Improving internal search should be one of your primary goals. It’s probably used by an extraordinary amount of people, searching for all sorts of things. In this post, I show how to capture the number of times people search, a breakdown of keywords and search attempts, and also demonstrate how much search is costing your organisation.

Ok, it’s been way too long since I posted an update, and loads has happened since November. I’ve been to the Omniture Summit in the US, I’ve presented again at the Education Marketing Conference in Sydney and I presented twice at the Omniture Client Briefings in Sydney and Melbourne. That was all in March.

A couple of conversations at the (incredible) Omniture summit sparked an interest and I thought I’d share with you how we implemented. Long pages. Well, pages that go beyond the fold.

Do you know if your users are scrolling down to read the content? Did you know you can get this insight?

Albert Einstein once had a picture hanging on his wall at Princeton that read:

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

He was a smart cookie and often referred to it…and it definitely rings true for web analytics.

Bit of surprising news, Adobe is buying Omniture for $1.8billion.

Still taking this in and many thoughts running through my mind at the moment. Seen Adobe purchase a few companies in the past and the results have been varied. They are, after all, a product-based company, offering little in the way of services. Omniture on the other hand, is a service-based company. Very different business models, very different thought processes.

If you’re thinking of trying to compare web analytics results by vendor, or even by the original log file, you’re in a for a very tough time.

Genie + bottle + uncork = Long time, not good time.

The problem is that while there are basically two different methods of data collection (via server logfiles or via JavaScript tags), the variables associated with both, in a real world environment, make it almost impossible to compare results.

And therein lies your genie out of bottle, and you scrabbling around trying to justify the results. You’re best off not even trying.

I’ve heard a number of times from potential Omniture customers (I’ve been asked to provide multiple Omniture references), that they’ve heard it’s not easy to set up or maintain. Well, that’s a myth. Omniture is in fact relatively easy to get set up and relatively easy to maintain.

I got asked today to provide a benchmark value for time on site for a competitor of ours. They asked me if I thought that 3 minutes and 41 seconds was a good time for someone to be on their site. Not an easy one to answer.

Users are here for a good time, not a long time. Get them to where you want them. Quickly. Then cross-promote them. Engage them. Then the good time can turn into a long time. But Time on Site certainly won’t tell you.

So, there’s lots of metrics and lots of terminology. Understanding the meaning is the first step to understanding what’s important.

This post is for those of you who want a quick primer into what’s important and what’s not. It doesn’t however talk about the “why” – that’s for a future post.