Just a quick update from Salt Lake City where I’m attending, and presenting, at the Adobe Omniture Summit 2011.

Not only is the event bigger than last year, in fact, their largest event yet with 2600+ people attending, but they’ve just announced a suite of new products, which as marketers, we’re all very interested in.

Many of us use video on our sites these days for different communication reasons. And those videos generally take a fair amount of effort (and cost) to put together. Understanding video engagement is therefore quite important to know which videos are most engaging, which ones lead to most conversions and so on. To date, we have generally used YouTube for our videos. But the problem is that we only get the basic information from YouTube, we aren’t able to see more insightful information.

There’s a number of ways of integrate video measurement data into SiteCatalyst, either by embedding the code into your own video player and then hosting the video on your site, or by using a third party source.

This post looks at how to enable video measurement.

We’ve all got forms on our websites. And chances are, you have multi-page forms. But, do you know how they’re performing? Do you know where people are abandoning your forms? If you knew that, what could you do? There’s lots of ways to track forms but they vary depending upon what you need to accomplish. Multi-page forms, which are very common these days, are slightly more complex from a measurement standpoint, but you definitely want to get some insights into these types of forms. In this post, I look at various ways to review form abandonment, from SiteCatalyst Fallout Reports, to using Discover Fallout Reports, to the Form Analysis plugin.

So, following a recent “back to basics” post, a reader requested that I write something describing how custom traffic props are actually useful. How about customer segmentation achieved through traffic props?

Custom traffic props are used for counting traffic-based activity, to gain insights into user behaviour across our sites. By default, custom traffic props only come enabled with the metric Page Views, which, by itself is, admittedly, not a lot of good. But, with a couple of minor customisations, you can get valuable insights from the props very quickly.

This post is actually about customer segmentation – in our case measuring student activity versus staff activity versus “anonymous” activity. In your case, it’ll probably be customers vs. non-customers. But, you don’t have to stop at the customer vs. non-customer segments either. There’s plenty of other customer segments that you can apply throughout the brand funnel, as they move from being just a browser to a high value loyal customer.

Read on to find out more about enabling customer segmentation.

One of the fundamental things you need to understand about Omniture SiteCatalyst is the difference between an s.prop and an eVar, and just what events are and when to set them. They are at the heart of the product and provide the ability to customise it to suit your business needs.

If you don’t understand the difference, you’re going to be in a world of pain, and left dazed and confused.

This is, understandably, the most confusing thing to new SiteCatalyst users, and they take a bit of getting used to, especially when you start to combine them all together, but once you understand them, you’ll be on your way to generating custom ones that can really provide insight. Hopefully this post will help out in some small way.

One of the big problems with single page microsites is that traditional measures, such as bounce rates, engagement time, scrolling etc, all go out the window because there is no “second page” activity by the user.

Take, for example, a recent press-release microsite that we did at Murdoch University. The press release is about snake bites and what owners can do to protect their pets. There’s a bunch of information on the page, including an infographic, downloadable files, images, and other stuff.

The problem is, as the user interacts with the page content, they don’t actually move from page to page – which represented quite a challenge in the way it’s measured.

Read on to find out how we got total visibility on interactions and engagement, including time on page, for a single page site.

Here’s another really simple customisation that you can and should do as part of your basic implementation, which helps you to further understand attribution.

Attribution is probably one of the hardest and most contested measurements available…which “thing” led your customer to do something. Read on to find out more about stacking in SiteCatalyst.

You’re optimizing content to drive relevance for your visitors. So why don’t you optimize your menus in SiteCatalyst for your users too? Make them more relevant – you’ll be thanked for it.

One of the lesser used capabilities in SiteCatalyst is the Custom Menu. They make reports easier to find for your users. Makes sense and only takes two minutes.

I recently read a great blog post about Cohort Analysis – measuring engagement over time, from 52 weeks of UX, and it got me thinking how to achieve this within Omniture SiteCatalyst.

As it turns out, with a bit of custom code, it’s pretty easy to do, and what an opportunity it opens up.

Cohort Analysis allows you to look at a group of people who start something at a specific time and monitor them over time to see whether their engagement increases or decreases. Then you can also compare them with people who start the same thing at a different point in time.

Read on to find out what this all means, why you need it, and what you can do with it…

We’re all involved in SEO – jostling for position, trying to improve our domain authority, vying for backlinks, looking at page rank. We’re all getting reports from our SEO vendors. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to include those core measures in our SiteCatalyst Dashboards sometimes.

Did you know you can?

It’s a bit of a hack – but it works.