Categories

Authors

Pages

Recent posts

Recent comments

Archives

Ben Gaines

Omniture Suite: Under the Hood

Ben Gaines is a Technical Writer on the Client Services team at Omniture. During his three years at Omniture, he has been a technical support consultant with Omniture ClientCare as well as a technical support engineer prior to his experience creating and managing Omniture's online documentation. On Twitter, you can follow Ben @ http://twitter.com/OmnitureCare.

OmnitureCare mailbag #2

Wednesday, 27 January 2010 @ 16:34, by Ben Gaines

Time for another installment of OmnitureCare mailbag, where I answer real user questions that weren’t quite long enough to justify their own blog post, but that I think might be helpful to many of you.
On a personal note, I’m busy preparing for Omniture Summit 2010 along with the team I’ve assembled to speak on advanced … Read more »

Code version H.21 released

Tuesday, 19 January 2010 @ 17:00, by Ben Gaines

Those of you who logged in to the Admin Console in SiteCatalyst since this past Thursday afternoon to generate new JavaScript code may have noticed that we released code version H.21. The primary purpose of this update was to add ClickMap support for the <button> element, so that you can see the number of clicks … Read more »

Enhancing automatic exit links

Thursday, 7 January 2010 @ 16:41, by Ben Gaines

Here’s a snippet of code that a colleague and I wrote for a SiteCatalyst user who wanted to count all exit links as success events. This is helpful for media sites and others where linking to external partners is a major aspect of online success.
You can put it anywhere in your code after the instantiation … Read more »

Capturing Time Spent on . . . well, just about anything

Thursday, 10 December 2009 @ 18:02, by Ben Gaines

Many SiteCatalyst users are familiar with the Time Spent on Page metric in the Pages report (which shows the average amount of time that visitors spend on the various pages of your site) and with the Time Spent per Visit report, which displays overall visit times as well as the amount of time that users … Read more »

Trimming the fat with dynamic variables

Tuesday, 24 November 2009 @ 12:38, by Ben Gaines

Raise your hand if you’re capturing some of the same data in your Custom Traffic variables that you are capturing in your Custom Conversion variables. I can’t say for sure, but I’m willing to bet that there’s greater than a 50% chance that you, Mr.-or-Ms. Blog Post Reader, raised your hand.
Now raise your hand if … Read more »

Top 5 Mobile Implementation Gotchas

Monday, 9 November 2009 @ 12:52, by Ben Gaines

Six months ago, while on a High Fidelity kick, I posted on the top five JavaScript implementation gotchas (i.e., common and easily avoidable mistakes) that I have seen during my time working with Omniture customers. But what about non-JavaScript implementations? In his recent interview on CNBC, Josh James pointed out, “Our customers are asking us, … Read more »

Internal search implementation and (a few) best practices

Monday, 26 October 2009 @ 11:09, by Ben Gaines

A few weeks ago, a SiteCatalyst user asked me whether Omniture products could measure and help optimize internal search engine data—the keywords that users are searching to find products, content, etc. within your site. This was one of those questions that make me smile, because I can answer confidently and affirmatively. It not only can … Read more »

Under the Hood: Preventative care against visit/visitor inflation

Monday, 19 October 2009 @ 15:25, by Ben Gaines

Previously, I’ve discussed how visit and visitor measurement works in SiteCatalyst. However, there are some nuances that I haven’t mentioned, and which can wreak havoc on an otherwise solid implementation. I have seen numerous cases of good development hampered by minor errors which cause visit and visitor inflation, so I’d like to discuss briefly a … Read more »

OmnitureCare mailbag

Tuesday, 22 September 2009 @ 9:12, by Ben Gaines

I like blog posts that have solid themes, but sometimes there are questions I’d like to answer that may not be long enough to constitute their own post. In such cases, I’ll use a “potpourri” format similar to the popular Bill Simmons mailbag recurring feature on ESPN.com to hit a bunch of disparate topics in … Read more »

Segmentation: The party game

Wednesday, 9 September 2009 @ 8:20, by Ben Gaines

Every December, at the Omniture holiday party, spouses, partners, and dates of employees get a crash course in the value of some of our products, courtesy of a “segmentation game.” Everybody stands up, and the emcee (CTO Brett Error) reads from a list of criteria and instructions, such as, “If you have a five-dollar bill … Read more »