I’m currently enjoying my last few days at WDM Nederland where I’ve worked as Project Manager e-Campaigns. I got to know e-marketing platform Messagent from Optizen pretty well and had a lot of interesting tasks to complete.

Now also my new website has launched so visit in masses and buy my services Click here: Clickthrough online marketing

It is true that many of our competitors compete with us on price because that’s all they have to compete with us on. And we believe that kind of competition actually works in our favor. Some tools are even free as many of you know, which we do not view as negative. In fact, the company with the purported best free analytics tool placed a major order with Omniture in the second quarter, and that is probably the best estimate of all to the differentiation of Omniture from the free analytics tools.

Interestingly enough, we believe the reason these companies provide free analytics tools is so their customers who advertise in their platforms can convert visitors more effectively so they can afford to pay more for advertising. Well, that’s exactly what we do. We hope our customers convert visitors more effectively. Except that we do it for enterprise customers and mid market customers, and the providers of the free analytics tool will do it for the long end of the tail. Actually, we believe that over time we will develop closer partnering relationships with the major search engines and advertising platforms since our goal is so similar. If they are confident in their technology, they should want their customers to have objective analytics that encourage more spend on the most effective platforms.

More info: Omniture posts wider 2nd-quarter loss, even as sales more than double

You are able to download a 90 day trial of this beta from the Google Urchin site. After 90 days you will be able to purchase the product at $2995.

It will be interesting to see if this software version will be the next step for current Google Analytics users.

Here are some notable changes (taken from Jupiter Research):

Omniture Discover OnPremise will utilize the Visual Sciences Platform 5 technology and page tags from VS can populate SiteCatalyst data, which will appear in the integrated interface. Omniture will maintain its legacy Omniture Discover (hosted) segmentation solution.

Omniture’s Search Center now appears under the header of Site Search and Content, where they wasted no time in incorporating Visual Sciences’ Publish Web Content Management Solution.

The popular HBX Analytics solution will be rebranded as Omniture SiteCatalyst HBX. Although HBX should be placed on an endangered species list, because the product will likely be phased out. Omniture states that HBX, “will continue to be supported until the key features have been integrated into Omniture SiteCatalyst”. HBX has had a long ride, from Hitbox to WebSideStory’s HBX, to Visual Sciences’ HBX and now Omniture. It looks like it’s finally time to retire the jersey and move on.

The Geotrends database is fuelled by the IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Their role on the internet is to keep record of all IP Addresses, they maintain the register who ows which IP Addresses. Now not all IP Addresses have a owner, there still are some addresses available though they are running out of stock (hence the introduction of IPv6). All IP Addresses that do not have an owner yet, are hold by IANA. That means that if you lookup an IP Address from one of the Regional Internet Registries, you will see the address of IANA

Now here it comes… the IANA is located in Marina Del Rey: http://www.iana.org/contact.htm. This is why you see Marina Del Rey in your reports. A simple solution is to keep your GeoTrends database updated.

If you add the WT.srch=1 parameter a destination URL will look like: www.omtrends.com/?WT.srch=1 This Query Parameter only tells WebTrends that the visitor came from a Paid Search advertisement, nothing less and nothing more.

To determine which Paid Search program was used (ie. Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing), WebTrends will capture the Referral information also. So if this visitor came from an AdWords campaign, WebTrends will see a Referring URL like http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4EGLC_enNL238NL238&q=visual+workstation+hbx and translate this into “Google AdWords”, with help of the file keywords.ini:

[Google AdWords]
ID1=.google.com
KeywordIndicator1=q= 

As you can see WebTrends will capture the q= parameter to retrieve the keywords. These are the keywords the visitor used in Google.

So for instance, if I search for “visual workstation hbx”, I might see iMETRIX in one of the Google AdWords advertisements. WebTrends will pick up the Search Phrase “visual workstation hbx” and report this in the out-of-the-box report Most Recent Search Phrases (Paid). Alrighty! you think?

Not really WebTrends reports on the Search Phrase the visitor searched on, not the phrase you are advertising on. This means that you cannot match your WebTrends reports with your Google AdWords reports. Let’s say you are advertising Broad Match on the word “HBX” and the user searches at www.google.com on “visual workstation hbx”. Google AdWords will report a clickthrough on the word “HBX” while WebTrends reports “visual workstation hbx”. There is no way to match both reports and if you didn’t know about this - you should have had a lot of discussion with your Google AdWords Professional already.

So now we know that  your reports probably aren’t displaying the data you think they are displaying. Let’s fix it rightaway!

We are going to use a Visitor History parameter. WebTrends has 4 available for you; WT.seg_1, WT.seg_2, WT.seg_3 and WT.seg_4. These Visitor History are meant to be used for segmentation purposes but actually can be used for anything you would like to store. A great advantage of using a Visitor History parameter is that it will store the information in a database so that if a visitor visits your site on day 5 of the month through Google AdWords and converts 20 days later, WebTrends will be able to report on this. If you’d use a regular parameter, ie. kw=<keywords>, WebTrends will only be able to report on behavior of the specific visit that has this information.

Ok I assume you are not using the WT.seg_1 yet, so we will add it to your URL. The value will be the keyword that you are advertising on at Google AdWords, resulting in this Query Parameter to be used in your landing page URL: WT.seg_1={keyword:nil} Google AdWords will automatically replace {keyword:nil} with the keyword you were advertising on. In this example it will eventually look like: WT.seg_1=HBX. More information about Google AdWords Keyword Insertion can be found here.

As you can see we also use the WT.mc_id campaign parameter. We add this to see which overall campaign performance in our campaign overview report. The gclid parameter is being added by Google AdWords because of the Google Analytics auto-tagging of AdWords destination URLs.

Eventually, when you would click on the Google AdWords adversitement, the destination URL will look like:
http://www.imetrix.nl/producten/Visual_Sciences.stm?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=PRHB&WT.seg_1=hbx&gclid=CKemrfi56I8CFQuuQwod6hU4Dw

The combination of Omniture and Visual Sciences creates a company with substantial scale and resources to deliver industry leading products and services that address the rapidly expanding online business optimization market. The combined company will be able to accelerate investments, meet a wider set of customer needs through a richer solution set and have a significantly greater opportunity to grow into new markets.

The exam wasn’t a giveaway as I wrote in my other post so I’m delighted to hear that I gave the right answer on most of the questions. We’re still not able to work with the product from the office but I’m sure Ruud will arrange this asap.

Google actually supports these irritating sites as they probably generate a lot of advertising Dollars for Google. There is no specific content found on the site so what’s your next step? Right, you either click one of the links or leave the site by typing the correct url. The term Google uses for these sites is “Parked domain sites“. The advertisements are called “Domain Ads“ and will also appear in your Google AdWords reports as “Domain Ads“. Two example sites:

http://wwwyourtube.com/
http://www.madonnashop.nl

 Interestingly, when creating a Placement report in Google AdWords, the URL’s of these Domain Ads  are hidden. They simply show as “Domain Ads” in your report. I think Google does this as these Domain Ads or  are highly lucrative and they know advertisers will add negative sites to their campaign or even stop advertising on the Content Network when they notice their Dollars are being spent on these sites.

In this screenshot you see that Domain Ads have a very high CTR.

As far as I know it’s not possible to create a site exclusion to exclude Domain Ads. Stop fooling us, Google!