Join us January 15th for an AMA with Champion Achaia Walton, who will be talking about her article on Event-Based Reporting and Measuring Content Groups!
In the Admin console it would be nice to have an online version of a Solution Design document, or somewhere in the Traffic Variables/Conversion Variables/Success Events sections to add specific notes to where each variable is set and any notes applicable to that specific variable.
How about if you could have a real-time overlay of the site where you could mark or highlight elements that need to be tracked (such as links, buttons) and enter comments/notes about what variables should be set for each call?
Sort of a grafitti wall for the analyst! Makes sense?
Very interesting twist on this idea, Marius! I haven't heard that suggestion before. I will be watching this idea closely to see if others have thoughts/reaction to your concept.
It would be interesting if you could turn this document into a REAL audit checklist.
Maybe you can show some samples of the types of values that are being collected, so you can check the type of data that is really coming through, not only the one that is supposed to be there.
@Marius - Great idea! You can then use that as the implementation. It would save those settings in some sort of VISTA rule based on various criteria on the page (URL, headers, etc), and that is all you need to code the page. Imagine the ease and speed of implementation.
Had this idea the other day and thought it was original. LOVE it. Containing version control (aka file history) would be wonderful too. Would do anything to avoid having to send multiple emails to confirm that the Solution Design I'm updating is the latest version.
As a long time user and Adobe Omniture Admin....I truly believe that USER ADOPTION would grow significantly if the ability to add additional columns to the Admin Variable Configuration Settings Screens to provide Business Use, Coding/Syntax Examples, and possibly link or screen shot upload for Visual Reference could be added.
WITH the ability to define a Wiki address to publish it internally on your company intranet or other secured invironment.
Half the challenge of using Adobe Omniture's platform, is understanding how the instrumentation aligns with all the business websites or mobile devices and as everyone knows, it's constantly evolving which requires constant updates to the Solution Design!
This really seems like the Level of Effort would be minimal, and the pay-off could be HUGE for non technical end users who are usually the primary stakeholders trying to figure out what report and variables align to the site or mobile device.
I'd love to see this happen. There are two aspects to this, and Mike really hits on a big one (which I think Web_Analyst is referring to, too):
Actually centrally maintaining the solution design; this would be useful for the implementation analysts and IT and, potentially, could even be used by a tag auditing solution that would crawl the site and validate tag completeness.
The *business user* potential, to me, is an even bigger deal. It makes me a little ill every time I groan because a client hasn't parenthetically included the prop/evar/event value next to the dimension/metric plain English name. I *really* want that there so I can cross-reference with the Debugger or Charles...but it's just gibberish to most business uers. Even if they've been instilled with the ins and outs of traffic and conversion variables, it's unlikely they have the Debugger or know how to find and interpret the solution design. MUCH better would be a mouseover that includes descriptions from a centralized document -- a longer description, when it was implemented/changed, what its intended use is, any caveats/cautions about it, and, heck, even whether it is "core" to the implementation or "advanced").
