SiteCatalyst Widgets [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Lately, there has been a lot of buzz around “Wid­gets” which allow you to take snip­pets of the data or con­tent you want to see and put it all in one con­ve­nient place.  Based upon this and cus­tomer feed­back, Omni­ture has cre­ated a Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­get that allows you to add reportlets from Site­Cat­a­lyst Dash­boards to your aggregator/portal of choice (iGoogle, My Yahoo, etc…).  In this post, I will walk you through the steps required to take to see Site­Cat­a­lyst infor­ma­tion through a Widget.

Step-By-Step Instruc­tions for Cre­at­ing Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­gets
The fol­low­ing are the steps you would take to add Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­gets to an aggregator’s web page.  In this exam­ple, I will add Site­Cat­a­lyst reportlets to an iGoogle page.

1. Cre­ate Dash­board
To begin with, you must cre­ate a Site­Cat­a­lyst dash­board.  This is rel­a­tively straight­for­ward and is done by view­ing a report in Site­Cat­a­lyst and click­ing on the Dash­board icon, select­ing a Dash­board name and sav­ing (if you have not cre­ated a dash­board yet, please refer to the Site­Cat­a­lyst User Guide or con­tact ClientCare).

2. Open Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­get Page
Next, open Site­Cat­a­lyst and nav­i­gate to the Wid­get set-up page, which is found in the tools area drop-down arrow within the Omni­ture Suite tool­bar icon as shown here:

3. Choose Wid­get Type
Once on the Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­get page, click the but­ton of the ven­dor you would like to use.  In this sce­nario, I will select Google.  Be sure that you have logged into your iGoogle page and con­sider cre­at­ing a sep­a­rate Omni­ture tab and hav­ing that open at the time you click the but­ton shown here:

4. Click Ven­dor Link
After you have clicked on the ven­dor link from within Site­Cat­a­lyst, you will be taken to the vendor’s page where you can click on a link to add the wid­get to your page as shown here:

5. Select Dash­board Report
Once the Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­get is added to your iGoogle page, you will see a list of Dash­board reportlets to choose from as shown here:

Sim­ply, select the one that you would like to see in the selected Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­get and notice that you can use the “more” and “pre­vi­ous” links to scroll through all of your dash­board items.

6. Rinse & Repeat
After your first wid­get is added, you can add more by click­ing again on the Google link from within the Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­get page or by click­ing on the down arrow from within the Wid­get and select­ing “About this gad­get” which will bring you to a page where you can add a sec­ond Wid­get.  You can repeat this process as often as you like and build an entire page of dif­fer­ent report Wid­gets.  When you are done, you should have a screen that looks like this:

(Click the image below to see com­pleted iGoogle page with sev­eral Site­Cat­a­lyst Widgets)

Impor­tant Things To Know About Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­gets
The fol­low­ing are some impor­tant things to know about Site­Cat­a­lyst Widgets:

1. In addi­tion to adding Site­Cat­a­lyst wid­gets to a Google or Yahoo pages, it is pos­si­ble to add them to any web page, com­pany intranet, Share­point, etc…  Instruc­tions for doing this can be found on the Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­get set-up page shown above.
2. Keep in mind when attempt­ing to share Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­gets are tied to a Site­Cat­a­lyst user ID so users will only be able to see dash­boards and book­marks to which they have access in SiteCatalyst.
3. If you have sev­eral Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­gets on a page, log­ging into one Wid­get will log you into all Wid­gets.  Sim­ply log into one and then refresh the page.  On the flip side, log­ging out of one Siet­Cat­a­lyst Wid­get will log you out of all of them.
4. You can cus­tomize the appear­ance of Site­Cat­a­lyst Wid­gets by defin­ing a cus­tom CSS class.
5. For iPhone users, sim­i­lar func­tion­al­ity exists through a cus­tom iPhone appli­ca­tion that has been devel­oped.  To down­load this free appli­ca­tion, sim­ply search for “Site­Cat­a­lyst” or “Omniture” from within the iTunes App Store.
6. For Google Android users, sim­i­lar capa­bil­i­ties exist as well.  See press release for more details.

 

Have a ques­tion about any­thing related to Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst?  Is there some­thing on your web­site that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best prac­tices you want to share?  If so, please leave a com­ment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@​omniture.​com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so every­one can learn! (Don’t worry — I won’t use your name or com­pany name!).  If you are on Twit­ter, you can fol­low me at http://​twit​ter​.com/​O​m​n​i​_​man.

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