Since then IQWorkForce has launched one of the most engaging facebook fan pages I have ever seen, and just this week I was asked to be interviewed by Corry about the Beyond Web Analytics podcast.     I jumped at the chance!  I have to admit that I am really geeked out seeing the interview posted.  So thank you Corry, for not only being a guest on the podcast but for the interview as well!

IQWorkForce Interview

To read the whole interview, which I highly recommend , visit the IQWorkForce site.

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You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river. [The Book of the Vision Quest]

I was not able to shake this quote from my mind, so I went out and purchased the book and quickly read through the book in one sitting.  Maybe it was the connection to the river, or the overall message of the quote.  What I really connected to was the part about how your perceptions of the events around you create the new reality that you are in.  It's this interpretation that led me to read this quote a few months back when we had the scattering of my Mom's ashes.   I am a firm believer that one of the few, maybe the only thing, you can control in life is how you react to situations.

Part of these reaction is what you are perceiving.  This perception, right or wrong, is your reality.   This holds true with your reactions with other people, with how you proceed with projects at work, or even with sets of data that you are trying to analyze and make sense of.    All of your past experiences will affect how you interpret the data, and what changes to your website or a/b tests or advertising choices that you have to make.    This complete perspective and understanding of this perspective should give you the confidence to try new things, to ask new questions about the data, or to even question the data itself.    Let's face it, no matter how much time and energy is put into an implementation, mistakes happen.

How you handle this reality defines not only your career, but you as a person as well.  Will you be limited in your efforts by your experience, by the tools you have to use, by your technical knowledge?  Or will you find ways to gain more experience,  ways to get the most out of whatever tools you have or use other tools, ways to expand your technical knowledge?

Me?  I will be volunteering for the Analysis Exchange and the Web Analytics Association.  I will read all the analytics blogs and books I can find and work to practice the techniques and strategies I find.  I will work to improve my technical and analytic skills.

This is my reality.

What will your reality be?

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As promised here are the presentation materials:

• Presentation
  • Blog Posts with examples from presentation:
    • Form Abandonment
    • Social Media
    • Video Tracking
    • Page Load Times
• Code Samples
• Tools / Links Referenced:
  • JW  Player (LongTail Video)
  • W.A.S.P.
  • Tamper Data
  • Omnibug

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:

• Omniture Blogs
• Omniture Developer Forums
• The Omni-Man Blog
• @OmnitureCare on twitter

Web Analytics Resources:

• Occam's Razor
• Web Analytics Association
• Beyond Web Analytics - Podcast
• Web Analytics Land
• The Empty Mind

Books:

• Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
• Web Analytics 2.0
• Competing on Analytics

-Rudi

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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.

    <cfset codeFactory = CreateObject("java","coldfusion.server.ServiceFactory") />
    <cfset getDebugDataSet = codeFactory.getDebuggingService()>
    <cfset getDebugData = getDebugDataSet.getDebugger().getData()>

This call returned an object that I was able to parse using  the same methods you would use to parse a query object.  It ran great on my development box, but when I moved it to production: Fail.   ColdFusion provided this lovely error message:

Detail Its possible that a method called on a Java object created by CreateObject  returned null.

I tried adjusting a few settings and was not able to resolve the issues.  I reached out to the Atlanta ColdFusion community, and received some very good guidance on the matter.  The reason for the error was I had debugging enabled on my development box, but did not on my production server.   And no matter what creative method I could come up with, would not justify enabling debugging on a production ColdFusion server.  The performance loss by doing this would outweigh the data gained.

The method that turned out to be the best, was also the easiest.   ColdFusion applications can take advantage of a global application file and two great methods within it: onRequestStart() and onRequestEnd().   The functions do exactly as their names would suggest, they will execute the code within each of them at the start and end of every request for every page in the application.

So inside the onRequestStart() function, you get a start time. And within the onRequestEnd() you get the end time and take the difference to get the page load time in milliseconds.  Pseudo code below:

<cfset startTime = getTickCount() />
<!--- something that you want to measure --->
<cfoutput>That took #(getTickCount()-startTime)#ms!</cfoutput>

Note: While the methods I used are specific to ColdFusion, any site that uses a global header and footer, should be able to achieve the data data with javascript or jQuery.

Now I have the the page load times and I began to pass the data into Omniture.  Soon I had results like this.

It did not take long to determine that data in this format would not be very useful as I could have values from 0 to in excess of 10,000 milliseconds.   So I created a quick SAINT classification and was able to group the data together into more logical sections.

Now, this was better, but not perfect and I did not like the data groupings and the time being reported into milliseconds.   After thinking a bit on this, I decided to convert the time to seconds on the ColdFusion side and do the grouping on the web side as well.  I grouped the data into the following sections and passed the data into an sProp:

• < 1 Second
• 1-2 Seconds
• 2-3 Seconds
• 3-5 Seconds
• > 5 Seconds

I then took this data and concatenated it with the page name to send in a second sProp:  < 1s | Home Page.   Doing this gave me these sets of data.

....and....

Note: These may not be the absolute accurate page load times, but they will be close enough to get a good idea of overall site performance.

Success!  Now, before and after major code changes to the site we will be able to go and see if the changes we made had an impact on the performance of the site.   So why go through all the effort to put this into Omniture, when there are other methods to get this type of performance data?  Now that you are able to send this data to Omniture, what else could you do with it?

• Send it in an eVar to see how performance impacts conversions.
• Apply a bounce rate metric to see how performance impacts bounce rates.
• Justify the modification or removal of  slow pages/functionality.
• Add pathing to the second concatenated sProp to see how users move through the site with performance

These are just a few ideas I had.  What would you do with this data inside of your Analytics tool if you could?

-Rudi

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Washington's Rules were:

1. Don't Assume You Are Welcome
2. Cultivate Your Local Support
3. Respect Local Religious Practices
4. Don't Abuse Prisoners
5. Withdraw if Your Objectives Are Unobtainable

Washington provided these rules along with some instructions to his officers on how they should conduct themselves in war and in conflict.  If you examine the instructions, you can see how these rules can be applied to most projects or new ventures.  Here is my take on how these rules can be applied to working with analytics in a corporation.

Rule 1: Don’t Assume You Are Welcome
“You are by every means in your Power to endeavor to discover the real Sentiments of the Canadians towards our Cause, and particularly as to this Expedition, ever bearing in Mind, that if they are averse to it and will not cooperate, it must fail of success.”

Analytics can show you where you biggest success are, but look at the bottom of the report and see where the biggest failures are.  Even though you might be able to provide some insight to help those responsible for the items at the bottom of the chart they might not be receptive to your assistance at first.   Start with showing them techniques used on some of the better performing sections and see how and if they can be applied to their content.

Rule 2: Cultivate Local Support
“Conciliate the affections of those People and such Indians as you may meet with by every Means in your Power, convincing them that we come, at the Request of many of their Principal People, not as Robbers or to make War upon them; but as the Friends and Supporters of their Liberties, as well as ours. And to give Efficacy to these Sentiments, you must carefully inculcate upon the Officers and Soldiers under your Command that not only the Good of their Country and their Honour, but their Safety depends upon the Treatment of these People.”

Local Support, Executive Sponsor, Vote of the Hippo.   Without the support of your management, and the support of the other departments in your organization, there is little hope of continued success.  To gain or grow this support, you may need to start small.  Get the basic tracking / analysis in place, then pick one page or section or content group and work to optimize that.  Then take the improved numbers to your team, your boss, other in the company and show them what is possible.   Having proof in hand of a singular demonstrated success is more powerful than any sales demo or prospective filled with potential success.

Rule 3: Respect Local Religious Practices
“As the Contempt of the Religion of a Country by ridiculing any of its Ceremonies or affronting its Ministers or Votaries has ever been deeply resented, you are to be particularly careful to restrain every Officer and Soldier from such Imprudence and Folly and to punish every Instance of it. On the other Hand, as far as lays in your power, you are to protect and support the free Exercise of the Religion of the Country and the undisturbed Enjoyment of the rights of Conscience in religious Matters, with your utmost Influence and Authority.”

You might feel that you have the knowledge or skill in your area of expertise that can improve your organizations website.  But if you do not respect the people and the process that are in place, you will find it hard to make any progress.  You need to take the time to talk with all the groups that have a vested interest in the data you can provide, to see what their goals are and then develop a plan with them to meet those goals.

Rule 4: Don’t Abuse Prisoners
“Any Prisoners who may fall into your Hands, you will treat with as much Humanity and kindness, as may be consistent with your own Safety and the publick Interest. Be very particular in restraining not only your own Troops, but the Indians from all Acts of Cruelty and Insult, which will disgrace the American Arms, and irritate our Fellow Subjects against us.”

This one is not as clear as the others.  I see "prisoners" as the groups in your company or organization that for whatever reason might not be the easiest to work with.  Like it or not, they are dependent on you to deliver the data and analysis to help them succeed as much as the groups that are easy to work with.  If you do not treat them with the same respect and with the same level of data and analysis as other groups you are not doing your job or assignment to the best of your ability.  Then you are not only hurting them, but your company and yourself as well.

Rule 5: Withdraw if Your Objectives Are Unobtainable
“If unforseen Difficulties should arise or if the Weather shou’d become so severe as to render it hazardous to proceed in your own Judgment and that of your principal Officers (whom you are to consult), in that Case you are to return, giving me as early Notice as possible, that I may give you such Assistance as may be necessary.”

Face it, there are some projects or goals that just can not be met.  There are some things that can not be tracked reliably enough to gain any sort of meaningful insight.  You have to know when it is time to stop waiting time and energy on that task and move on.  Also, with this data, you might be able to help your company see that a campaign or product offering is just not working or meeting it's goals, and it may be time for the company to focus it's resources on a different more successful campaign.

These "rules" provide at a minimum some great points to think about and consider as you go about your interactions with your clients or colleagues.  Just as you need to optimize your site to provide the best experience for the visitors to a web site, you should optimize your approach to working with others to bring analytics to a point where the data can be used to make intelligent business decisions.

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Paraphrased: If you have a short easy to share/print/send email like www.mysite.com/cool and that redirects to the user to a long ungangly url like www.mysite.com/much/longer/url/to/get/customer/to/admit/that/ie6/is/thedevil.htm. What happens to the referrer data/info?

Short answer? Most likely it is lost and your redirect will strip out that precious referrer data. But, it does not have to depending on how you have your redirects set up.

For this example lets assume that you use a common redirect folder called "redir" . So when you print or create a short easy to share email for your new campaign you want to sent out or shared.

www.site.com/redir/ie6isthedevil

And when a user types this in, or clicks on the link from an email they get taken to

www.site.com/its/true/ie6/is/the/devil.ftw

However, as the question above highlights, the referrer data from page to the short url is lost. Fortunately, this fix to this is easy. On the page that contains the actual redirect code, place this JavaScript in place.

<script language="javascript">
document.url = document.referrer;
</script>
.
.....
(redirect code in language of choice)

It merely copies the referrer data into the DOM URL object on the redirect page to pass it along to the long final url. Then all of your web analytic tracking code will function as expected. (I tested this in Omniture & Google Analytics)

That's it!

-Rudi

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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?

From my understanding of the tools out there today, you are not able to get accurate answers to the questions above.     However, this is an very interesting problem that got me thinking on how I could leverage ColdFusion to be able to capture and get more meaningful data from the abandoned forms.

The Challenge:

• Capture data by users from abandoned forms
• Push that data into Omniture SiteCatalyst
• Create a report with real, actionable data on form abandonment

The Setup:

• ColdFusion 8
• Client Variables stored in a database (SQL)
• jQuery

Step 1:  Capture the form data

The trick to capturing the data would be to find a way to save the form data in some persistent variable so that the data could be retrieved later.  Right away I thought of the Client Scope .   Then the task was to find a method that could be deployed to multiple forms across a site with minimal re-coding.    For that I wrote this snippet of jQuery:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function(){
// Form Handling/Analysis Test
$('#Form2BeTracked').children().each(function() {
$(this).bind('change',function (event){
$.post("/includes/processFormProgress.cfm", $('#Form2BeTracked').serializeArray() );

});

});

});
</script>

This jQuery function simply binds an onChange event to every form on the page it finds with the id: Form2BeTracked.   This is an easy to deploy script site wide and has no impact on the normal form behavior.

The code on the proccessFormProgress.cfm is all of 3 lines :

<cfparam name="client.formProgress" default="#session.cfid##session.cftoken#">
<cfwddx action="cfml2wddx" input="#form#" output="wddxSession">
<cfset client.formProgress = wddxSession>

This code takes the entire Form Struct and saves it into the client scope/database

Form data is saved real time in the client scope.

The nice part about this is that by default, ColdFusion saves the list of form elements in the form.fieldnames variable. Using that we can get a count of the number of variables for this form, and then see that only 2 of the fields were filled out and what the values of those fields are. All of this without the user clicking submit.

Step 2: Clear data on form submit

If the user submits the form, we need to clear the data in the client variable. This is an easy one line of code to be added on the page that handles the normal submitting of the form.

<cfset client.formProgress = "">

This will clear the form data out of the client variable. This is an important step that can not be skipped or your count of abandoned forms will be inflated.

Step 3: Check for abandoned form data

By saving the form data in the client scope it will be held there in the database for as long as the time frame defined in the ColdFusion Administrator. This setting will determine the frequency that you must check for abandoned form data.

select cd.cfid, cd.data, cg.lvisit from
CDATA as cd join CGLOBAL as cg
on cd.cfid = cg.cfid
where cg.lvisit >= (your timeframe here )
and cd.data like 'formprogress%'

This should pull a result set with all the records of form data that has been saved. ie. abandoned.

With a little ColdFusion magic

<cfquery name="abandoned" datasource="#REQUEST.dsn#">
	select cd.cfid, cd.data, cg.lvisit from
	CDATA as cd join CGLOBAL as cg
	on cd.cfid = cg.cfid
	where cg.lvisit >= GETDATE()-1
	and cd.data like 'formprogress%'  

</cfquery>

<cfset variables.wddx2Convert = abandoned.data>
<cfset variables.wddxLen = len(variables.wddx2Convert)>
<cfset variables.wddx2Convert = right(variables.wddx2Convert,variables.wddxLen-13)>
<cfset variables.wddx2Convert = replacenocase("#variables.wddx2Convert#","##","","ALL")>
<cfdump var="#variables.wddx2Convert#">

<cfwddx action="wddx2cfml" input="#variables.wddx2Convert#" output="variables.form">

<cfset variables.formElementList = variables.form["fieldnames"]>
<cfset variables.formElementCount = listlen("#variables.formElementList#")>

<cfset variables.formList = "">
<cfloop list="#variables.formElementList#" index="formItem">
	<cfset variables.tempValue = variables.form["#formItem#"] >
	<cfset variables.valuePair = "#formItem#:#variables.tempValue#">
	<cfset variables.formList = ListAppend(variables.formList,"#variables.valuePair#","|")>
</cfloop>

You end up with a variable string that you can then submit to Omniture using the Data Insertion API. See this post on details if the API.

As you can see from the image above, you now have the count of the form elements in the form along with the data values from the form elements that were filled out before the user abandoned the form. With this, you can choose what format would be the most useful for your needs to really dig into abandoned forms.

-Rudi

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Note: After you choose which s.prop you are going to use to store/capture the data in, you will need to contact Omniture Client Care to get pathing enabled for that s.prop

Where does your path take you?

In a previous post, I went over how we capture the search terms from the Google Mini. So when I returned from the training, I contacted client care and had then enable pathing on the s.prop and "Shazam!". We now have pathing on the internal search terms.

This has been working great, and I've been really pleased with being able to see exactly how visitors refine their searches. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Susan Fariss, at the American Chemical Society (@soozantf) about search analytics and the questions came up on do we know where the user was on the site when they initiated the search and then what search result did they click on.. if any? Well... I did not have those answers, but I sure wanted to.

So the question was could the following be accomplished:

• Detect/capture where visitor was on the web site when the search was initiated
• Modify the google mini xslt to tag all of the search results so that the result clicked could be captured
• Would this provide the full search pathing expected

Detect/capture where visitor was on the web site when the search was initiated:
This was the easy part of the adventure for sure. I already had a JavaScript function handling the initial search, so I added another function call in that

			function recordInternalSearchOmniture(){
				var s = s_gi(s_account);
				s.linkTrackVars="prop1";
				s.prop1 = s.pageName;
				s.tl(document.location.href,'o','InternalSearch');
				s.linkTrackVars="";
			}

This code snippet simply pulls the s.pageName and puts it into the same s.prop used to store the actual search terms, creating the "entry point" of our search path.

Modify the google mini xslt to tag all of the search results so that the result clicked could be captured:
This proved to be the pesky part of the adventure. The challenge was to be able to add the jQuery function to tag the search results someplace where the Google xslt could access it. After a few missteps I added the jQuery to a main .js file (not the s_code.js) that I was able to link to inside the xslt. But first I needed to add a div with a specific Id to the xslt so that I would be able to tag the results with the tracking codes. So inside the xslt I did the following.

<!-- **********************************************************************
 Search results (do not customize)
     ********************************************************************** -->
.
.
.
<div id="googleSearch">
<!-- *** Customer's own result page header *** -->
.
.
<!-- *** HTML footer *** -->
</div>

So find the section that says "Search results (do not customize)" - I viewed this as more of a suggestion than a hard rule. Inside this section, wrap the header/footer items with a new div with the id of "googleSearch" (or some other id of your choosing). This is needed so that the jQuery function can find the elements that need the new tags. Once that div is in place add a jQuery function to find all results in that div and tag them. The first function below binds a function call to the a href tags in the search results. The second function does pulls in the location of the search results and records where the user clicked. This provides the "exit point" to our path.

$(document).ready(function(){
$('#googleSearch a').each(function(i) {
  var hrefval = $(this).attr('href');
  $(this).bind('click',function (event){
  	omniGoogleSearchResultClicked('Search Result Clicked',hrefval)
  	});
});
.
.
function omniGoogleSearchResultClicked(propTitle,hrefVal){
	var s = s_gi(s_account);
	s.linkTrackVars="prop1";
	s.prop1 = hrefVal;
	s.tl(document.location.href,'o',propTitle);
	s.linkTrackVars="";
}

Would this provide the full search pathing expected:
Yes! This does indeed provide a full search path.

I knew IE6 was evil!

Ok..  so maybe I changed the actual values, but this is the type of search pathing you can achieve with tracking the entry and exit points in the same s.prop as the search terms and having pathing enabled on that s.prop.

-Rudi

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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.

@OmnitureCare pointed me in the right direction with this link to a post on the Bing Forum.

From Bing Forum: I'm getting a ton of hits from IP 65.55.* that appear to be coming from user searches such as referrer "http://www.bing.com/search?q=copper" and user agents similar to "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SLCC1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.40607; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648)"

The swell folks over at Microsoft claim that they are working on a new spider and working out the kinks. Well this "kink" has been mucking with my data and is very annoying. Kink FAIL!  I pulled the web log files and began to search for all traffic from the IP Range of 65.55.*.*  Here is what I found:

2009-10-04 00:12:34 W3SVC1 127.0.0.1 GET /filename - 80 - 65.55.207.50 msnbot/2.0b+(+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm) 404 0 0
2009-10-04 00:12:48 W3SVC1 127.0.0.1 GET /filename - 80 - 65.55.109.1 Mozilla/4.0 200 0 0
2009-10-04 00:12:48 W3SVC1 127.0.0.1 GET /filename - 80 - 65.55.109.1 Mozilla/4.0 200 0 0
2009-10-04 00:12:48 W3SVC1 127.0.0.1 GET /filename - 80 - 65.55.109.1 Mozilla/4.0 200 0 0
2009-10-04 00:12:48 W3SVC1 127.0.0.1 GET /filename - 80 - 65.55.109.1 Mozilla/4.0 200 0 0

The first line above looks ok.  The bot clearly identifies itself and does not fire off the tracking JS code.  The next few lines appear to be normal "real" user traffic and do result in the tracking code being executed.   I check the IP address over at http://www.dnsstuff.com and get back that the IP address does indeed belong to Microsoft.

I could list row after row of data from the log files with countless variations of traffic from various M$ ip addresses that do not identify them as bots.  All of the fake/spoofed traffic has this in common:

• 65.55.*.*  IP address range
• User Agent listed as "Mozilla/4.0" only

Now that I have the "signature" of the bad traffic, I wanted to find a way to prevent this from falsely inflating our city and other visitor data.  I dug around trying to find an elegant way to do this with JavaScript only, but decided the best approach would be to leverage the ColdFusion platform we use and simply suppress the s_code file from being loaded if I was able to detect the traffic matched the above pattern.

<cfif findnocase("65.55.","#cgi.remote_addr#") GT 0 AND findnocase("Mozilla/4.0","#cgi.HTTP_USER_AGENT#") GT 0>

This IF block checks for the pattern and prevents the Omniture JS code from being loaded if both conditions are met.   I put this code in place around noon yesterday and in less than 24 hours I can see that this is working.

I will be keeping a close eye on all the traffic reports to make sure that we are not losing any real traffic data, but I am confident that will will keep this current issue from jacking my data any further.

Below are a few sites I found that helped me in my research:

• http://solaroverpower.com/2009/06/16/is-microsoft-spoofing-blog-visits-to-generate-traffic-back-to-bing/
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/3875363-5-30.htm
• http://www.webmasterworld.com/search_engine_spiders/3950463.htm
• http://www.bing.com/community/forums/p/648805/9549504.aspx?PageIndex=3
• http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/648564.aspx

-Rudi

Updated 10/15/2009:

James Dutton found this bug showing up in Yahoo Web Analytics as well.  Read his tips to resolve it!
Yahoo Web Analytics data inflated by Bing and how to fix it.

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The vast majority of ColdFusion sites I've work on in the past are not public sites, and historically there have been little, if any concern for web analytics.  Sure, we had basic usage data, but nothing close to the level of detail that Omniture can provide.  This goes beyond SEO, and just numbers for the marketing department.  It is the ability to gain a true understanding of what your users are doing on your applications.  Which features they really use and which ones they don't.   Imagine building a web application and being able to have the data to drive the design of navigation and layout of these web apps.  Imagine having the data to take to the decision  makers to prove the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of certain features.  This is what Omniture can do you for.

At it's most basic level, the Omniture code is a Javascript file that you will include on every page of your web application or public web site.  On every page load, the JavaScript file makes an image request to Omniture and in doing so, sends the tracking data to Omniture and is then available within their tools to analyze and slice in almost any way imaginable.   Combine this with the power of ColdFusion and the possibilities are dizzying, especially when you start thinking about adding this type of tracking to Flex, Air, and of course Flash applications as well.

Most public sites rely heavily on other JavaScript functions to get any data beyond the basic implementation, but with ColdFusion you have one of the most powerful web languages at your disposal to easily gather and send much more advanced levels of data into Omniture.  I have posted several articles here that demonstrate a few things you can leverage ColdFusion for and send the data into Omniture:

• Social Media Data
• Hierarchy Data
• Build Custom XML for Data Insertion
• Custom Video Tracking

I've only been exposed to and been working with the Omniture code for a few months and I'm still learning how powerful this data can be, but I'm a true believer in the value it can bring.  If you made it this far in the past, thanks, and take a look around.  I will be the first to tell you that by no means do I consider myself to be an expert, but I am very excited about the things I have been able to do with Omniture & ColdFusion and I am looking forward to what the merger of Adobe & Omniture could mean for the ColdFusion community.

-Rudi

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