6 Months Since I Left Omniture

I started at Omniture in 2000 when it was named myComputer.com. Josh and John were younger, I remember seeing them enjoy a ride in John’s first Porsche. They built an engineering friendly culture and for the most part everyone enjoyed working there. Then came the bubble burst and I luckily found a more steady job in Utah Valley. MyComputer.com went down from 130+ employees to 30+ employees in less than a year. In 2003 the company, now rebranded Omniture, won a dark-horse race for the HP contract and I was hired on (kind of funny, now I work for HP). I was employee number 40 of the regrowth. I loved the Omniture Culture, I had come from a family-run business and was a bit tired of the nepotism and family politics. Omniture was highly innovative and innovation was explicitly expected from everyone that worked there.

Rather than working as an engineer, I came back to work as an implementation consultant. That is when I discovered my love for digital marketing and web-site optimization. And the next few years were a whirlwind of growth, new employees, and demanding clients. When the whirlwind started to settle I found myself working on the first Genesis integrations and passing those integrations on to engineering and consulting.

Over the years it soon became apparent the the engineering-driven culture was beginning to cease. The highly innovative culture became more organized and clanish. Organized because Omniture brought in more ”seasoned” management and more clanish because the “good-ol-boys” mentality seemed to increase as everyones’ pockets grew bigger and bigger. Not to mention that the CEOs balance from John Pestana was gone once Pestana left (think Jobs and Wozniak).

So, I was sad to see the culture change from highly innovative to organized-clanish. But a big thing that affected my decision to leave was the unsure future of web analytics. I hope Omniture wins the analytics game as I still have many friends that work there and it would be an overall benefit for Utah Valley if they are successful. As we start to see industry conversion in analytics I’m very interested to see who will come out on top.  If anything Omniture will definitely end up a successful consulting/agency group because of the knowledge they have gleaned over the years. And of all the vendors out there they have the best shot.

6 months later I must say that I do miss innovating at Omniture. There is still a lot of hope that Omniture will emerge victorious in this Petabyte Age, but only time will tell. If anything, they definitely have a shot. I feel they should probably fine tune their innovation rather than focusing on organization to increase their chances. All the best to my friends at Omniture.

-Ryan Ekins

Omniture Summit 2009

There is a saying amongst the entrepreneurial community here in Utah Valley “Going big creates trust” and this year the Omniture Summit was the biggest yet in many ways. The event was at the Salt Palace Convention Center a much larger venue than the Grand American Hotel or the Ski Resorts of the past. In past years you would find it hard to move in the partner showcase and other locations. This year there was plenty of room to stroll without feeling claustrophobic at every turn of the corner.

Omniture’s theme for the Summit was “lead the change”. The point of the theme; during these hard economic times we can let change happen to us or we can lead the change. Omniture made it clear that they are here to lead the change to the online marketing suite. They announced a few more products that will be added to their growing list of tool sets. The Online Marketing Suite, brings together all of Omniture’s applications for partners and agencies. Developer Connection, a spider that searches for pages without code and indexes keywords on pages for further understanding of SEO efforts. Omniture Recommendations, a product recommendation engine which was in beta with ExactTarget for targeted emails with product recommendations and supposedly had a 200% lift in conversion from emails.

A lot was said about the present economic environment, but Omniture perceives this environment as an opportunity because all online web sites have a reason to believe and a need to believe for optimizing their online marketing spend and widening their conversion funnel.

I had the opportunity to be a part of Mindmeld, which brings together the analytics and optimization experts of the industry and discuss new channels of marketing like mobile, kiosks, etc. We discussed bringing web analytics to the executive level, particularly the CMO level.

My main focuses for the breakout sessions were social media and SEO. A big takeaway that I had from the social media side is “fish where the fish are”. Building your own social media tools may be helpful, but if you are looking to help people convert or support users, you may want to build out tools or departments that work directly with existing social media tools. A guest speaker from Comcast described how using Twitter he was able to gain real time insight into customers that had service issues. Because he was able to interact with them directly he gleaned valuable information for their service department to fix issues. In fact, Omniture has just released a solution that takes Twitter data and pushes the number of times your brand is mentioned into a report in SiteCatalyst. This is helpful in showing how your brand is being mentioned, but a real solution would be a brand monitor that can detect negative and positive comments across the entire web, including all social media tools. There are many brand monitors out there and it is probably a better solution to import data from the brand monitors rather than from just one source, like Twitter.

The other side that I concentrated on was SEO. It was a lot of the same that I had already known. SiteCatalyst doesn’t do a good job of tracking natural search keywords and if you want better tracking either add in a HUGE piece of JavaScript that detects search engines or add a VISTA rule on the backend that takes the keyword and places it into a custom variable. It is a popular VISTA rule known as unified sources (besides better search engine traffic tracking it takes all marketing channels and places in a single variable). Then you can look at how landing pages from natural ultimately causes conversion on the site. This is done by segmenting out traffic that had a landing page with natural search. This works, but doesn’t take into account any mid visit searches. So as part of the unified sources it is best to add in the landing page into its own variable. Categorization of keywords was also another topic, but for those with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of natural search phrases coming through, categorization can be a daunting proposition. The only advice the speaker could give for that was to “hire an intern”. Coming from Omniture I know some of the tricks of the trade and created a solution to automatically classify keywords through a database driven VISTA rule. If anyone else is interested in automatic natural keyword categorizations, let me know.

As a side note, I had many people come up to me and thank me for having brought Maroon 5 to the Summit. I wasn’t able to attend the Maroon 5 concert (daughter’s birthday), but I guess HP had sponsored their appearance. Good move PR/Marketing/whoever from HP who set that up. J

At the end of the Summit we gathered in a large room and marketers are given the chance to stand and request feature additions to the product. I was able to make a feature request on behalf of HP. A tracking pixel that can be used for external impressions on banner ads, emails, and other external media that does not affect visitor, visit and page view counts. That way we can look at impressions to conversion for external media. About half of the audience agreed with the request.

Overall, it was another successful Summit for Omniture and I learned a few things here and there in the process.

-Ryan Ekins