“I can’t find anything!”

This is the most common response we came across during the scoping and implementation of Search and Promote as the new internal search for Murdoch University.

Hardly surprising, given the issues with internal search that I covered in my previous post, but amazingly consistent!

In fact, one of the great truths we found during this project is that people truly don’t care where content is located, or whether it’s authenticated and/or accessible – they just wanted to type something in the search box, immediately find what they’re looking for, then carry on with their work.

We’ve now completed the implementation across our internal sites, and it’s working really well – so well that we’re now 2-3 weeks away from covering our external sites.

In my last post I promised to run through the implementation, however there’s a lot to talk about, so today I’ll cover SEO metatags (or the lack thereof), using multiple content sources, and how we integrated Search & Promote with SiteCatalyst to dynamically alter search result ranking.

Given the issues with internal search across campus and the wide range of staff and students that were more than happy to tell us just how bad it was, we decided to first implement Search & Promote across the internal sites where our primary audience are current staff and students.

Through the implementation of SiteCatalyst a few years back  across our network sites we have been able to segment our staff and student traffic, so we knew from the onset just how many searches each segment were doing, and how long on average they were taking.

Looking specifically at staff, approx 2,400 people collectively performed 234,131 searches in 2010, spending an average of 202 secs per search. Wow!

That equates to 13,137 hours, which, at an average of $40/hr, comes out to a $524,498 productivity cost. This figure alone should catch the attention of your key stakeholders and finance people.

Armed with that knowledge, we set the following key objective for the  Search & Promote trial across our internally facing sites;

• Reduce time staff spent searching by 10% by delivering a single set of filterable results, transparent of source, influenced by recent traffic.

Now that we had a clear objective, we could begin on the planning and implementation. We were greatly aided by a project team at Search & Promote – thanks John, Wally and Richard; you were all very helpful, and it was great working with each of you.

The first step was to set up the organic crawl of our internal sites, which largely consisted of listing the appropriate entry points;

Image: URL entry points in Search and Promote

And their corresponding URL masks (note the test feature that allows you to try your masks before saving them);

Image: URL masks in Search & Promote

Search & Promote works on a number of pages crawled – your licensing allows you to go to a certain number of pages, and after that the pages are not added to your index. There was a bit of tweaking to figure out what that level was, however there’s a cool feature in Search & Promote that allows the crawl to continue and count the number of pages that you’ve gone over by so you at least have an idea of where you are. From there you can either increase your licensed limit, or identify the larger than expected sites and par down the number of pages found by using the error logs and URL masks.

Compensating for the lack of SEO content

One of the issues I’d talked about previously was a lack of the bare minimum SEO metadata across many sites, most of which we had no direct control over. We tackled this by using the metatag injection feature in Search & Promote, which can be configured to dynamically inject metadata during a crawl, based on a URL pattern. This metadata is then included in the index as if the metadata was already embedded within each page, and can range from standard title/description metatags, to custom tags that can be use to create search filters (facets).

We soon found, however, that a significant portion of internal content required authentication to access, which meant that the crawler could not get in to that content. The Search & Promote crawler can be given credentials to access that content, however our concern was that content was authenticated for a reason, and to show even a title or extract from authenticated content on a public search may give away too much.

Given that the “we can’t find anything!” comment included authenticated content and applications, we needed an alternate option for this implementation to be successful.

At Murdoch we have a database called the A-Z index, which is maintained by our IT area, and over the past 5-6 years has grown to include an entry for most of our authenticated content and applications. This was a perfect source of information, now we needed to somehow incorporate this content into our search results.

Enter a feature in Search & Promote called ‘index connectors’.

Incorporating multiple sources of content

The index connector feature within Search & Promote allows you to define a third party xml feed, xml file, or comma/tab delineated file as an alternate source of content to be crawled.

The IT at Murdoch team were able to provide us an xml feed out of the A-Z index which allowed the Search & Promote crawler to include each entry/link within the feed in its scheduled crawls, together with custom mappings for each tag within the entries  to predefined custom metatags;

Image: Sample from our A-Z Flat XML feed

Image: Setting up the A-Z Flat XML feed as an index connector

Not only were we able to crawl the feed and include all the authenticated content as separate entries (‘restricted’ in the above screenshots), but we were able to alter the look and feel of the specific A-Z results within the wider search results, and account for a lack of  description within the feed.

The side-effect that we hadn’t counted on, but worked to our benefit, is that the A-Z index had entries for related non-Murdoch sites that were still of value to staff and students.

By having entries for the non-Murdoch sites in the A-Z as wayfinders, we didn’t need to crawl the actual sites themselves. This resulted in a significant reduction in the number of sites/pages we needed to organically crawl, while still providing our audience with a complete set of search results.

Using this same index connector functionality we were also able to incorporate the university’s campus directory listings via a new xml feed; whereas with the A-Z feed we only wanted to incorporate the results within the wider results set, we wanted results from the campus directory to always be the first results and be displayed in a table format, but more on the styling and positioning of these multiple content sources later.

Allowing for cyclical requests to ensure the most relevant results appear

In my previous post on Search & Promote, one of the key advantages the product had over its competitors was the ability to natively integrate with SiteCatalyst.

Via SiteCatalyst we already knew that our internal search terms follow highly cyclical patterns as our student (and staff) needs change over the semester. For example, the term ‘timetable’ is searched for throughout the semester, however the anticipated result changes as the semester progresses. At the beginning of semester, people are looking at for their semester timetable and towards the end their exam timetable.

In the past we’ve used custom coded mechanisms to help staff and students find what they’re looking for, however with Search & Promote we can take that to a whole new level!

Search & Promote allows you to define a data source within SiteCatalyst, in our case Global Production > Page Views, and then add ranking weight based on those values – the higher the weight, the higher the impact the SiteCatalyst data will have over your search results.

We defined s.prop41 under our Global Production suite in SiteCatalyst as SearchPromoteURL, and then used it to cross reference the Search & Promote crawled URLs with the associated Page Views data in SiteCatalyst;

Image: Using page view data from SiteCatalyst to influence ranking

Now, every day the last seven days worth of aggregated SiteCatalyst page view data is automatically downloaded and fed into the Search & Promote custom defined field SearchPromoteURL, which in turn is used in a ranking rule that increases the relevance of highly trafficked pages in the last seven days;

Image: Aggregated page view data in Search & Promote

A good example of this in action are our sample and past exam papers in our Library website, where there is a separate page per letter – with the SearchPromoteURL ranking rule disabled, the pages are literally ranked A through to Z, as the other active ranking rules see them as equally relevant. However when the SearchPromoteURL ranking rule is in place, the top ranked exam page is Exams B, followed by P and I.

In the admin data report for “exams” below you can see how the ranking, relevance and score metrics are all the same for the exam paper pages, and that the differentiating ranking  factor is delivered by the page views;

Image: Admin view of results for 'exams' and the different ranking scores that order them

The same ranking results can be seen on the front-end at http://search.murdoch.edu.au/?q=exams;

Image: Corresponding public search results for 'exams'

This is exactly what we set out to achieve, and it’s so far looking to have worked pretty well!

In part 2 of this post, I’ll cover how we combined all our sources of search results into a single set of user-centric, filterable search results, well as how we fared against our original objective of reducing time our staff spent search by 10%.

Well, it’s August and true to their word, Adobe upgraded us to SiteCatalyst v15 on the 1st, and so I thought I’d share a few of the golden nuggets within v15.

I was thinking about how to order them…do I go by not bad to flamin’ eck, that’s awesome? Or start with the big bang and then let it continue to smoulder throughout? 

The problem is there are too many new and great features that you can’t really put them in any type of order.  They appeal to you on different levels, from functionality, to UI, to analysis, to reporting, to combination segmentation and sub reporting.

And as this post is kind of huge (sorry you might a coffee and a bagel on this one), here’s a little taste of what’s covered in it:

•  Segment, the all powerful segmentation
•  New segments
•  Site Overview Report
•  Segmented Overview Report
•  Side by Side segments (well sort of)
•  Key Metrics report
•  Normalization (one of my new best friends)
•  Visits, Visitors and PageViews
•  Full Sub Relations – multiple breakdowns on eVars
•  Traffic prop breakdowns
•  Login as another user
•  Calendar events specific to report suites
•  Significant changes

So let’s start with the big one that everyone knows about, or at least should.

Segments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 5 months, you’ll have heard about the segmentation capability within SiteCatalyst v15.

Out of the box, it comes with 7 pre-defined segments that are shared across SiteCatalyst, Discover, and Test&Target.

These segments were chosen because, according to Ben Gaines at Adobe, they are “valid (and important!) for all of our users—across vertical and market size. We’ve also seen these types of segments predict different behavior across a variety of actions: registration flows, purchases, and general site browsing.”

New Segments

You can, of course, create your own segments on the fly and apply them to any report as well.  If you’re a Discover user, you can create them in Discover and save them back into SiteCatalyst for later use.

I’ve not yet figured out how to create a segment available across all report suites, without creating it in Discover.  Perhaps Adobe can help on this one?

Segments can also be used in Test&Target too. There’s a one-click little target icon next to the segment box which opens up a new A/B..n campaign in Test&Target, although it doesn’t specifically target custom segments that you’ve created as that’s a little more complex – but the preconfigured ones are available for use immediately.

Site Overview report

This new report is actually a dashboard, but, it’s highly useful and can be modified to your needs.  Using the same features as dashboards, you can set this one to your landing page when you log in (no more pinwheel).

From those reportlets, you can get to the main report by clicking on the name of the reportlet.

You can also change the date and the whole thing will rerun against the new dates.

Segmented Overview

If you want to see a particular reportlet using a specific segment without running the whole dashboard again, just click on the report suite name within the reportlet and a little popdown appears, allowing you to select not only the report suite, but also a segment to use.

When you select a new segment, it will re-run the reportlet, not the dashboard, against the new segment.

Of course if you want to run the entire dashboard against the new segment, then just select the segment in the main segment dropdown and you’ll get instant gratification.

Side by Side Segments

Ok, so you still need Discover to do comparative segmentation, but, there is a sneaky little way to show two segments at the same time, using a dashboard report.  Generate your base report, for example, I’ve used calculated metrics on the new Key Metrics report (see below for more info).

Then apply a segment, and add it to a dashboard.  Apply another segment and add it to the same dashboard.

Then go to the dashboard layout editor (which is also new), and just put both reportlets into the new dashboard.

What you get is a visualisation of the two (or more) segments, plotted over time.

Key metrics report

One of my personal new favourites here is the Key Metrics report, which allows you to put multiple metrics on a time-based report.  This was always one of the big challenges before, but, they listened to us, and here it is.  And there’s a bunch of nifty things about this report that I just love!

Firstly, as shown above, you can add multiple metrics, or calculated metrics to the report – something you could never do before.  For instance, you can add Visitors, Visits, Page Views, Conversion Metrics, Conversion Rates and so on.

Now that you’ve got the key metrics trended side by side, every worthy analysis ninja will look to segment that information – so, just go ahead and apply those segments.

One of the great things about this report is you can do calculated metrics too…side by side (see the image for side by side segments above).

Normalization

Ah, what a great idea this was.  Normalize your data on the Key Metrics Report.  As you can see from the above screen shot, the page views data is overwhelming the trending report, making it difficult to view some of the trends for the other metrics.

But that’s ok now – just normalize it.  Same report as above, just normalized.  And the other metrics pop up.

Ok, so those metrics that I’ve used don’t really tell us anything.  How about this one then?

I’ve highlighted dates when certain metrics weren’t in line with the norm.

Now you have something to go and look at.  Why, on those dates, did those metrics “pop”.  What did you do?  Did they vary by segment?  And what can you do to nudge those that didn’t behave similarly?  You can learn from that.

Love this report.  One of my new best friends.

Visits Visitors & PageViews

Yes, these are now available across most conversion reports.  You used to be able to get Visits and Visitors by special request, but now, they’re enabled and you get Page Views as well.  And they’re particularly useful across things like campaign reports, referring domains, search engines, keywords etc.

Full Sub Relations – multiple breakdowns on eVars

Remember the days when you had to think carefully about setting up subrelations on eVars…should you use Full or Basic?  And remember the impact if you got it wrong, or realized later that you needed Full Sub Relations on a key eVar?

Well, those days are gone.

You now get full subrelations on all eVars (although I don’t quite understand why the admin asks you still for the type of subrelation you want when you create an eVar – Omniture…can you add any info here?)

In this example, I’ve used two eVars, both are set up in the admin as Basic Subrelations, but I’m able to now break one down by the other, and then I’ve added a filter to remove the keyword “murdoch” from the report.  As you can see, it’s a conversion report, with Unique Visitors, Visits and Page Views, as well as success events.

Once again, you can sub-segment this report against any of your existing (or on-the-fly) segments. Yay!!!

Traffic Prop breakdowns

Another great feature is the ability to now breakdown key traffic props, such as the referring domain report.  It used to have basically “instances” and allowed you to put in success events.

No more.

Now you can not only see Visits, Visitors and Page Views, as well as success events, but you can also now break it down by things like Average Time on Site, and, all eVars…wow!  Couldn’t do anything like that in v14.

And you can flip it too…start with a conversion report, such as our Figure Out Your Life segments, and you can break them down, by Referring Domains, or Time Spent per Visit etc.

Ok, long post I know, but, there’s so much going on that I’ll probably add more posts in the future on the new features.

Just to touch on some of the other new things as well…

Login as another user

Do you have a user that’s experiencing problems?  Well, now you can log in as that user.  Go to the admin and views the users, then click on “Login as this user”.

Report specific calendar events

One of the problems with SC14 calendar events was that they showed up across every other report suite…which made it very unhelpful to users that had somewhat restricted views, such as global sites and regional sites.  The UK office didn’t really care that you ran a specific promotion, but they saw it anyway.

Now you can apply a calendar event to a specific report suite only.  To be honest, the link for it is a little tough to spot, so I’ve put a whopping great big arrow to it:

Ok, now I’ve covered the things that I’m excited about, there are a few things that new users need to understand with this version.

This has all come about because of the way that data is stored.  It used to be pre-processed into the reports, which resulted in the limitation on segmentation and other capabilities such as breakdowns.  But Discover always worked off the original unprocessed data, which also led to some differences in the data, especially around unique visitor counts and classification deduping.

SiteCatalyst v15 now runs off the raw data – the same as Discover, so the datasets are the same, hence the reports are the same.

Key Differences

There are some key differences between v14 and v15 that you need to be aware of:

Visits for Non-Cookied Visitors

All visitors, regardless of them accepting a cookie are now included in Visit counts and pathing data.  But this increases your Visits metric, so your conversion rates will likely go down a bit.  In testing, the increase of visits was about 0.5% for first-party cookies, and 5-12% for third party cookies.  Another great reason why you should be on first party cookies (contact your account manager if your tracking server has 2o7.net in it).

Time Spent metric 

Both the time spent per visit and the average time spent on page metric now use all server calls to generate the metric, which is much improved on SC14.  What this means is that non-page view data is included in time spent reports, such as custom links etc.  And, they’re no longer bucketed.  It now works off an average for each and every individual page view.

De-duplicated Visits and Visitors in Classifications 

Classifications are now correctly de-duplicated, meaning that when you group things using classifications, they are now de-duplicated, whereas before, they would count each instance of a visit or visitor.

Ben Gaines wrote an excellent blog post about these and a couple of others which is definitely worth reading and getting to grips with.

Summary

What can you say?

Thank you, Omniture Business Unit within Adobe, for listening to us.  These changes make the platform even more useful than it already was and clearly makes it a powerhouse in the web analytics space.

With these, and many other changes made, we’re able to provide our organizations with even more insights that lead to more business optimization capabilities, a better ROI and hopefully more analysis ninjas.

Thanks guys!

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.

Forget about these…

1. Hits
   Hits were all the rage in the 90′s. “100,000 hits yesterday!” was often heard. Wow. Problem is, a ‘hit’ counts any hit to the web server, like images, not just pages. So, pages with images received more ‘hits’… so it was a pretty inaccurate/unfair metric… and a better metric to measure web popularity came along; the ‘pageview’ metric.
   
2. Web Counters
   Remember those? Again from a bygone age. No-one ever mentioned what time period the number was for, let alone what it actually measured. And those that did have them often got upset when the number stayed really really low…to the point where they would artificially inflate their own numbers.

Of limited value…

1. Browser Types
   Pretty much only good for knowing which browsers our users are using. But, today, every site should be made to render properly in multiple browsers.
2. Platform Types
   Likewise with the browser types, however, many providers now separate this out to mobile platforms, and as mobile platforms become more ubiquitous, we keep an eye on this. However, it’s important to see what content the mobile users are viewing and ensure it’s readily available to those platforms.
3. Resolution
   Again, good for understanding how to design the site with minimum widths in place. Note however, there’s a difference between screen resolution and browser size – two different values, two different results.

Basic, fundamental metrics…

1. Page Views
   This tells you the amount of views our site pages are getting – in particular, this allows us to see how the site fares over time. A view counts as a loading of a page. Still considered a very important metric, but the increasing amount of flash/AJAX built websites, and the increase in online video, means fewer page views are counted, even though the same amount of content is being looked at. Therefore, we need to consider our ability to track AJAX built sites, and Flash driven interactions. Any metrics platform worth it’s salt will be able to track this through custom tagging (which Omniture, of course, does).
2. Visits
   A ‘visit’ is the equivalent of when someone arrives at our site and starts looking at pages. A visit can consist of many pageviews, or just one. The industry standard is to expire the visit after 30 minutes of inactivity, or 12 hours of constant activity.
3. Unique Visitors
   A unique visitor counts the number of distinct people (well, really computers) that are visiting (making visits) our site in a particular time period. A unique visitor can make up many visits, each containing many pageviews. This is still one of the best metrics to use for site popularity. Bear in mind though that it’s important to understand the timeframe as well. Daily, weekly and monthly unique visitor metrics vary because of the reporting period.
4. Referrers
   This is a great metric – it tells us all the sites that people are finding our site and visiting from. If we don’t know where people are coming from, then we don’t know how our marketing efforts are doing, and where to spend additional money. There will also be Direct/Type In’s in this report, which provide a good indication of how many people start directly at our site (or from a bookmark). We seemingly get a huge amount of traffic from Google Organic search (which incidentally also has the best conversion rate – see below), but, read on…

   This is one to be slightly wary of as well… As this metric shows where a visitor originated from on the first visit, future visits can also be attributed to this original site. The wary part is that sites like Google write a cookie that hangs around for a really long time (6 months, versus the standard 1 month for media sites) and so if the first visit comes from Google, then two additional visits as direct type in’s, the referring domain will always show as Google (3 visits, whereas it should be 1 from Google and 2 Direct).

5. Search Engines
   This metric is a more detailed version of ‘referrers’ and tells us which search engines people are visiting our site from.
6. Keywords
   Hugely important metric. As it sounds, this metric tells us the top keywords that people are typing in at search engines and ultimately clicking through to our site. It’s basically an even more valuable, in-depth version of the ‘top search engines’ metric.
7. Geo
   Where are they coming from? Particularly useful for marketing overseas. You’d be surprised at how the content visited differs from country to country, and even regions within a country.

Spend more time looking at the following…

1. Average Time Spent
   This metric indicates the amount of time a visitor spends on our site and pages. It’s usually a good indicator of the quality of our website. The longer the time spent, usually, the better. However, a long number can be an indicator of a bad website experience and that people can’t find what they are looking for. It’s best to combine it with the bounce rate and exit pages (see below) to get a more accurate picture of the quality of site content. Also, the average time spent doesn’t take into account the last page seen (it has no way of knowing when the visitor closed their browser or walked away), so typically blog home pages suffer from this.
2. Entrance Pages
   All too often people just analyse and improve the homepage, because they think that’s where the majority of their traffic arrives from. However, the reality is that many people will arrive deep into the site through search engines. Looking at this metric reveals which of our pages are most often used as entrance pages. We look to improve these pages and make sure it’s easy for visitors to navigate from these pages – otherwise these entrance pages will become exit pages.
3. Exit Pages
   This metric indicates the amount of ‘exits’ from pages on our site. Therefore, it reveals the pages that drive people away. But remember, some exit pages are more natural exit pages, like purchase confirmation or ask for information signup confirmation pages. We look for the highest exited pages that seem to be an important path in our site flow (user journey), like course pages or information pages, and improve these.
4. Bounce Rate
   This is one of the most under-used, but most revealing metrics. To put it simply, it indicates the amount of people that, upon arriving at our site, immediately leave. Therefore, it’s a great indicator of the quality of our site. Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits from entrance page visits for individual pages. A bounce rate below 40% for pages is considered good.
   
   While single-page visits / entrance pages is good, we also use page views / number of times this was an exit page…a slightly different view. This shows overall how much traffic left from this page.
5. Internal Search Keywords
   This is definitely a key metric and one of the most revealing and a subject of a future post. By looking at the keywords people use to search internally, it shows exactly what people are wanting/expecting to see on the site.
6. Multi Page Rate
   This is an interesting metric, used in combination with the Entry and Exit metrics. Basically, this one shows how well a page view contributes to a multi-page visit. Key pages should have a high multi-page rate percentage, as should key entry pages.
7. Repeat Visitor Rate
   This is another great metric to use, and is a great indicator of the quality of the site. Simply put, the more visitors return, the better the site is likely to be. The higher the percent of repeat visits versus first time visits is another great indicator to use for site quality.

The Holy Grail, well, definitely the most important…

1. Conversion
   Knowing the conversion rate is one of the most powerful things to know and act on. And not just conversion for the site as a whole but conversion rate by page or set of pages. Conversion doesn’t automatically mean that you have to be selling something. While it is the most common definition for conversion, it can also be a very powerful metric to highlight how user progress through content (pathing is similar but not quite the same). Ideally have a funnel for each conversion to understand where people are leaving before they convert – a prime candidate to analyze conversion rate and funnel is pages within an checkout form – traditional retail stuff.  However, any multi-page process will produce a funnel. Another important view is to look at conversion rates by referrers, which gives a good indicator of the value of various sources.We correlate conversions by country, by campaign, by promotion, by traffic source, by keyword (paid and organic), by path etc, which gives excellent insight and allows us to constantly look at ways to improve the conversion rates.
2. Value
   What is value? Value is many different things for many different reasons. Value might be an estimation of the value of a visitor, of a lead, of an application, of a purchase, of a request for information. You often hear that a company has lost millions of dollars when their site goes down. This is because they know on average how many orders might be placed and the dollar value of the orders…therefore they can calculate value.

   We also calculate value; the average value of a lead. Leads are a primary KPI on our site. Leads submit applications. Applications drive revenue. By reverse calculating through the funnel, we can calculate the value of a lead. Hence, the importance of leads. And hence the importance of understanding conversions.

In a future post I’ll explain why just looking at the numbers really doesn’t accomplish much. The value is in the strategy. Metrics are used to measure business goals and user goals – therefore, understanding both business goals and user goals is critical, as it helps to shape the information tracked, which ensures that you get the best value from the metrics provided, and ultimately the best insight and ROI.