New Version of the Omniture Implementation Toolkit

June 17th, 2008 by Lars Johansson

Semphonic has announced a new version of its Omniture Implementation Toolkit. I decided to ask Phil Kemelor a few questions about it.

Have you seen a big demand for migration help from HBX users? Is that the main reason for the updated version?

Phil: We actually started thinking about doing the HBX to SiteCatalyst migration guide when the acquisition was first announced, so this has been in the works for awhile. But we also wanted to get some client work under our belts to inform what we already knew conceptually to be issues that s HBX customers would be dealing with, such as developing reports with ReportBuilder, a different page naming convention and dealing with link coding, for example.

We’ve also gotten some excellent feedback on the first version of the Toolkit, and this led us to adding a Coding Standards and Best Practices Guide and a guide to tagging AJAX, Flash and DHTML.

What is your most successful selling point for the toolkit?

Phil: We find that people who are managing implementations are finding the Toolkit to be a great resource; just getting straight on all the terminology and being able to have a good basis for planning their projects, and knowing when to involve stakeholders and development teams.

Are there any popular requests you have yet to cater to?

Phil: We think for right now we’ve gotten most everything covered…at least based on the feedback we have through current subscribers. We encourage all subscribers to give us feedback on other topics they’d like to see addressed.

We expect to update the Toolkit a couple of times a year to make sure that the information is current and valuable.

What do you think is the biggest challenge when implementing SiteCatalyst?

Phil: Omniture is a complex product, which is both the good news and the bad news. The good news is that you can do a significant amount of customization in the product to do very comprehensive analysis. The bad news is that you can’t just slap on a global tag and expect to get all of the data that you want, and report on it in the way you want.

To really take advantage of the tool, you need to do quite a bit of custom variable and event coding. That takes some thought and planning; really understanding how business questions map to the reports you want.

If you’re new to SiteCatalyst and doing and implementation for the first time, you may miss this simply you don’t understand how propVars, eVars and events relate and translate into reports in the interface. Without that understanding, it’s pretty much impossible to do a good job with the customization.

The new Best Practices section was really an outgrowth of feedback we had that people were struggling with how to understand those constructs and use all that customization effectively. This clearly helps time HBX customers who are migrating to SiteCatalyst, as well as those who are new to the product.

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