A recap of some of the sessions I attended today at the Omniture Summit.
The keynote presentations were very informative, but primarily designed to give some perspective on the recent takeover of Omniture by Adobe.
The CS5 integration between flash and Omniture was demonstrated in it’s simplicity and offers really tight integration on the surface between both SiteCatalyst and Test & Target. The latter was demo’d later in the day and really demonstrated the power that marketing users are now given to control behavioural targeting and multivariate testing.
One opinion put forward by Josh James, General Manager of Omniture was that we should be less focussed on cannibalisation of the different channels but to look more at the bigger picture of how the channels complement each other.
Josh also positioned the history behind the CMO being able to turn the tables on other departments in the business, for example keeping sales on task. Marketing can now deliver quality leads to sales and information is now available on conversion rates slipping. Cool!
There was also emphasis on looking at business metrics rather than marketing metrics, really look at an integrated approach to understand pipeline, engagement, sentiment, distributed presence, revenue, influence and brand equity.
Adobe’s take-over was discussed by their VP of Corporate Development, Paul Weiskopf. He positioned the following benefits:
- Blurred lines between what is content and what is content and applications
- Multi-device use of the Internet, which places Adobe at the front
- Optimised creativity, through simple application tagging.
There were some announcements, for example Search Centre Plus now includes facebook marketing. There is also now a genesis integration between Facebook Open Graph implementation and SiteCatalyst. This integration is in development, but is essentially sentiment analysis, or as they put it “buzz”.
Some key takeaways from the keynotes were:
- Really understand your visitor paths to contact pages, to try and understand why people called rather than converted This includes looking at on-site search as there may be key questions that aren’t being answered online. Analyse and Optimise.
- Improve internal search, understand why people use it and how. Cover common misspellings.
Social Media Strategy
This was a bit of a slow session, however some key take aways were that Omniture are very much focussed on the quick wins in social media, namely Facebook. They can apparently integrate with other mediums through the SiteCatalyst API, if the other party has an API. No specifics were given with other integrations.
Facebook applications are a great way to understand more about your customers, and used in conjunction with the Facebook genesis integration it allows you to get really granular data into Discover – detailed segmentation capability.
Attribution Modelling
Attribution modelling is such a dry subject area but so important to understand. The presentation was very good in explaining the various attribution models and then that the cookie expiration is a key factor, along with the unique behavioural characteristics of your customers in visiting the site. Each business is different so there is not set best practice on expiration, it will however have a huge impact on attribution. The attribution schemes are:
- Last click
- First click
- Linear, even distribution
- Decaying, where the last click is attributed most decreasing down to
- the first click
- Reverse decaying, as above except most value attributed to first click
- U shaped
Recency and latency are significant factors on the attribution model used. Omniture’s default is 30 days for a cookie. the audience had people down to 7 days.
The main takeaway was to really understand the path to conversion, and to use attribution to help in that understanding.
RIA Measurement
This session was really showcasing the integration between CS5 and Omniture. of note has to be the control that marketing is now given to be able to test almost in real-time without a developer having to be involved.
CS5 is also going to support the open screen project, which will be used to send events back out into Omniture. An example was given of a player sending meta data via the OSMF.
The key takeaway on RIA is to differentiate between what is a page view and what is an event. Both are server calls however it keeps your page view metrics intact as just that. With the rise in RIA’s you need to be careful with this.
Looking forward to Friday’s sessions now.
