Utah SEO Consultant

Michael M. Choi

Comment on December 10th, 2006.

Very interesting article Bart. It was very informing.

Robert

Comment on February 22nd, 2007.

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.

Jeff Lawrence

Comment on March 21st, 2007.

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?

BartGibby

Comment on March 22nd, 2007.

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

Kelly

Comment on March 27th, 2007.

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?

BartGibby

Comment on March 27th, 2007.

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

Kelly

Comment on March 27th, 2007.

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

pria

Comment on April 25th, 2007.

i noticed differences in the numbers reported via click map and the numbers from the data warehousing report??

Bart Gibby

Comment on April 25th, 2007.

pria,

I am not sure whether you are asking a question or making a statement?

-Bart

Matt Newman

Comment on May 23rd, 2007.

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.

Peter Andersson

Comment on July 13th, 2007.

Do you know if omniture by default use 1st party cookie or 3rd party cookie counting Unique visitors/browsers?

Bart Gibby

Comment on July 13th, 2007.

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

Britton

Comment on August 11th, 2007.

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.

Bart Gibby

Comment on August 11th, 2007.

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.

Ryan Roberts

Comment on August 31st, 2007.

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.

Ilkka Jormalainen

Comment on December 5th, 2007.

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.

Bart Gibby

Comment on December 5th, 2007.

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

Snoobi Oy

Comment on December 11th, 2007.

The URL is http://www.snoobi.com. For further details you can contact Jukka Ropponen 0400423910

Victor Edinian

Comment on February 1st, 2008.

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

Melissa

Comment on February 26th, 2008.

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?

Bart Gibby

Comment on February 26th, 2008.

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

jack casey

Comment on March 14th, 2008.

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!

Bart Gibby

Comment on March 14th, 2008.

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.

Ken

Comment on April 1st, 2008.

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?

Bart Gibby

Comment on April 3rd, 2008.

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.

Patrick

Comment on April 23rd, 2008.

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.

curtis

Comment on May 14th, 2008.

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.

Matt

Comment on May 24th, 2008.

Re Integrated Analytics Paradigm – wouldn’t this just be database marketing?

Bart Gibby

Comment on May 27th, 2008.

Matt,

Do you mean “database marketing” as the database is the product or service that is being sold? Or using databases to do marketing?

We are talking about internal data used to sell more product or services, add more value to our current and future customers with those products or services, and do it with the least amount of waste by optimizing and integrating marketing campaigns.

See the largest problem with databases is they have to be used by everyone involved inside the company. Even with proper relationships between the databases people still need to understand the data and use it.

It also needs to be resource effective. Which right now a system that does all this would either have to be patched together from various 3rd party and internal databases or all custom built internally or by a 3rd party.

Do you know of any solutions?

-Bart

Lisa

Comment on June 5th, 2008.

We tried to use http://www.omniture.com, but we encountered highly questionable JavaScript coding practices. Our own appraisal of the Omniture code has shown that their developers have attempted to generally follow the variable naming requirements that are described above, but have only done so partially, rendering the effort useless. Thus we are faced with not only a lack of cooperation with the vendor, but a general incompetence. Please see the Omniture representative’s response below.

/Omniture representative wrote: I’m sorry, but it is not possible for me to have our code rewritten to stop using “f” as a variable, or to have all of our functions and variables renamed. In addition, I cannot provide you with a list of all variables in the s_code.js file because of intellectual property protection issues.”/

The claim that a simple variable name could have intellectual property implications is patently ridiculous.

Anthony

Comment on July 4th, 2008.

Hi we are web interactive company consist of less than 20 workers with less than 5 person handling technical/database and analytics issues.

we had been using Google Analytics all this while until yesterday our directors bring front Omniture calling it the future of analytics.

they are not a technical person. they know nothing much about GA as well as Omniture.

Even though we are a small company, we run web campaigns and solutions to multi million corporation like Samsung, Pepsi etc.

the question here is, can 2-3 technical person handle the problem that might arise using Omniture? should we stick back to GA?

thank you for reading

Bart Gibby

Comment on July 4th, 2008.

Anthony,

If I had a team of 2 to 3 people using Omniture’s SiteCatalyst I would be the happiest man alive.

What I mean is, even though Omniture has its flaws, its main advantage in the future is that it is not Google.

To answer your question if 2 to 3 people is enough or not. That depends. I would want at least one person focusing on website conversion using the SiteCatalyst product.

If your 2 to 3 people know and are trained on the program it can be the most powerful tool you will ever use.

Again, you have to be trained. It is so in depth and covers so many areas of website analytics that you need to be patient and learn it. It is completely customizable!!

I only used it for 6 months. I taught my self what I could. But I regret to inform you that my main function was to report on SEO campaign metrics using it not increase website conversion.

So be sure that your company knows using the product will be a waste, a huge waste of money if they do not pay to have you trained properly and in depth on how to use it.

If they don’t you might as well stick with GA.

P.S. Love your website. Some great design work. Never actually seen a website offer to go full screen and actually have it make my entire browser disappear. very different. Hope you guys get some targeted website traffic from the search engines with it.

ben

Comment on July 26th, 2008.

The reason that Visits are lower than Visitors is because Visits are only counted for people that come to your site who are accepting persistent cookies. Visitors are counted even if the persistent cookie is not able to be set.

You actually quoted this little tidbit straight out of the documentation, though it’s not obvious from the wording. I would imagine any of the support people at Omniture would be able to tell you that as well.

Anyway, Google counts Visits for both persistent & non-persistent cookied visitors, hence the difference in numbers. For the most part, comparing two different systems like that is dangerous. Some numbers will match, some won’t, and it’s difficult to tell if they’re supposed to or not. Anyway, hope this helps.

Bart Gibby

Comment on July 28th, 2008.

Ben,

I appreciate your feedback. Very excellent point about the cookies.

However, don’t you think it contradicts the whole idea of tracking both visits and unique visitors? Why not just track one and avoid confusing the user(s) of the SiteCatalyst system.

I prefer a system that forces me to use consistent measurements. That way I know whether the data is truly related to each in valid methodologies.

Just set me up a system that works, is consistent and doesn’t contradict itself. That is all I ask for.

Ben

Comment on August 1st, 2008.

I agree completely. I’m not saying I agree with the way they set it up. I actually hate it, but knowing is half the battle right?

BrownBoy

Comment on August 1st, 2008.

Bart,

All pathing reports in SiteCatalyst are, quite naturally, built around the concept of a VISIT. If you include the the visits of non-cookied users with the visits of cookeid users, you potentially compromise the validity of your pathing data. Non-cookied users are identified using an IP+browser method. It’s the next best thing after no cookie, but still inherently inaccurate given shared IP addresses via proxies, IP-pooling as practised by most ISPs, etc.. In essence, including the visit data of non-cookied visitors in your pathing data pollutes good data (from cookied users who have good visit integrity) with bad (lots of users looking like the same user due to IP sharing and single users looking like multiple users courtesy of dynamic IP allocation).

I take your point that this can be confusing for those new to SiteCatalyst and the lack of consistency between visit and visitor could be a problem to some, but to flip it around, does it make sense to compromise the validity of pathing data just to achieve this consistency?

Note also, the pages seen and events triggered by non-cookied users are of course recorded by SiteCatalyst; it’s just that the visit metric itself does not include the visits of non-cookied users.

For the rest of the comments, it’s difficult to know where to start. Nobody’s going to have a quarrel with “I prefer X” or “I think Y only works for big companies”. These are opinions and everyone is entitled to them. But there are several statements of “fact” above that are, I’m afraid to say, borne of sheer ignorance. My favourite concerned the “highly questionable JavaScript coding practices”. Quick, someone call AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, Disney and the rest of the Fortune500 companies out there whose due dilligence failed to uncover this priceless gem.

Apologies for the sarcasm, but really….

Bart Gibby

Comment on August 1st, 2008.

BrownBoy,

So if I am calculating conversion rate and I have polluted data, then that gives me a polluted conversion rate. Great, I now have data that is either saying my rate is too high or too low.

If Site Catalyst has a way of turning IP address or Cookie tracking on/off. Then I say Good for them and all who use it. If not then I say bad for them and you are welcome to your contradicting data.

There is no point in tracking a relationship between two sets of data if you can never get the proper data to leverage that relationship. So just pick one set of data, forget about the relationship. Gather just that set of data as accurately as possible.

Google seems to get it right… I am fine with lower numbers so long as they are consistent and the relativity of the relationships between the data collected are sound.

Stop overloading me with data I can’t use. I need data to make business decisions now. Don’t make me have to do more calculations. I don’t need corrupted data that leaves me wondering if it is accurate enough to get the job done.

Bart Gibby

Comment on August 1st, 2008.

Ben,

I agree, knowing how they get their data can be very useful. Especially when the data starts to make you wonder, “How did they get this data?”

When data starts to get you thinking like that, it is either very good or its very bad. its usually very bad in my experience.

Ya so the other half of the battle would be compensating for any data that is not valid. Or just starting over.

BrownBoy

Comment on August 1st, 2008.

Bart,

You can run reports in SC that allow you to see both cookied and non-cookied visitor numbers. You can get visits per visitor using like for like (i.e. for cookied user only) at the flick of a switch. The key to all analysis is knowing where you’re figures come from. If you know that your visits metric does not include non-cookied users – who you can quantify using other reports – then your covnersion data is not “polluted”. It’s only “polluted” if you either:

a) don’t know that visits excludes non-cookied users, or
b) have no way of assessing/quantifying the number of non-cookied users.

The reality is that when trending data, the number of users rejecting cookeis is pretty much immaterial anyway. This is not quite so with pathing data, as a relatively small segment of users who share a same proxy IP, or who are getting different IPs in mid-visits due to dynamic IP allocation by their ISPs, can disproportionately impact the integrity of pathing data in quick order.

Look, I accept the above is my opinion on what’s more important, but I’m willing to concede that the point is arguable. I’ve no doubt it is *possible* to get decent pathing data out of Google Analytics and, even if the data is compromised by non-cookied visits, this ceases to be quite so importnat if analysts know that their data includes non-cookied visitors; their fallout trends over time will still yield quality intelligence that can be acted upon. Likewise, I’d aruge that the absence of non-cookied visits from SC’s visits metrics is not the big deal you might think it is so long as analysts know that this is the case. Knowledge is power, and all that.

I have no problem with users who prefer one approach over the other. That’s the type of stuff that makes the world go around. But your insistence that one approach yields *bad* data as oppsoed to *good* data using the other solution, needs to be challenged.

Stop overloading me with data I can’t use. I need data to make business decisions now. Don’t make me have to do more calculations. I don’t need corrupted data that leaves me wondering if it is accurate enough to get the job done.

The point is that you wouldn’t have been “wondering” anything if you actually knew how Omniture calculated visits, something every user discovers on first day of basic user training. This isn’t an attack on your intelligence – I’m sure there’s things you know that I don’t. But now it has been explained to you why you saw what you thought was a data anomaly but is in fact perfectly valid data, why not just accept that this is just a different approach that has it’s own benefits, just as Google’s approach has benefits, too? Why the insistence that your analysis efforts in SiteCatalyst are rendered by pointless without an exponential increase in effort? It’s just not the reality, my friend.

Respetfully,

BrownBoy.

Bart Gibby

Comment on August 4th, 2008.

BrownBoy,

I am so glad you have actually been able to help me finally. Its been almost 2 years since I posted this. I never received training, so I was left to my own understanding of the program.

So for the analytics laymen, which is almost everyone who has posted a comment here. Omniture’s SiteCatalyst really needs either to be more usable for the laymen or Google analytics will always win.

I love SiteCatlyst, its just not meant for people to understand without training. If you read my summary at the bottom of my post or even my followup post you’ll see that.

And yes BrownBoy, you win, when it comes to how much effort I put into knowing how to use SiteCatalyst. But that’s my point BrownBoy.

SiteCatalyst needs someone trained on it and working it every day to maximize conversion. Where on Google’s anayltics its just nice to look at every once in a while and check out certain stats when it comes to conversion optimization.

But it does all I need it to do, I sue it mainly for traffic sources, I do SEO.

I am actually looking forward someday to getting a certificate or two using an website analytics program like SiteCatalyst.

Cheers,

-Bart

abc

Comment on December 11th, 2008.

hi iam layman when it comes to sitecatalyst and i am using .net application our company has signed up with omniture so i have no choice than implementing it can you help me with some implementation tips and other stuff

Bart Gibby

Comment on January 9th, 2009.

What kind of tips are you looking for? Suggestions would depend on what type of setup you are doing.

But the big thing to remember is that most packages from Omniture comes with training. If you guys bought a package that comes with training I would do ALL the training you can. Just soak it all in and apply everything you can.

Just ask who ever went through the sales process at your company they should know.

Eric

Comment on January 18th, 2009.

Seriously? There are ways to filter out the non-persistent cookie visitors anyway. My article (http://tinyurl.com/789sum) describes these discrepancies in greater detail. Your argument that Google Analytics is more reliable than SiteCatalyst is totally false. I use both systems, and while SiteCatalyst attempts to give you the most robust dataset, Google Analytics hardly compares. Google Analytics is great for the beginner user, but true data analysts need access to all data.

Bart Gibby

Comment on January 22nd, 2009.

Eric,

You are right and I agree with you. My argument simply is that Google is simpler, and easier to use. But because of that there are disadvantages to using Google analytics.

If you setup SiteCatalyst correctly meaning the final data that you use for decision making is filtered and the java code on the site is setup to give you the right page titles, conversions, campaigns, etc. data then yes SiteCatalyst is hands down more useful.

Perhaps someday I’ll get certified. But not just yet.

P.S. this post was made about 2.3 years ago.

Lenin

Comment on March 3rd, 2009.

Bart,

I want to learn Omniture’s Sitecatalyst and finding hard to get training material. I found good information from this blog but still searching for a good site which provides implementation knowledge.

Please help me with the information where exactly i can get some material to learn and links for the same.

Thanks in advance!

Melissa Kavanagh

Comment on March 5th, 2009.

Lenin – Aside from the implementation guide available through Omniture’s website, I HIGHLY recommend Adam Greco’s blog: http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ Adam provides great insight into SiteCatalyst in a way that is very understandable, and allows you to take his tips and implement them immediately.

Aside from that – I posted here just over a year ago, when we had implemented Omniture on over 20 sites. We have more than doubled our implementation since then, and every time, we do something a little different. We are certainly getting better with experience. This is not a tool where you can just slap some code in the footer and be on your merry way. Your data, and ability to get actionable analysis from it, is only as good as your implementation. It takes A LOT of thought and planning for each site to make sure we are getting the information we need and be able to make decisions on.

Omniture is a great tool. Don’t get me wrong, it has some flaws too, but in many cases if you’re not getting what you thought you would from the tool, chances are, you have not implemented correctly, or have not learned to use the tool in its fullest capacity.

Bart Gibby

Comment on March 5th, 2009.

Melissa,

Excellent followup. I really appreciate it.

Have you implemented cnames via a sub-domain so you don’t get third party cookies rejected?

Michael

Comment on April 7th, 2009.

I have an Art Gallery, and I am most interested in indentifying and tracking unique visitors. GA does not do this, I know Sitecatalyt does this, and does it well, but even at their “rock bottom” pricing, it’s more than I can afford. Does anyone know of a more affordable option to Site Catalyst?

Bart Gibby

Comment on April 8th, 2009.

Michael,

I use “GA” on this blog and on my many other domains. GA tracks “Absolute Unique Visitors” and visits.

There are others you can use. Click Tale, 103bees, hitwise, AWstats comes free on most php/apache cpanel servers.

There are tons of website analytic products out there.

Michael

Comment on April 8th, 2009.

I wasn’t clear. I would like to track indivduals. By that I mean “Jane Doe” and “John Smith” and “Bart Gibby”, etc. First get them to provide the information through registraion, place a cookie, and then monitor their behavior on my site.

Since my post I discovered Visistat, and they seem to offer this ability along with comprehensive analyics at approx. $30/month, which I think I am going to try. As a sole proprietor with no staff their interface seems simple enough and provides a level of detail I am capable of sifting through.

Bart Gibby

Comment on April 8th, 2009.

Michael,

Looks like a great find. I think I might look into “Visistat” as well. Would be nice for a few of my domains.

Thanks for sharing.

Anonymous

Comment on May 1st, 2009.

If anyone knows anything about Omniture they would know that “BrownBoy Belkin” is not interely unbiased when it comes to discussing Sitecatalyst

Neelu

Comment on June 18th, 2009.

Bart,

Your blog was extremely helpful to get a feel of Omniture vs GA and all about Web Analytics. I was surfing for information on Omniture for about 2-3 days now. I work for AAA club south (covering FL, GA, TN and PR) in the database marketing dept as a data analyst. They want me to get started using Omniture. Initially, I was asked to get a feel for the product and its worth and eventually if I found it usable I would be sent for training.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated n keep up the good work!

Bart Gibby

Comment on June 18th, 2009.

Neelu,

if your a big corp and can pay someone full time to use the omniture products I would highly suggest it. They are even tracking rankings from Google traffic, as of last month.

However, if you want a free analytics Google’s is the best I have seen. Google also have a enterprise version but I doubt it is as customizable as you would need.

If I knew more about your needs I could recommend even something like hitwise, 103bees, or even just webalizer.

Neelu

Comment on June 19th, 2009.

Thanks Bart, I will definitely let u know…once I have access. It may be next week before I get a login.

Neelu

Comment on July 10th, 2009.

Bart

Hope ur doing well. I finally got hooked up with Omniture on my machine last Monday. I have figured out some cool stuff we would be using it initially.

I wanted to ask if there is a way to figure out hits on a page. For instance, say we consider the home page aaa.com and I want to know the number of clicks on the different links on the home page. As I want to get product specific. Could I just do a fall out report instead?

Please let me know.
Thanks

Melissa Kavanagh

Comment on July 10th, 2009.

Neelu,

You could use a number of different reports. One report would be the “next page” or “next page flow” report. Either one would show you what the next page viewed was on from the home page (or any other page you choose to look at).

You might also want to check out the ClickMap feature. Although the data shown shouldn’t be taken as law, it can give you an overview of how visitors are using the page using the heatmap feature.

Regards,
Melissa Kavanagh
Fuel Interactive
Web Analytics Specialist
http://www.fuelinteractive.com
http://www.twitter.com/makavanagh

Yvon

Comment on July 22nd, 2009.

So what happend with ‘Snoobi’ btw?

Bill

Comment on September 30th, 2009.

I am not sure why enterprise size companies do not build their own event based systems and warehouse that data – not hard to do at all and you can account and customize everything. Using a simple network protocol to capture data then extracting, transforming and loading – then you’re off to the races. Simple. GA is great for small to mid sized companies but larges businesses will have the budget and need for an in-house system with the data they own.

Bart Gibby, Utah SEO Consultant

Comment on December 7th, 2009.

Bill,

I actually had a client do this using their Ruby on Rails developers. They feel it is is their key advantage in the market place.

user agent » Blog Archive » How to tell if Google is going to kill (or acquire) your business

Pingback on December 9th, 2009.

[...] I’ve had some exposure to Omniture SiteCatalyst, WebTrends and a few other analytics platforms – many of which require training and experience to really get their full benefit. Many times as a consultant, I met clients who religiously deleted the regular email reports sent by their analytics package of choice, because they didn’t understand it, or what they understood of it was not interesting. Simplicity often trumps power. [...]

kartik

Comment on January 5th, 2010.

Hi Bart, This is very good functionality of the given topic

Thanks,

Bart Gibby, Utah SEO Constultant

Comment on January 5th, 2010.

Kartik,

I appreciate the compliment and am glad you have found the information useful. It is nice to know that many of my readers ares still finding this comparison of “Omniture SiteCatalyst vs. Google Analytics” useful.

Cheers,

-Bart

Yuvaraj

Comment on February 4th, 2010.

Thanks for the this comparison. However I feel that many of the companies they opt for Omniture as they think Google Analytics is free and moreover the data is in thirdparty server. Anyways I haven’t used omniture yet, probably will try using it asap and would definitely post my feedback. BTW nice post

judy

Comment on March 2nd, 2010.

I didn’t see anyone mention that GA owns your data, and Omniture does not, so if you move from GA you don’t get to take data with you. omniture is a server request not a user request. I work for Government and we are large and need an application that can report on the many needs we have. GA only allows for one domain name, omniture allows for multiples. The session cookie is all we are allowed to use in Government no persistant cookies. I am open to something that will meet our needs but GA doies not, and Omniture is the only one in the balck, webtrends is in the red, and that worries me.

Bart Gibby

Comment on March 2nd, 2010.

Judy,

If you have the budget then I would go with Omniture. There are other solutions than the top three.

This is a brand new stats program, technically it is in Beta testing at the moment.

http://www.advancedwebstats.com/

I have used their products for a few years now, this is their latest development.

Bart Gibby

Comment on March 2nd, 2010.

Yuvaraj,

Thank you for the kind words. The URL I posted above is again another alternative that you might enjoy as well.

judy

Comment on March 3rd, 2010.

Thank you very much, I will look into this and I am so happy I found this site with all of this great input.

Rhonda

Comment on March 3rd, 2010.

Hi there- this is a very informative thread. I appreciate you leaving it up for so long. Obviously, the topic is relevant. What is the pricing for http://www.advancedwebstats.com/? Any ideas?

Bart Gibby

Comment on March 3rd, 2010.

Rhonda,

I current’y do not have any idea of when they will release this webstats software. Lets hope they take their time and get as many of the beta test bugs worked out as possible before they charge people to use it.

But the good news is that it is free until then. I am not sure how portable the data is… you would think you could export it in a SQL or a xml format of some sort in case you ever needed to move to a different platform… wonder if it will accept data from other platforms…

again this software is still new to me too.

Rhonda

Comment on March 4th, 2010.

Helpful reply comment thank you.

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