OMG – have you seen the new Discover? If not, why not? If so, you’re probably in heaven and I completely understand.

Discover v3 is the latest release of the ad-hoc analytics software from Adobe – and I have to say, Tim Lott and the team over there have done a fantastic job with this release, opening up capabilities that, once you start, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without them.

So, what’s all the fuss about? Read on…

There’s no excuse nowadays not to be optimizing across multiple channels. There’s heaps of tools available from no cost tools to paid tools and there’s plenty of consultants willing to help you get out there and lead you down a path of optimization.

Just remember though, 90% of optimization is done by people, only 10% by the tool. It’s people that create the optimization strategy, the ideas to test, the segments, the content, the creative and of course, the insights that come from the results – both good and bad.

So how do you know if free is ok or whether you should invest in something a little more robust? It depends how serious you are about optimization. It also depends on what analytic tools you run as well. It depends on what you actually want to achieve.

I’ve come across a few clients now that either aren’t using SAINT, are using it in a limited way, or are using it for campaigns only. Maybe people are confused by what it does, or daunted by it, or just don’t know what it can be used it for. It’s got uses that extend way beyond campaigns.

So, in this post, I’ll re-cap a bit about what SAINT actually is, and how it can be used, across a whole multitude of things.

While Jerome is busy posting about the in’s and out’s of implementing Search&Promote, I thought I’d wade in with a post on why businesses should consider their search as a missed opportunity.

I’ve previously posted on what I think is a hidden gold mine of information called internal search. It’s an area of the site that many companies, quite frankly, ignore.

“Not too sure how to do anything with it, we assume it’s working just fine serving up results to random queries, so we’ll leave it alone and focus on our core purpose, driving people into our conversion funnel.”

Or something along those lines.

If that’s you, go stand in front of a mirror and slap yourself a few times! Wake up and smell the coffee…there’s much more to search than that!

This topic was requested by one of my readers – thanks for the inspiration Dan.

And it comes back to segmentation. And the value derived from measuring your customers/members behaviors across your digital channels, and the impact they could be having on your conversion rates if you don’t segment.

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.

So I promised that I would finally put fingertip to keyboard and talk a little bit more about using Visitor Scoring…to finish up the series that I started a while ago.

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that we implemented a series of metrics for engagement measurement, culminating in a per-visitor score.

I wanted to share with you some of the insights and benefits of doing all of this, particularly in Discover.

While this might be a quickie, it’s a biggy. A big one in terms of the amount of data just uploaded through SAINT. In fact, we’ve just uploaded around 1 million rows of data, with 6 columns per row.

And it didn’t even blink! Gotta love that!

So why do we have a million rows of data?

Customer segmentation of course.

This is the third (but not final) post in the series on Visitor Engagement. One of the problems with the Visitor Scoring method that I previously described, is that, at the end of the day, you’re still somewhat limited to viewing scores at the “average” level, by segment.

That presents a number of challenges because the average is precisely that…and the underlying scores vary dramatically within each segment.

But there is a way to see what each and every visitor score is, or even within the different segments…and it’s called the Unique Visitor ID. You can see at the visitor level, how many times they’ve returned, how many “things” they’ve done, such as searches, product views, revenue etc.

This is really the icing on the proverbial cake.

This is a follow on post to my previous one about measuring that elusive engagement. This post focuses on the aspect of applying a score to visitor interactions, as they interact with your content and applications.

Visitor scoring is fairly simple – especially in SiteCatalyst, and by leveraging the data in Discover through segmentation, (and ultimately in SiteCatalyst 15), it’ll give you even more insight into visitor engagement.

Visitor scoring measures and assigns a relative value to individual customers and prospects based on their actions and behaviors over time. You can determine intent and engagement – even before visitors convert.

Once you’ve identified your most valuable visitors, you can dissect their actions to determine the campaigns, keywords, referring sites and offline touch points that engage them – and invest more on these efforts.