ColdFusion User Group Presentations
At the February 2010 Atlanta ColdFusion User Group (ACFUG) meeting & at the ColdFusion Meetup I gave a presentation on working with Omniture & ColdFusion. I based the presentation on a blog post I wrote last September.
As promised here are the presentation materials:
- Presentation
- Blog Posts with examples from presentation:
- Code Samples
- Tools / Links Referenced:
Bonus Resources:
In addition to numerous articles I have posted here on my blog, below are some great resources related to Omniture and web analytics in general. If you have questions or comments, please leave them below.
Omniture Resources:
Web Analytics Resources:
- Occam's Razor
- Web Analytics Association
- Beyond Web Analytics - Podcast
- Web Analytics Land
- The Empty Mind
Books:
-Rudi
Tracking Page Load Times
One of my favorite things about ColdFusion is the level of detail you can get from the debugging information. The ColdFusion server will provide upon request and the right permissions: variable scopes, sql query information, server information, and execution / load times. This is very useful information to have while coding and is invaluable when you are trying to optimize the speed and performance of the site. However, is it hard to get good benchmark for this data over time from the perspective of your end users.
Earlier this week, I set out to see if there was a way I could get access to the page load data and send it along to Omniture so that I could first get a benchmark of what the performance of the web site was over time, and second be able to tell if changes we made to the site had any impact on performance.
My first attempt in accomplishing my goal was to try and access the same Java object that the debugging code used to get the execution times. I thought, well I see it in the output on the screen, it should be easy enough to grab that data element and pass it along.
Form Abandonment
NOTE: The code samples below are merely a proof of concept. This solution is not actively in place in any production environmetn that I am involved with.
I was talking to a fellow ColdFusion developer about a web site he was working on, specifically a registration form, and what were some of the best practices with form length and such that would facilitate users filling out the form and submitting. This is a common issue with web sites that will not be going away anytime soon. In fact the questions he had are the same ones I have seen in dozens of blog posts trying to figure this out.
- How many questions to put on a form?
- What type of questions work the best?
- What question(s) scared off a user and kept them from completing the form?
I know that there are a few "Form Abandonment" plug-ins out there for Omniture and the likes, but from what I've seen the data you get is somewhat limited. If your form has 20 elements on it and the plug-in only lets you know what the last element with focus was, you have to really think about the validity of that data. How do you know for sure that the user filled out the elements in order? Did the developer of the form set the tab index correctly? Did the user glance at the form, click somewhere near the bottom and then bail? Did the user fill out half the form the shut down the browser?
Bing! You have inflated traffic numbers!
The past couple of months we noticed a very odd trend the the geo-location / city data that was being saved in Omniture. The great metropolis of Redmond, Washington was now the number 1 city of origin of our web visitors. And this was not a small lead, they were the number 1 city by more than double the traffic from the number 2 spot.
Trying to find an explanation for all this, I checked the twitter-verse and did a little digging online, but did not have a chance to really dive into the issue until yesterday.
“If wishes were horses beggars would ride”
Thanks to the magic of the internet & twitter I read a request this morning for a wish list of integration ideas for Adobe + Omniture, from @BrettError. I knew that I would not be able to fit my list in the 140 characters allowed by twitter, so I will list them out here.
Of all the Adobe products out there I use ColdFusion almost exclusively (not counting reading PDF's with Acrobat), so my list will be very slanted towards items I would love to see from an Omniture + ColdFusion perspective, that would make my job of implementing and optimizing the Omniture code & tags easier. That being said, this list below could easily be ported over to whatever development platform the site to be tracked is built on.
1) Tag library integration / validation within the soon to be released ColdFusion IDE - CF Builder. Much like the integrated JS libraries that can be added to other Eclipse based IDE's
2) Dedicated AJAX support - ok, so maybe this one has nothing to do with ColdFusion specifically but it would be great to have a defined/dedicated AJAX tag like s.trackAJAX() instead of having to use the custom link tracking s.tl() to track AJAX events. More and more of what I do is on RIA, AJAX heavy elements where a user/web visitor can spend a long time and make many clicks on AJAX elements without ever triggering a page reload.
3) Native integration with the ColdFusion session variables to by default populate many of the page specific variables to send to Omniture. (pageName, server, channel, etc.)
4) Built in tags to use the Data Insertion API to push data into Omniture as an alternative to the JS Beacon. Having this as a CF tag, might make it easier to accomplish #2 above.
5) Community. The Adobe ColdFusion is a loyal and active community and serves as a great example of the effectiveness of having a great active and supported developer community.
6) Enhance documentation by creating Adobe AIR versions such as this. I use this version of the Adobe Live Doc's all the time. Very handy!
So, there it is. My 2/5's of a nickel on what I would love to see as a results of the Adobe(ColdFusion) + Omniture integration.
-Rudi
PS. The original tweet request for the wish list made me instantly think of a quote my mom often repeated to me when I would say "I Wish...."
“If wishes were horses beggars would ride”
Archives
- Episode 11: Omniture Summit 2010 Recap
- Episode 10: How to Find/Keep a Job in Web Analytics
- Episode 9: Building recipes for Web Analysis
Recent Posts
- IQWorkForce Interview
- Web Analytics + Beastie Boys???
- Perception is Reality
- ColdFusion User Group Presentations
- Tracking Page Load Times
Categories
Blogs I Follow
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- Beyond Web Analytics
- Charlie Arehart
- CodFusion
- ColdFusion Jedi
- Crepuscular Light
- Empty Mind
- Insightr
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- RIA Podcast
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