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Rachel Finley
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Brigham Young University
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prspecialist@byu.edu

Whoogle Whatalytics Wins Omniture Web Analytics Competition

A team of three Marriott School students won first place and received $5,000 in prize money in the Fall 2007 Omniture Web Analytics Competition (OWAC), hosted by the Rollins Center for eBusiness.

The winning team was comprised of Chris Haleua from Sandy, Utah; Grant Tanner from Greenwood Village, Colorado; and Jon Tucker Christiansen from Draper, Utah. They formed the team Whoogle Whatalytics for the competition and wowed judges with their expert analysis of the Dogfunk.com web site, a sister site of Backcountry.com, a Utah-based retailer of outdoor sports equipment and an Omniture client.

Whoogle Whatalytics was one of four teams that presented at the finals of the competition. Teams Whoogle Whatalytics, Orig-omni, ISYSERS, and Dwight all presented to a live audience during this final stage of the competition.

These four teams were selected from a total of thirty-four entries in the competition. Jeff Ehlers, student lead of the competition, says that many students enter OWAC because of an ever-increasing interest in the field of web analytics.

“This is a growing industry,” Ehlers says. “This industry is interesting and exciting to students and that is what attracts students to the competition.”

Judging for the competition was conducted by a team from Omniture’s consulting division, including Matt Belkin, vice president of consulting; Cameron Barnes, manager of consulting solutions; and Ben Robison, consultant and previous OWAC first place winner in winter 2007.

The winning team excelled in four areas, which consisted of effective interpretation of the company’s goals and key performance indicators of success; in-depth analysis that gave multi-layered explanation of factors that impacted the findings; insightful recommendations that were backed up by the team’s analysis; and a crisp and professional presentation.

“Whoogle Whatalytics exhibited a combination of strong suits in all the areas evaluated,” Barnes says. “They excelled in delving more than one layer deep into what was impacting the success of the site and indicating some hidden insights. They also exhibited great presentation skills in their poise and the professional quality of their visual presentation.”

Barnes says that students were asked to simulate a business optimization consultation by using Omniture’s flagship software tool, SiteCatalyst. Student teams were trained on the software and then asked to present their findings in a preliminary round, which cut the field down to the four finalists.

Tanner, an MISM student, was fascinated with the effectiveness of SiteCatalyst.

“Omniture’s SiteCatalyst software stores a wealth of valuable information on pretty much every angle of a web site, like click-through ratings, external site keyword usage, and internal fall-out data,” Tanner says. “It helps any executive know where the majority of the revenue is being generated, or where advertising expense is not paying off. The trick is to know how to sift through it all and find what really matters most.”

Haleua says his team would not have won the competition without their hard work and dedication. The team spent about five hours a day researching the web site and preparing the presentation for judges. Some even had to give up other commitments to finish the work.

“It was not easy, but the time flew by as we discovered how powerful SiteCatalyst is if you know where to look and how to build the reports that require more than a click on the basic menu,” Haleua says. “Through a few custom calculated metrics, we really felt like we could base our recommendations on reliable facts that could make a difference for the company in the real world.”

Overall, OWAC was a major success and the Rollins eBusiness Center has big plans for next semester’s competition.

“We have a few tricks up our sleeves to make next semester’s competition even bigger and better,” Ehlers says. “Omniture continues to be very supportive of BYU. Their support makes this competition a success.”