adventures at omniture

Posted March 4th, 2008 by casey

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.

1. Yield (Revenue / Visits)
2. Conversion (Orders / Visits)
3. 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.