Engineering Services [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

While Omniture SiteCatalyst provides tons of capabilities right out-of-the-box, there are times when clients want to do some advanced things that are not common enough to be rolled out to all SiteCatalyst users.  As we have discussed in the past, many of these more unique items end up being JavaScript plug-ins created by Omniture Consulting.  However, there is another department at Omniture, that too few clients know about, that is able to make the seemingly impossible possible.  That team is named Engineering Services and is akin to the Apple Store Geniuses that seem to have all the answers.  In this post, I am going to lift the veil on this team so that more Omniture customers are familiar with what they do and how to take advantage of their services.

Engineering Services
So what is the Engineering Services team and what do they do?  The Engineering Services team helps clients solve business problems through advanced implementation add-ons.  This team of highly specialized, senior engineers is available on a short-term, paid basis to extend your SiteCatalyst implementation through the creation of custom solutions or integrations with your company’s other IT systems.  The following will cover just a few examples of the types of projects with which the Engineering Services team can assist you.

VISTA Rules
As I covered in a previous post, VISTA and DB VISTA rules can be created to enhance your data collection.  All VISTA rules are custom projects created by the Engineering Services team.  They have created thousands of custom VISTA projects over the years and continue to create new ones every day.

Report Suite Add-ons
The Engineering Services team has seen many cases where clients want to push their SiteCatalyst implementation as far as possible, but don’t have the internal resources to do so.  Here are some examples of the types of report suite add-ons that the Engineering Services team can provide:

• Want to incorporate Cost of Goods Sold to your SiteCatalyst reporting (as shown in this post)?
• Ever wish you could see more GeSegmentation data (country, region, etc…) in Conversion reports?
• Want to get more detail on Daily, Weekly and Monthly Return Frequency?
• Want to go deeper on Time Spent per Page, Campaign Tracking Code, Internal Search term?
• Want to see advanced techniques to value your site pages?
• Want to see how your campaigns are performing across visits, without having to touch your implementation?
• How about tracking the bounce rate of referrers?
• Want to see paid and natural search engine/keyword data in the same report as your campaigns?  What about also adding referring domains?  Want to see a report like the one below?

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Report Suite Routing
Using Engineering Services, you can easily send website traffic to different report suites without having to make a single change to the code on your pages.  Here are some examples of ways Engineering Services helps clients re-route data:

• Do spiders/bots ever visit your site?  Do you use monitoring agents like Gomez or Keynote to measure up time for your site?  Engineering Services can remove the noise by routing this traffic to another report suite.
• Do you have safeguards in place to keep fraudulent orders from skewing your data?  Engineering Services can keep your SiteCatalyst data/reports clean by automatically moving suspicious behavior to a separate report suite based on criteria you provide.
• Are your employees’ visits to your site tainting your data?  Engineering Services can route that traffic to a separate report suite so you can focus on true customer behavior.

Encryption Solutions
As more and more data is collected online, many customers want to employ data encryption to ensure that key company data is safe.  The following are some advanced data encryption solutions created by Engineering Services:

• Engineering Services can encrypt any data being sent to Omniture and decrypt it after it is received so it is inserted into SiteCatalyst data tables correctly.
• If your organization receives data feeds, DataWarehouse reports from Omniture or has to send SAINT files or DB VISTA data, Engineering Services can encrypt these file to ensure a high standard of security.

Misc. Custom Projects
The Engineering Services team thrives on tackling the seemingly impossible and has completed many other types of solutions to prove it:

• Bringing historical web analytics or log file data into SiteCatalyst.
• Using advanced techniques of visitor segmentation to apply segments to historical data.
• Advanced CRM and other 3^rd party integrations.
• Custom Data Feeds to populate your back-end systems with website data.
• Re-inserting data that may have been missed due to tagging errors or oversight.
• Advanced usage of Omniture API’s.

New Solutions
I am always impressed by how many new solutions they create. For example, I did not even know about a new Custom Desktop Widget until I started writing this post.  Take a look at a couple of screen shots they sent me.

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These secure custom widgets can display standard SiteCatalyst or custom reports, and provide real-time data to people across an organization without requiring direct access to SiteCatalyst.

As mentioned above, these are just a few of the ways that the Engineering Services team can assist you.  If you have not asked Engineering Services you have not heard the final answer.  If you have ever run into something that you feel you cannot do “out-of-the-box” please call your Account Manager, who can arrange for a consultation with someone in Engineering Services.  I promise it will be worth your while!

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

• Adam Greco
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