Migrating from HBX to SiteCatalyst

Analytics · By On · 5 Comments

Almost nine months into the Omni­ture acqui­si­tion, I thought it was time to start shar­ing some insights into HBX migra­tions to Site­Cat­a­lyst. In my role as team lead for the enter­prise HBX migra­tion team, I’ve had the oppor­tu­nity to inter­face with many clients as they con­tem­plate if and when they want to move to the Site­Cat­a­lyst plat­form. Dur­ing these nine months we’ve solid­i­fied our migra­tion pro­gram and learned a lot along the way, both from our new col­leagues at Omni­ture as well as from those clients that were eager to be early adopters of the migra­tion program.

Over the com­ing weeks and months I plan to cover top­ics that, based on expe­ri­ence to date, seem to be top of mind for most clients con­sid­er­ing the move to Site­Cat­a­lyst. Some of these top­ics include:

  • What are some top con­sid­er­a­tions when plan­ning for the HBX migration?
  • Omni­ture Report Builder — Trend­ing reports with HBX and Omni­ture Report Builder
  • Seg­men­ta­tion — I use HBX Active Seg­men­ta­tion today, what will I use in SiteCatalyst?
  • Cus­tom Vari­ables — I use HBX Cus­tom Met­rics, what will I use in SiteCatalyst?
  • Cam­paigns — What are the dif­fer­ences in HBX and Site­Cat­a­lyst cam­paign tracking?
  • Client Ser­vices — What sup­port is avail­able to me as I migrate and beyond?

For this post, I’m going to recap what I see as the top rea­sons why you want to con­sider migrat­ing to the Site­Cat­a­lyst plat­form. For those of you that haven’t had a chance to review the mate­r­ial on the pre­vi­ously pub­lished on our site, I encour­age you to review it.
While there are many new or enhanced fea­tures in Site­Cat­a­lyst, based on feed­back from migrated HBX clients, top fea­tures include:

Cus­tomiz­able Dash­boards & Reports
We con­sis­tently hear from HBX migrated clients that the cus­tomiz­able dash­boards and reports are a tremen­dous improve­ment over HBX and it allows the casual user to more effec­tively con­sume the infor­ma­tion. Increas­ing user adop­tion of ana­lyt­ics is a com­mon goal for many orga­ni­za­tions and hav­ing a web ana­lyt­ics tool that helps facil­i­tate this adop­tion is key to suc­cess. In addi­tion to being able to build cus­tom reports and dash­boards right within the user inter­face, you can also have them sched­uled for deliv­ery. In the past, many of our HBX clients relied on Report Builder to build cus­tom reports and sched­ule them for dis­tri­b­u­tion. Much of this can now be accom­plished right within the UI (for those Report Builder fans, we now have Site­Cat­a­lyst Report Builder avail­able, which I will address in a future post).

Cal­cu­lated Met­rics
In addi­tion to the flex­i­bil­ity of the cus­tom dash­boards and report­ing, you also have the abil­ity to cre­ate cal­cu­lated met­rics on the fly right within the user inter­face. While Omni­ture includes many of the key base­line met­rics within the plat­form, there are often met­rics that are spe­cific to each orga­ni­za­tion. Within HBX, in order to cre­ate any cal­cu­lated met­rics, you would need to do the cal­cu­la­tions in Excel often using Report Builder to access the web data. In Site­Cat­a­lyst, you can use the expres­sion builder to build the cal­cu­lated met­rics and then use them in your cus­tom reports.

Video Report­ing & Mobile Track­ing
I’ve grouped these two impor­tant fea­tures into one topic as they both rep­re­sent newer func­tion­al­ity that are clients are begin­ning to lever­age. With a recent release, the mobile track­ing in Site­Cat­a­lyst is robust and we are already find­ing migrated clients tak­ing action on ana­lyt­ics gleaned from their mobile vis­i­tors. While HBX has some video track­ing, the video report­ing in Site­Cat­a­lyst is exten­sive with native sup­port for Flash and Flex, along with Win­dows Media Player, Quick­Time and RealPlayer. In addi­tion, Video engage­ment or mile­stone track­ing is built into reports, enabling orga­ni­za­tions to find sweet-spots for ad place­ment by see­ing the most viewed sec­tions of video.

Site­Cat­a­lyst Plat­form
I’ve referred to Site­Cat­a­lyst as the “Site­Cat­a­lyst Plat­form” ear­lier in this post. The rea­son for this is that Site­Cat­a­lyst is the under­ly­ing plat­form for many solu­tions that are built using the Site­Cat­a­lyst data. In addi­tion to Site­Cat­a­lyst, we have Dis­cover (Insight & Advanced Seg­men­ta­tion), Search Cen­ter (Key­word Per­for­mance), Test and Tar­get (AB/MVT Test­ing & Behav­ioral Tar­get­ing), Sur­vey (Real-Time Cus­tomer Feed­back), newly launched Site­Search (inter­nal search) and finally Gen­e­sis (Plug & Play Appli­ca­tion Inte­gra­tion).
We’ve seen many HBX clients express strong inter­est in Gen­e­sis as it allows them to eas­ily inte­grate Site­Cat­a­lyst with other online-marketing appli­ca­tions (cur­rently over 100 cer­ti­fied Gen­e­sis part­ners), which they may have strug­gled to do with HBX. With, your orga­ni­za­tion can gain a uni­fied view of mar­ket­ing activity.

Robust Online Train­ing Videos, Knowl­edge Base, and Online Com­mu­nity
As you con­sider migrat­ing to Site­Cat­a­lyst, train­ing for your user base is cer­tainly a key com­po­nent to a suc­cess­ful roll-out. In addi­tion to the live train­ings offered by our train­ing team, there are dozens of train­ing videos avail­able from right within the user inter­face. Top­ics include “Intro­duc­tion to Site­Cat­a­lyst for HBX Users” to more advanced top­ics such as “Path Analy­sis”. Sup­ple­ment­ing the train­ing videos is the Knowl­edge base, which allows you to search the online help and sup­port­ing white papers. Finally, there is the online Com­mu­nity, which con­nects Site­Cat­a­lyst users to an online forum to ask ques­tions and share best prac­tices amongst their peers.

If you have not yet had an oppor­tu­nity to see this func­tion­al­ity in Site­Cat­a­lyst, I encour­age you to engage your account team or con­sider attend­ing one of our upcom­ing Omni­ture Café’s . For those of you on the west coast, there will be a Café event in San Diego on Sep­tem­ber 30th, fol­lowed by an event on Octo­ber 1st in Los Ange­les. You can find details on these events as well as reg­is­ter here. Stay tuned as we’ll be announc­ing our next Café in New York shortly.

If you have ques­tions on the HBX Migra­tion Pro­gram, please con­tact your account team or feel free to send me an email at cridge at omni­ture dot com. Also, let me know if there are any top­ics you’d like me to cover in future postings.

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  • http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/ Jeremy B

    Be aware, the tran­si­tion is incred­i­bly time inten­sive. Make sure you have avail­able staff and time to go through all the train­ing mate­ri­als before imple­men­ta­tion. Omni­ture is sooooo much more com­pli­cated to imple­ment than HBX was. After tran­si­tion­ing, I really miss the sim­plic­ity of HBX. I wish Omni­ture staff had to go through this tran­si­tion per­son­ally on a large site, I think they would come up with a dif­fer­ent approach if they did.

  • http://www.creditcards.com John Stans­bury

    We migrated soon after the VS acqui­si­tion and couldn’t be hap­pier with the deci­sion. We got to stay with our estab­lished account team and got greatly expanded data and func­tion­al­ity to boot. My biggest con­cern at the time was the “loss” of Report Builder, but now that’s avail­able and works extremely well with SC data. Inter­est­ingly, I find myself using Report­Builder a bit less fre­quently (with HBX it was pretty much the _only_ way I worked with the data) and am able to con­duct more of the analy­sis within the SC UI.

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/cridge Chris­t­ian Ridge

    Jeremy,

    I agree that it’s impor­tant that you do com­mit time and resources to your migra­tion to Site­Cat­a­lyst. As with any suc­cess­ful ana­lyt­ics imple­men­ta­tion, it’s impor­tant to spend time defin­ing your busi­ness require­ments that will com­ple­ment the Omni­ture Fusion Deploy­ment Method­ol­ogy. As part of the def­i­n­i­tion process, the Omni­ture Fusion approach with HBX migra­tions incor­po­rates indus­try best prac­tices along with any cus­tomiza­tion of your exist­ing imple­men­ta­tion that you wish to per­sist in your Site­Cat­a­lyst imple­men­ta­tion. The deliv­er­able from this Fusion process is a play­book that can be used by your tech­ni­cal team as a cus­tomized guide to the implementation.

    Depend­ing on the com­plex­ity of your imple­men­ta­tion and the resources you have avail­able, we find it can take an aver­age of 4 to 6 weeks for small to mid­size sites and longer for larger, more com­plex sites. We encour­age clients par­tic­i­pate in the Omni­ture train­ing courses as they’re plan­ning for migra­tion. The Imple­men­ta­tion Train­ing course can be help­ful for your tech­ni­cal and busi­ness team mem­bers as it pro­vides a fun­da­men­tal under­stand­ing of the Site­Cat­a­lyst implementation.

    Site­Cat­a­lyst does allow for more cus­tomiza­tion and flex­i­bil­ity than the HBX plat­form. If you choose to take advan­tage of this enhanced flex­i­bil­ity, it does result in a more com­plex imple­men­ta­tion than HBX, but the Fusion play­book deliv­er­able should sim­plify this for your devel­op­ment team.

    I’ll speak in fur­ther detail regard­ing con­sid­er­a­tions when plan­ning your migra­tion in future posts.

  • http://www.loanmarket.com.au/ Loan Mar­ket Home Finance

    We have a heap of sites that we intend to move over from HBX. I attended the imple­men­ta­tion traing­ing with James George here in MELBOURNE Aus­tralia this week, and I am encour­aged by the gloa­bal view that Site­CAt­a­lyst offers in rela­tion to HBX. After test­ing the suite I can see the inter­faces are sim­pler and way bet­ter response times, and can be fully cus­tomised using the eVars and sProps. My ques­tion is:: IS There a forum zone for post­ing q’s and find­ing sim­ple answers from other users?
    Darren

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/cridge Chris­t­ian Ridge

    Hi Dar­ren,

    Great ques­tion and I’m pleased to hear your expe­ri­ence with Site­Cat­a­lyst to date has been pos­i­tive. In my first post I men­tioned the wealth of online resources within Site­Cat­a­lyst includ­ing the online train­ing videos, Knowl­edge Base and Com­mu­nity Forum. I believe the Com­mu­nity Forum is exactly what you’re look­ing for as it is a forum for post­ing ques­tions and answers from the Omni­ture online com­mu­nity of users.

    You can access the Omni­ture Forum from within Site­Cat­a­lyst and nav­i­gat­ing to the Help>Community>Omniture Forum. From there you will find about a dozen dif­fer­ent forum top­ics rang­ing from Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst — Gen­eral Ques­tions, Imple­men­ta­tion, and Advanced Tools and Analy­sis. You are able to post ques­tions and receive answers as well as search pre­vi­ous posts.

    In addi­tion, most likely of inter­est for larger orga­ni­za­tions, you have access to a pri­vate forum that is avail­able for all inter­nal Site­Cat­a­lyst users at your com­pany. I’m sure you’ll find the Omni­ture Forum a valu­able resource.