Casey Jackman

adventures at omniture

casey — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:21:00 +0000

I recently participated in the Omniture Web Analytics Competition (OWAC) in a team three BYU students and we won! Well, not really. The judges were stunned by our amazing analytical skills and understanding of the robust and extensive software SiteCatalyst; but it was determined as a group we were just too good looking, lending us an unfair advantage. Our good looks were clearly “far too distracting, preventing the us [the judges] from becoming truly engaged in the presentation.” (OWAC Judge 2, 02/22/08)

Ignoring the understandable bias in judging, the competition was very academically fruitful. Our group proposed three KPIs and each member of the team explored a KPI.

Yield (Revenue / Visits)
Conversion (Orders / Visits)
Order Size (Revenue / Orders)

I was given stewardship over Order Size. I explored ways to encourage visitors to add more items and more lucrative items to their shopping cart. One particular avenue I researched for order size enhancement was the Site Map. Most e-commerce sites provide a site map to assist search engines in scraping data and creating web hierarchy. backcountryoutlet.com is fortunate enough drive enough traffic through google that their site map is listed under google search results.

For power Google users, these additional links provided shortcuts to popular sites. The hosting site can capitalize on these links to direct traffic to high-conversion or high-yield products. Upon reviewing SiteCatalyst data regarding conversions and generated sales, we were able to make recommendations for optimum links to place on their site map, empowering backcoutry to direct shoppers by category to desired pages.

Site maps can easily be updated and submitted to search engines using web tools. This particular site drives twice the market average of hits through Google, further establishing its need for a sound site map for the Goolge to display. A site map that is not provided or is very deprecated relative to current organization of the site can be decremental to a site’s success.

its gettin hot in hur

casey — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:21:00 +0000

So site syndication monitoring is nothing new, but is perhaps underutilized in web analytics. Its seems that the goal of any blog (especially one subsidized by advertisements) is to provide content that encourages users to visit as frequently as possible. Tracking visits from a loyal viewer on analytic software is a simple task that provides ample information on the user; however, when the viewer graduates your site from random daily visits (seeking for new content) to giving your site’s url a home in his/her RSS Reader, things change. The user can now receive a [your site] fix every time new content is published. Truly, this is a premium customer of your site. But if you ask your typical analytics software, it will tell you the your previously loyal customer, who once frequented your site daily, has moved on to new cyberspace. Ironic that your most loyal customer is one that is now impossible to track.

FeedBurner, recently acquired by Google, is an excellent way to track users that subscribe to your blog (even if its just your wife, mom, and your other computer at home). The subscriber data provided by FeedBurner cannot rival the data received from sound analytics software about site visitors, but it can describe the number number of subscribers, how often they fetch from your site, and what RSS reader they are using.

One issue with converting site visitors to site subscribers is the loss of ad revenue. Users no longer see text and banner ads that may be the sole purpose you host your site. FeedBurner provides terrific integration with Goolge Adwords. Upon providing Adwords credentials, users can opt to advertise on each sydicated post. A simple text or banner ad is appended to post (the advertising content consistent with predetermined Adwords account preferences) and each user ad click generates the same revenue that would be expected from actual onsite ad clicks.

Subclipse

casey — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 06:41:00 +0000

For Adobe Flex programming I am left with few IDE options, of which Eclipse seems stand alone in ease of use. I prefer Eclipse for Java programming to any other IDE but for Flex I’ve have a few complaints. I applaud Adobe for going against their usual trends and releasing the Flex SDK for free. In theory, one can use a watered down word processor (notepad or wordpad) to code the Macrodmedia XML (MXML) markup and Action Script 3 (.AS) pages for logic. Then simply compile with the free SDK and deploy the compiled flash file to any host. However, the AS and MXML libraries are completely foreign to me, leaving me begging for an IDE. Here’s where Adobe compensates the SDK charity, the only IDE they offer is ultimately just a big plug-in for Eclipse, but they still feel justified in charging $499 for a single license! Well, my biggest complaint is that Eclipse and the FLEX + Eclipse have yet to add subversion functionality, users are still limited to problematic, pathetic-branching CVS. Well, even though a little disappointed I was still ‘feelin lucky’, so I took my problem to our friends in Mountain View, CA and the first hit was an excellent plug-in for Eclipse. Subclipse is a few simple jars that will help welcome you’re IDE to repositories of the 21st century. The plug-in is provided by The Eclipse Team but mirrored by Tigris.org .