Adobe Omniture and CQ WCM

Analyze your authoring, author your analytics.

I’m excited about this integration we’re doing right now, bringing Omniture analytics into their world of content management with CQ. I realize this blog gets readers of many backgrounds, so let’s clarify:

Omniture provides a rich suite of reports and analytics based on a wide spectrum of data, ranging from a simple anonymous page view to an authenticated user’s actions and page events.

CQ WCM provides a highly configurable and flexible web authoring experience for the non-tech savvy.

Integrated

When wired together, web site administrators bring CQ’s level of flexibility and control into their analytics game.  With Omniture in your CQ installation, you’re not only editing your analytics implementation on your site without seeing code, but you’re re-authoring content based on effective, custom tailored metrics about that content.

We’re doing this by building a CQ component specifically for the customer’s Omniture requirements. This component is then included on every page template the business wishes to track. Based on the reports Omniture shows them, they can immediately start making changes to their content, or even changes to their Omniture integrations itself. For very simplistic example, imagine turning tracking on and off for a given page because you feel it’s skewing your reports. You would accomplish this with the click of a button from within CQ rather than hitting source code and removing JavaScript.

We’re also building Omniture into existing components to capture events related to them. For example, we’ve got a “video” component that authors drag onto a screen, allowing users to view a video there. By wiring Omniture in, we’re now capturing data each time the user watches the video. This same concept can be built anywhere, capturing events. How many anonymous users are filling out the mailing list form each month? How many authenticated users are searching the FAQ database? What percentage are new users? It’s fun stuff to know, but also carries great utility when the Omniture integration is planned for and designed well.

Maintenance

One of the many beauties of a Web Content Management system like CQ is source code organization. I’ve worked on a lot of projects from very small to very big enterprise, and I can tell you I’ve seen some crazy spider-webs of analytics code dispersed throughout many source files. I once picked up a PHP project where the previous developer had copied and pasted analytics code onto each template in the site, and then modified each pasting slightly to fit the needs there. It got ugly over time. In CQ, componentizing and modularizing it all into one encapsulated and controlled place is a real relief and will surely be a time saver as the customer’s intentions with Omniture mature and grow.