Welcome to Inside Discover

Over 5 years ago Omni­ture Dis­cover was launched and in the past five years so many won­der­ful, amaz­ing, and dare I say, mag­i­cal improve­ments have been made.  On April 8 the magic con­tin­ued with the release of Dis­cover 2.9.  With all the great improve­ments in this release we decided that it was finally time to start a blog focused on using Dis­cover to ana­lyze and make deci­sions for the improve­ment of your online business.

A recent For­rester research arti­cle states that, “As the econ­omy rebounds, many com­pa­nies are seek­ing to use a great cus­tomer expe­ri­ence as a way to retain cus­tomers, grow wal­let share, and bring new cus­tomers on board.”  The first step in cre­at­ing the best online user expe­ri­ence is to under­stand over­all how vis­i­tors are using your site, which can be accom­plished using ana­lyt­ics tools such as Site­Cat­a­lyst.  Usu­ally as you start to under­stand your vis­i­tors on a whole, ques­tions arise about who these vis­i­tors are and how they can be grouped to pro­vide bet­ter expe­ri­ences.  This is where a real-time advanced seg­men­ta­tion tool, such as Dis­cover, can help.

You may be look­ing to opti­mize the user expe­ri­ence based on how users got to the site, what con­tent they view, prod­ucts they pur­chase, arti­cles they down­load, how fre­quently they visit the site, etc.  You may want to iden­tify char­ac­ter­is­tics or behav­iors that vis­i­tors have when they con­vert and opti­mize the site to encour­age other vis­i­tors to fol­low a sim­i­lar path.

The pur­pose of this blog is to help you with these ques­tions.  We really want to pro­vide you with insights and exam­ples of how you can drive action­able ana­lyt­ics through seg­men­ta­tion more quickly and effec­tively.  All posts will fall under one of three cat­e­gories:
1. Fundamentals:  Intro­duc­tion of things that we would con­sider to be fun­da­men­tal, such as seg­men­ta­tion best prac­tices, using met­rics in the cor­rect con­text, etc
2. Enhancers: Tips and tricks to enhance how you can take advan­tage of all the func­tion­al­ity in Dis­cover
3. Analysis: Sam­ple analy­sis and case stud­ies uti­liz­ing dif­fer­ent fea­tures of Dis­cover to help kick start your own analysis

Because of the wealth of knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence here at Omni­ture we are going to tag-team the posts between three main authors.  Kevin Willeit­ner, the Dis­cover Prod­uct Lead within Omni­ture Con­sult­ing.  Laura Mac­Tag­gart, Discover’s biggest fan.  Tim Lott, the illus­tri­ous Prod­uct Man­ager for Dis­cover.   This tag-team approach also allows us to reg­u­larly post arti­cles to quench your Dis­cover thirst.

We are very excited to share our knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence with you and we also look for­ward to receiv­ing feed­back or ideas from you.  If there are spe­cific top­ics you are anx­ious to see cov­ered, you can sub­mit them in your com­ments. And don’t for­get to add your Dis­cover fea­ture requests to the Omni­ture Idea Exchange (http://​ideas​.omni​ture​.com/). This is the best way to get your ideas in the proper forum where they can be voted on and hope­fully imple­mented in a future release.