Sciences is a post from: benry blog

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This is your chance to hear Semphonic’s leading practitioners talk about the Omniture acquisition of Visual Sciences and ask them specific questions
around the impact, alternatives and implications!

Ask Semphonic is a FREE Q&A webinar hosted by Semphonic. You can submit questions in advance or during the webinar and hear our Analysts answer and
discuss them. Each Ask Semphonic webinar will have a main theme – kicking off with the Omniture / VS acquisition. Other measurement questions are welcome
and will be addressed time permitting.

Ask Semphonic is a follow-up to our X Change conference. Feedback from the conference overwhelmingly found the conversational format extremely useful and
asked for more web analytics “conversations.” While facilities such as the Web Analytics Forum are excellent for many questions, the conversational format
used at X Change adds a distinctive element that is hard to duplicate in any printed setting. Each Ask Semphonic session will last approximately 45-50 minutes.

WHEN: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 at 11:00am PST / 2pm EST

WHO: Semphonic’s Consultants will include Gary Angel, Breen Baker, June Dershewitz, Jesse Gross, Joel Hadary, Phil Kemelor and Paul Legutko.

Register now for this free webinar. Submit your questions to analytics@semphonic.com.

My questions

1) Gary’s recent blog post, Don’t Settle for Leftover Turkey When it comes to Web Measurement, notes that if you are on HBX, moving to SiteCatalyst, will involve the mapping of variables, segments, etc. His comment “The longer you stay anchored in the world of HBX, the longer you’re going to be eating leftover Turkey” sounded to me like his suggestion would be to ‘move now’ rather than wait to see the migration path Omniture proposes (the gateway being one route). For those on an existing HBX contract (ours expires in Dec 2008) is it his suggestion that we contact Omniture and start the transition now giving up a portion of our paid contract with HBX? What’s the approach Semphonic and other agencies are taking with their clients?

2) For those moving from HBX to Omniture, what do you think the biggest change for them outside of tagging? The loss of Report Builder? The need to re-tool reporting/dashboards? The need to learn a new tool? Feature decisions? (e.g. to ‘Discover’ or not).

3) Is this a time to evaluate other tool options other than SiteCatalyst (e.g. IndexTools, Google Analytics) or make an assumption that ‘big is better’?

Are you an HBX client? What are your questions? What are your plans?

Ask Semphonic about Omniture/Visual Sciences is a post from: benry blog

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•  Strong commitment to support of existing customers during the coming few quarters
• Desire to work to make the transition smooth for customers
• Combined client base of over 4000 customers, increased efficiency and increased scale with the combined company.

Time will only tell.

From today’s Visual Sciences earnings call is a post from: benry blog

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With this much analytics power under one roof the future will be interesting. My guess is that HBX will disappear with current clients migrated over; Visual Science will be integrated into Discover; then we’ll see someone gobble up the whole lot in this race for BI supremacy.

Other views and comments:

• Ian Thomas
• Phil Kemelor
• Gary Angel
• Marshall Sponder
• Manoj Jasra
• Bryan Eisenberg
• Jesse Gross
• Eric Peterson
• Lars Johansson

Omniture acquires Visual Sciences is a post from: benry blog

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Robbin at LunaMetrics agreed to help (and was a fantastic sounding board throughout this project).

We began by looking at a number of options for measurement. A number of metrics and KPIs came to mind: Ratio page views to visits; Exit ratio; Bounce rate and Percent one page visits. Here’s an explanation of each of the KPIs I’ve mentioned in more detail:

Ratio page views to visits
Formula: page views of a particular page / visits to the same page
A high ratio, especially on deep pages, seemed to indicate that the visitor was stuck and using the back button.

Exit ratio
Formula: exit visits / visits to the same page
While we might have a high number of visits for a page (meaning that we were getting the traffic there), this KPI would highlight which pages were causing the user to leave when they couldn’t find the information they were looking for.

Bounce rate
Formula: single access visits / entry visits to the same page
A measure of how many people leave without viewing any other pages. A low number tells you that the page is effective in moving the user deeper into the site, a higher bounce rate, the less effective a page is at keeping the user engaged. (Note: HBX, unlike Google Analytics, doesn’t display a bounce rate metric like Google Analytics does, so you have to calculate this in Excel).

Percent one page visits
Formula: single access visits / visits to the same page
Jim Novo noted this one in a Google Conversion University article. It’s the percentage of visitors bouncing off the site (like ‘plexiglas’ says Jim). It’s and usually is tied to global navigation issues and should trend down over time as you make changes to the site or copy. Robbin took the Bounce Rate and Percent One Page Visits KPIs and charted them and they correlated nicely, so using either KPI would work for us.

Looking at each of this KPIs on a per page basis told us we had some problems. Each by themselves was partially effective, but missing bits of information. So we set out to create a KPI mashup. This became known as the Steif Mashup Content KPI. Here’s what we came up with:

Visits * Bounce Rate / Time Spent on Page in Seconds

We liked this. Visits were a good indicator of the traffic volume and page importance to users, Time Spent on Page was a good indicator of the engagement of the user with the page content when they got there and Bounce rate was a good indicator of whether the page itself was working or not.

• A high visit page with a high bounce rate needed to be fixed ASAP. People were going here and we were losing them
• A low visit page with a high bounce rate, could be attended to when priority allowed
• A High visit page with a low bounce rate we could leave for now and come back to tweak later
• A low visit page with a low bounce rate we’d likely not even look at.

Using HBX Report Builder I created an Excel worksheet that pulled in the page path and the metrics related to that page path. For those who have never done this using Report Builder, here’s what you need to do.

• For the page path select ‘Most Requested Pages’ and bring in the page name and page path. If you set a filter you can bring in only pages that meet certain criteria (e.g. I used this to bring in only pages for the ’Banking’ section of our site – which you can set either within the Report Builder interface or reference to a cell in your Excel spreadsheet)
• Adding dependent requests off the page name, I grabbed each of the other values (visits, single access, entries, exits and time spent on page) and added them to their own columns.
• Since HBX reports time spent on page as D:HH:MM:SS you need to break this apart to get a value for the time overall in seconds. That’s easy using the MID function in Excel (cell G3 in the example is the time spent on page cell):
  (MID(G3,6,2)*60)+(MID(G3,9,2)

Then doing the calculations for each KPI was just a matter of referencing the data pulled down into Excel.

Problem was that this still wasn’t giving me an “at-a-glance” view of what pages were working or not. For example for a high traffic sick page, the resulting number was higher than that of a low traffic sick page, even if the bounce rate was the same for both pages. So setting priority at a glance was difficult. So we tried changing the mashup KPI taking out the ‘visits’ and ended up with this:

Bounce Rate / Time Spent on Page in Seconds

This was starting to look better. Now if a page had a higher “score” the more this page needed attention.

• A high bounce rate page with high read time could mean that the content was missing some information the visitor was looking for
• A low bounce rate page with a high read time meant that the content was likely working.
• A high bounce rate page with a low read time meant we were losing the visitor quickly. Content wasn’t working or providing the necessary information.
• A low bounce rate page with a low read time wasn’t getting used much, but was meeting the needs when it was accessed.

Now with this new KPI we’re starting to prioritize content changes that need to be made. As an overlay on this we’ve also segmented these KPIs looking at how the values change based on the traffic source, new vs. returning visitor, member vs. non-member, etc. Where we have pages with lite traffic volumes, we can extend it out to cover a longer period (e.g. last quarter instead of the last month).

So what do you think? Have we tackled this the right way? How do you measure your site’s content effectiveness?

Measuring content effectiveness is a post from: benry blog

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