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The Web Analytics Report looks at... Creating report dashboards in Omniture

"Some customers report that while it can be easy to access and view complex data, they find it harder to pull simple information, such as summaries. Web analytics managers note that Omniture does not offer standard dashboard reports "out-of-the-box," leaving customers to build dashboards from scratch. So, while there is a great deal of flexibility in customizing dashboards, if you have many stakeholders, just getting started could itself present a significant project."

More about The Web Analytics Report

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The Search & Information Access Report: This newly updated 341-page Search and Information Access Report critically evaluates 23 Search and Information Access offerings from around the globe... Read more

The Enterprise Collaboration & Community Software Report : This newly updated research critically evaluates 27 Enterprise Collaboration and Community Software products head-to-head... Read more

The Enterprise Content Management Report : This newly updated research critically evaluates 32 Enterprise Content Management products head-to-head... Read more

 

 

The challenge of mobile analytics - Part 1

29-May-2008   --  

Last year everyone was talking about Web 2.0; this year it's all about the mobile web. Let's take a look at what this means for mobile analytics...which by the way, I'll be speaking about on a panel at the Internet Marketing Conference in New York on June 4.

The bottom line...mobile analytics is relatively new; beyond infancy, but certainly not for the faint of heart.

Biggest challenges are

Identifying unique visitors, because mobile browsers don't often accept cookies (you will likely need to rely on browser, OS and IP combinations)

Identifying the phone and manufacturer (you may need to integrate data from the Wireless Universal Resource File (WURFL)

IP addresses changing based on moving between mobile towers.

Vendors committed to JavaScript page tagging, such asCoremetrics and Omniture, are touting a "no JavaScript" image tag implementation strategy. However, these and other tag-based vendors rely on a JavaScript library file to collect data about the OS, size, and resolution of the monitor. To compensate, you need to stuff the image tag with query strings that will collect the data you require for reporting.

From the perspective of collecting browser (user agent) data, log file and packet sniffing still make sense because these are server-side methods, and therefore the http request gets logged. So AuriQ (packet sniffing), Unica and WebTrends are all possible alternatives, but still suffer the same issues with regard to unique visitor identification.

On the reporting side of things, vendors will point out that you can get the same reports as you'd get normally, which is true; you just have to filter accordingly to get a break out of mobile activity. Nedstat is an exception, recently announcing a more packaged treatment of their mobile analytics reports.

Reflecting the ongoing industry fragmentation within web analytics, a collection of new firms have emerged with a more specialized approach to analyzing the mobile web. I'll take a look at these companies in my next post.

- Submitted by: Phil Kemelor, Contributing Analyst

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