Kirk Ouimet

The current leader in the web analytics industry, Omniture, recently promoted a web analytics competition at Brigham Young University. I participated in the competition and had the opportunity to compete at Omniture’s office building located in Orem, Utah. I had a really enjoyable time, and was able familiarize myself with SiteCatalyst, Omniture’s flagship product. I’ve been using Google Analytics for the past couple of years on my sites, and I have been very impressed with SiteCatalyst. I learned that SiteCatalyst is far more customizable than Google Analytics and allows for the creation of much more extensive reports.

The idea for the competition was simple. Omniture gave everyone access to one of their current client’s web analytics data. Our job was to analyze the data and present our findings and recommendations to a panel of judges. The client this year was backcountryoutlet.com, and our team’s strategy was to focus on these three key performance indicators (KPIs) for e-commerce stores:

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

During our analysis we quickly learned that the readily available data in SiteCatalyst was useful, but insufficient to draw any in depth conclusions. Given enough time to create custom reports and create calculated metrics, a web analyst can find some really cool correlations with a web site’s design and the KPIs mentioned above.

One of my favorite experiences from the competition was the chance I had to meet with a product manager at Omniture during lunch. Our team talked with the product manager about Omniture’s other upcoming products, including Discover and Search Center. We also discussed the process of choosing and bidding for good keywords using AdWords and other CPC advertising venues.

My experience in the competition has led me to ask myself how I could use what I learned about web analytics to further monetize my existing sites. Also, being able to see all of the web traffic data for a large online retailer has instilled in me the desire to start my own e-commerce store. We’ll see what I can do this summer!