At InfoBase Media Corperation we use Omniture SiteCatalyst which is very complex and is meant as a enterprise solution. We’re not that big trust me, the actual license is actually like $30,000 a year, thankfully we just buy from a reseller called 10XMarketing.
The funny thing is that both companies are located in the Provo-Orem Utah area just like us. I guess the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, unless of course your Google. What I mean to say is that SiteCatalyst frankly is too much for us and is just too expensive for what we use it for. None of us are trained to use it to its fullest capacity and its even been giving us bad data the last week or so.
I think it is mainly because the SiteCatalyst code may not be on every page. It was the past but since we have been adding the Google analytics, which is free by the way, to our site some f the SiteCatalyst code may have been deleted by accident or something. I am not sure the date error could be caused by not having the code on every page due to the nature of the data, which is visits vs. unique visitors.
First I feel it is important define each, both definitions are taken from the SiteCatalyst Glossary of Terms.
Visit:
The number of times a visitor browses to your site. A visit begins when a person first views a page on your company’s Web site, and lasts until that person stops all activity on the site for a period of 30 minutes (Web analytics general industry standard). The industry assumes that, given the length of time, the person likely closed their browser and reinitiated a separate “visit.” A unique visitor could be responsible for multiple visits (or sessions) during a day, month, and year.
Unique Visitor:
Registered when a person visits a site for the first time within a specified period of time. In other words, while one person may visit your site and view the front page three times, a contact page twice, and several other pages once each, this person would be recorded as one “unique visitor” so you can tell exactly how many individual people are coming to your site.
There are four different time frames SiteCatalyst uses to define unique visitors: hourly, daily, monthly and yearly. An hourly unique visitor may visit your site at 2:01, 2:45, and then again at 3:24. This visitor will register as two hourly unique visitors, because only the 2:01 and 3:24 visits would count as unique visits for their respective hours (2:00-3:00 and 3:00-4:00). This same standard is used to determine daily, monthly and yearly unique visitors for their respective time frames. It can be helpful to ask the following question to see how SiteCatalyst determines who is a unique visitor: “How many different people saw my site during this time period?”
Note: Daily Unique Visitor reports are different from the others in that it is not only cookie-based, but is also IP address based to help catch everyone who visits your site.
Note: The sum of all daily unique visitors is not equal to the total monthly unique visitors for that month. This is because a visitor who returns twice in a given month will count as two daily unique visitors – one for each day they visited, but only as a single monthly unique visitor.
Because a unique visitor can return and make many visits in the course of a day or a month that there should always be fewer Unique Visitors than Visits or they should be equal, Unique Visitors < or = Visits. Another way of putting it is that Visits should never be less than Unique Visitors. But this is exactly the bad data I have been getting from SiteCatalyst for over a month now.
Here is some data examples:
| Date | Unique Visitors | Visits | Variance |
| Sep 1, 2006 | 807 | 812 | 5 |
| Sep 2, 2006 | 997 | 1003 | 6 |
| Sep 3, 2006 | 1383 | 1348 | -35 |
| Sep 4, 2006 | 1053 | 1030 | -23 |
| Sep 5, 2006 | 1006 | 993 | -13 |
| Sep 6, 2006 | 926 | 903 | -23 |
| Sep 7, 2006 | 964 | 949 | -15 |
| Sep 8, 2006 | 1299 | 1249 | -50 |
| Sep 9, 2006 | 1184 | 1134 | -50 |
| Sep 10, 2006 | 1635 | 1569 | -66 |
| Sep 11, 2006 | 1327 | 1320 | -7 |
| Sep 12, 2006 | 1394 | 1364 | -30 |
| Sep 13, 2006 | 1153 | 1127 | -26 |
| Sep 14, 2006 | 1082 | 1074 | -8 |
| Sep 15, 2006 | 988 | 987 | -1 |
| Sep 16, 2006 | 1237 | 1217 | -20 |
| Sep 17, 2006 | 1681 | 1637 | -44 |
| Sep 18, 2006 | 1092 | 1093 | 1 |
| Sep 19, 2006 | 1110 | 1136 | 26 |
| Sep 20, 2006 | 1144 | 1121 | -23 |
| Sep 21, 2006 | 1824 | 1755 | -69 |
| Sep 22, 2006 | 1179 | 1177 | -2 |
| Sep 23, 2006 | 1238 | 1219 | -19 |
| Sep 24, 2006 | 1651 | 1575 | -76 |
| Sep 25, 2006 | 1214 | 1226 | 12 |
| Sep 26, 2006 | 1215 | 1208 | -7 |
| Sep 27, 2006 | 1132 | 1128 | -4 |
| Sep 28, 2006 | 1090 | 1095 | 5 |
| Sep 29, 2006 | 999 | 1009 | 10 |
| Sep 30, 2006 | 997 | 970 | -27 |
| Total | 36001 | 35428 | -573 |
| Oct 1, 2006 | 1720 | 1690 | -30 |
| Oct 2, 2006 | 1285 | 1253 | -32 |
| Oct 3, 2006 | 1166 | 1166 | 0 |
| Oct 4, 2006 | 1075 | 1095 | 20 |
| Oct 5, 2006 | 979 | 979 | 0 |
| Oct 6, 2006 | 987 | 1001 | 14 |
| Oct 7, 2006 | 961 | 910 | -51 |
| Oct 8, 2006 | 1511 | 1476 | -35 |
| Oct 9, 2006 | 1366 | 1398 | 32 |
| Oct 10, 2006 | 1659 | 1618 | -41 |
| Oct 11, 2006 | 1580 | 1537 | -43 |
| Oct 12, 2006 | 1003 | 1007 | 4 |
| Oct 13, 2006 | 948 | 941 | -7 |
| Oct 14, 2006 | 623 | 595 | -28 |
Google on the other hand has not been giving me bad data like this. Now keep in mind we just got all our pages added with the Google analytics code, or at least we think we have. Speculation still exists because Google consistently gives us lower numbers than SiteCatalyst for everything, but at least the numbers have been consistent. Here is our Google data:
| Date Range | Unique Visitors | Visits | Variance |
| Fri 9/1 | 743 | 921 | 178 |
| Sat 9/2 | 831 | 1000 | 169 |
| Sun 9/3 | 1272 | 1476 | 204 |
| Mon 9/4 | 904 | 1045 | 141 |
| Tue 9/5 | 921 | 1083 | 162 |
| Wed 9/6 | 888 | 1054 | 166 |
| Thu 9/7 | 886 | 1026 | 140 |
| Fri 9/8 | 1192 | 1440 | 248 |
| Sat 9/9 | 1063 | 1218 | 155 |
| Sun 9/10 | 1489 | 1713 | 224 |
| Mon 9/11 | 1230 | 1458 | 228 |
| Tue 9/12 | 1093 | 1291 | 198 |
| Wed 9/13 | 1072 | 1257 | 185 |
| Thu 9/14 | 987 | 1181 | 194 |
| Fri 9/15 | 899 | 1105 | 206 |
| Sat 9/16 | 934 | 1099 | 165 |
| Sun 9/17 | 1489 | 1718 | 229 |
| Mon 9/18 | 1015 | 1188 | 173 |
| Tue 9/19 | 1010 | 1213 | 203 |
| Wed 9/20 | 1009 | 1226 | 217 |
| Thu 9/21 | 1356 | 1677 | 321 |
| Fri 9/22 | 585 | 700 | 115 |
| Sat 9/23 | 591 | 682 | 91 |
| Sun 9/24 | 846 | 991 | 145 |
| Mon 9/25 | 644 | 763 | 119 |
| Tue 9/26 | 580 | 708 | 128 |
| Wed 9/27 | 575 | 688 | 113 |
| Thu 9/28 | 547 | 664 | 117 |
| Fri 9/29 | 459 | 579 | 120 |
| Sat 9/30 | 480 | 607 | 127 |
| Sun 10/1 | 826 | 1014 | 188 |
| Mon 10/2 | 694 | 814 | 120 |
| Tue 10/3 | 585 | 697 | 112 |
| Wed 10/4 | 552 | 682 | 130 |
| Thu 10/5 | 523 | 627 | 104 |
| Fri 10/6 | 473 | 584 | 111 |
| Sat 10/7 | 457 | 533 | 76 |
| Sun 10/8 | 735 | 873 | 138 |
| Mon 10/9 | 955 | 1175 | 220 |
| Tue 10/10 | 1482 | 1726 | 244 |
| Wed 10/11 | 1286 | 1514 | 228 |
| Thu 10/12 | 944 | 1116 | 172 |
| Fri 10/13 | 865 | 1034 | 169 |
| Sat 10/14 | 467 | 518 | 51 |
Conclusion: Google Analytics can actually give you more reliable data than Omniture’s SiteCatalyst and it’s FREE!
27 responses so far ↓
1 Michael M. Choi // Dec 10, 2006 at 3:26 am
Very interesting article Bart. It was very informing.
2 Robert // Feb 22, 2007 at 3:12 pm
I have come upon the exact same conclusion. I have had Omniture training, and have seen it in action on 3 major sites I have helped manage and analyze. For my personal sites I go for the free Google Analytics.
Omniture is full of bugs and the interface makes it difficult to visualize correlations properly. GA has an extremely simple drilldown process in which your information is presented so nicely that you don’t have to split your head open to analyze.
Granted, there are less custom variables, and less possibilities with certain tracking elements (campaigns, trkids, etc), but let’s face it, when you’re analysing every little thing to such detail, you’re not spending time adding promotions, content and ideas to your site that could make a nig difference in attracting qualified traffic…
Google Analytics is more than enough for any small to med-large site…. omniture is for muli-million dollar companies… that have the time and resources to waste money on a whole “tracking” team.
3 Jeff Lawrence // Mar 21, 2007 at 10:25 am
Thank you for the information Bart. Have you noticed a substantial unique visitor count beyond 10-15% when using Google Analytics compared to a log based solution?
4 BartGibby // Mar 22, 2007 at 8:36 am
Umm… I have not done the math on that. I do have a hunch that Google doesn’t give me all my keywords like my log based program(s) seem to do, or at least that tracking of keywords will be different between the two.
But it would make sense that there would be an increase in the accuracy of the statistics gathered by Omniture Site Catalyst, Google Analytics, and other solutions that use more than just logs such as cookies.
However, this may even decrease the unique visitor count. I would really like to get more into conversion and tracking. In fact I’ll take a look at this in one of my future blog posts.
Thanks Jeff, I hadn’t even thought about how big the difference between the two would be.
Cheers,
-Bart
5 Kelly // Mar 27, 2007 at 12:49 pm
We installed Omniture late 2006 and I have been noticing odd behavior since installation on the reporting end. Such as; 15-20% inflation compared to the engine reports (visits, views); pages reporting traffic that weren’t live yet; pages appearing within the clickmap report that aren’t part of a page. When I ask about these items, I am told the reporting is fine; like I am suppose to accept that answer and forget about the mystery occurences. Has any one else experienced these behaviors?
6 BartGibby // Mar 27, 2007 at 2:32 pm
Pages not being \”live\” can still get traffic, search engines are amazing today they can drill, prod, and poke in places they have never been able to go before.
This could be one reason for your traffic. Another is if you have a large company or even many team members just working on the pages could count as traffic.I am betting its the last, I would go into the Omniture settings and have your office specific IPs or cookies not tracked. I am not sure to what extend Omniture can filter out developers traffic, but I would assume it would be adequate.
If you have a changing page due to development and have added the Omniture code to that page before all the changes then that would also most likely explain your click map issues.
its probably a good practice to add the Omniture code to your pages as your final step before making the pages live.
I hope this helps, Cheers!
-Bart
7 Kelly // Mar 27, 2007 at 4:04 pm
No, that page had not even been developed yet; the page was built weeks close to a month later. Omniture was the last step when we did go live with this page, though.
In regards to the click map, the page has not been touched (this is a different page btw).
Thanks for your feedback
Kelly
8 pria // Apr 25, 2007 at 1:29 pm
i noticed differences in the numbers reported via click map and the numbers from the data warehousing report??
9 Bart Gibby // Apr 25, 2007 at 3:10 pm
pria,
I am not sure whether you are asking a question or making a statement?
-Bart
10 Matt Newman // May 23, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Bart, what is up? This is Matt Newman, from high school. I stumbled onto your site when I googled:
SiteCatalyst vs. Google Analytics
I am the webmaster at Wheelchair Foundation, and I have come to the same conclusions you have about Google Analytics and Omniture SiteCatalyst. With Google’s recent upgrades to Google Analytics, I think Omniture is going to lose market share fast unless they do something different. You can’t beat free, especially when it provides more accurate, more user-friendly, and better-managed data. Like all things Google, Analytics is an amazing product that only a big company with nothing better to do with hords of cash and a bunch of geeks with phds would produce for free.
11 Peter Andersson // Jul 13, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Do you know if omniture by default use 1st party cookie or 3rd party cookie counting Unique visitors/browsers?
12 Bart Gibby // Jul 13, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Peter,
From what I know they use their own cookie for tracking. I do believe there is settings in the sitecatalyst admin to set the cookies for certain time frames.
Useful if you want to expire a special sale or something.
Does that answer your question? Or are you asking if they can read other websites cookies placed on the users machine?
A coworker of mine also mentioned that:
“All tracking systems use third party cookies, cookies are domain based, and you can only drop a first party cookie from the domain or root domain that the browser is accessing. For example: if I am on toys.ebay.com, I cannot drop a cookie for http://www.ebay.com, but I can drop one for toy.ebay.com or ebay.com.” - Jared Turner
13 Britton // Aug 11, 2007 at 8:33 am
Don’t want to burst your bubble here. Omniture data isn’t bad folks. They simply have a different setting that doesn’t count a visit if the visitor rejects third party cookies. Google obviously chooses to count visits even if the user rejects a third party cookie. So this boils down to a choice of when to count a visit or not based on user browser settings.
I do agree however that if your company is small, free is hard to beat. If you’re enterprise, Omniture is a no-brainer over Google. There’s a reason why more and more enterprise folks choose Omniture. It simply gives these companies more of what they need: the ability to customize their tracking solutions like GA can’t. If your small and don’t need all that customization, Google isn’t necessarily a bad idea.
14 Bart Gibby // Aug 11, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Britton, I really appreciate you defending Omniture’s Site Catalyst. They are a local company here and I have even had them contact me for to be a “Best Practices Consultant”. But most of all I would love to see them maintain their dominance in enterprise level analytics soultions.
Too many Utah (Utah Valley mainly) based companies like WordPerfect, Novell, and others have been destroyed by giants. The two mentioned of course were by Microsoft.
Google has yet to devastate anyone else that I know of as Microsoft has when they release a product. Google just doesn’t have the distribution channel that Microsoft has had… so they have had to create a new one.
Back on track here, I still do not see why SiteCatalysts numbers would have been so much higher than Google’s if is counting less visits than Omniture. But the most important thing is that there is a negative variance with Omniture and not with Google. Thus I deem Google’s data to be more reliably consistent when it comes to Visits and Unique Visits.
Please, pleas elet me know if they have fixed this… eventually I think my new work OrangeSoda would love to make an agreement with a top tier analytics company.
15 Ryan Roberts // Aug 31, 2007 at 11:54 am
Well how valid is your comparision if you think your Omniture code is implemented incorrectly anyway. Granted their shouldn’t be more uniques than visits. My experience with Omniture has been really good. When we have run into weird reporting anomalies they’ve been able to correct them after working with their support.
16 Ilkka Jormalainen // Dec 5, 2007 at 8:20 am
Hi! Im from finland and there is a really intresting web tracking program here called “Snoobi”. I haven`t seen omnitures reporting but compared to google analytics, snoobi gives me much more valuable information about my website. There`s a really good search option in snoobi. For example you last list every visitor with snoobi who has came to my website in 5 days and used word “holiday” in google. Then i can see what pages every separate visitor has clicked in my website and in what order. Then i see for how long they have been in every page. I can also see in what firm they work for and how many times have they visited in my site. I can also make a search that how many of them has visited in some exact page
This is really good for my addwords campaign.
17 Bart Gibby // Dec 5, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Ilkka,
do you have a URL for the “Snoobi” analytics? I am currently testing three or four different analytics on my website. I would love to add one from Europe.
I am always looking to highlight the best tools for webmasters.
Cheers, - Bart
18 Snoobi Oy // Dec 11, 2007 at 12:19 am
The URL is http://www.snoobi.com. For further details you can contact Jukka Ropponen 0400423910
19 Victor Edinian // Feb 1, 2008 at 2:42 am
Hey folks, interesting thread we have here. I agree that this is a very difficult comparison because the page tags in the above examples were not implemented correctly. And although I have used Google Analytics and WebTrends, I am anxious to use Omniture and Unica at an enterprise level.
With this said, I think the core reason to use any analytics solution is to bring more value and less waste to your site. If you have millions of people visiting your site, a 10% improvement is 100,000+ unique improvements, which hopefully should increase conversions by an X amount.
Now the brass tax, which is the holy grail out of all enterprise analytics softwares that you think will make it simple to optimize your efforts that 10% more?
Let’s keep it simple…and discuss…
Google in my opinion does the job, if you have tagged your pages correctly, and you have 100% implementation. The problem is that it does not do a good job with offline efforts.
WebTrends on the other hand, is decent. It does have many features that will allow you to work with databases, email programs and more. The problem I found is that they lack in many add on’s like multi-variant testing and the sort.
Therefore, any true success from Omniture with these other issues? I’m curious to find out…
Thanks,
Victor
20 Melissa // Feb 26, 2008 at 9:25 am
Hi,
I come from an interactive agency, and we have implemented SiteCatalyst 13.5 on about 20 different client sites. We started with Omniture about 9 months ago. It seems to be an uphill battle trying to decifer good data from bad. On some sites, our campaign ids are getting dropped, so we can’t tell what email, banners, prints ads are working and which are not. On one of our more complex sites we have A LOT of custom settings, but the reports contradict each other. SearchCenter data conflicts with SiteCatalyst data. On other sites, we see orders that we know were purchased, have been lost by the analytics system.
Is it possible that there is no one product out there with 99% accurate data? Is it possible that we are supposed to use these tools to help us with trending, and give an overall idea of what’s going on, but have to accept the fact that it’s not accurate?
21 Bart Gibby // Feb 26, 2008 at 11:40 am
Melissa,
This is a great comment. I appreciate you taking the time to share this perception with us. It has been over a year since I posted this blog post. Since then I have also come to the same conclusion.
That no one tool can actually give you 100% accuracy. I have three free analytics solutions installed on my blog at the moment. They all differ with the data I receive from them.
Someday I hope to post a real case study about them. I have not because there are several out there already.
Again thank you for taking the time to write to all of us.
Cheers,
-Bart Gibby
22 jack casey // Mar 14, 2008 at 6:47 am
We TRIED to implement site catalyst for over 6 months and found so many inconsistencies that we junked the product. It is so complicated and un userfriendly that you need 2 dedicated people just to error check the product. The overhead of running the product was way too high. We ended up going back to Google for some fresh air. However we quickly grew out of the top line numbers we got from Google as you could not drill down to any degree and it was funny how Google always appears to account for over 60% of site traffic when our logfile analyser showed categorically they accounted for 40%. This made us suspicous that Google overinflates their own figures to support their PPC and since they are not audited i think it is easy to believe that Google are looking after their own. There is a huge conflict of interest to sell PPC and then report on it impartially.
We have since trialied Webtrends, Intellitracker and unica. We found all systems to be ok but unica and Intellitracker stood out a mile as the product for the serious business. Check them out both out as they make omniture and Google look like clowns when it comes down to power, userability and ease of use. Amazing products guys!
23 Bart Gibby // Mar 14, 2008 at 11:31 am
I have never heard of Unica. And I didn’t know WebTrends sold analytics. It seems everyone and their dog is doing analytics now a days.
I know we have very basic analytics program at OrangeSoda, Inc. but we don’t sell it separately from our PPC and SEO services. Its more of a value added service we provide.
Funny thing is I have not even used it on my blog yet. Simply because I have not received authorization for a an account yet.
I would like to check out these others you have mentioned Jack. I appreciate the time you took to tell us about your experience with SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics.
24 Ken // Apr 1, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I’d like to make a bold statement - there will never be a package that offers 100% data accuracy (even statistics don’t have 100% confidence anyways). The reason is simply because what is involved in the process:
- all of what you have already mentioned;
- tracking implementation (in flash vs. html);
- scripts operation calling the right tags;
- client server sending data;
- vendor server receiving data and depositing data accordingly;
- reporting platform pulling data accordingly.
If an error occurs in any of those steps, you will not see accurate data. Can they be fully operational 24/7/356? …. didn’t think so! Being said, I think we need to focus more on how we should utilize these tools.
I wouldn’t want to repeat what’s already said - large firm with good staffing should go for Omniture, etc. What I want to bring up is the lack of collaboration between Marketing and Analytics. I’ve yet to see any company doing a good job at using these tools to support their marketing objectives - I don’t just mean offline analytics, I mean the integration of all types of analytics. Web is only one of many marketing channels. If we have the Integrated Marketing Paradigm, why not an Integrated Analytics Paradigm?
25 Bart Gibby // Apr 3, 2008 at 10:29 am
Ken,
I really like where you are going with your comment. “Integrated Analytics Paradigm” is a very thought provoking topic. Especially for companies who use their website as one of their many sources of advertising and revenue.
Maybe that the next step with Omniture is to fully integrate a enterprise level full analytics system.
Crunching numbers from all sources.
I also like your bold statement. That the perfect data gather analytics solution is not out there and probably never will be. Which as you mention is due to the complexities involved and all the different types of technology working together.
I completely agree with this.
I would still like to point out that, just because it is expensive doesn’t mean it is more accurate. On a side note just because it is free doesn’t mean that it is less accurate. As my data I collected above suggests.
I hope Omnitire has fixed this issue. It is sad day for a company when a competitor can give a product away for free that gives a higher rate of data confidence.
Again Ken thank you for the awesome foresight into what a true analytics solution can become.
26 Patrick // Apr 23, 2008 at 5:46 pm
Has anyone run into a scenario where the clicks being reported by the search engines and omniture are close, but the difference between clicks and unique visitors is huge? I’ve been able to accept a 10-15% difference, but when it gets up to 40% a red flag goes up. Say a keyword drove 9,000 clicks, but that only translated into 6,000 visitors. I find it hard to believe the difference is from the same visitor clicking on an ad multiple times, unless there’s fraud involved.
27 curtis // May 14, 2008 at 8:15 am
Yes, a very good info on analytics software and the competition. After reading a little more on snoobi I see some faults in Google analytics . Intellitracker’s site did not offer much info at all. What I found most was their client list. And they measure site visitors..kind of funny there.
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