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Rachel Finley
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Brigham Young University
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prspecialist@byu.edu

Student Team Wins Big at Omniture Competition

A student team, Three Performance Vindicators, took a clean sweep at this semester’s Omniture Web Analytics Competition (OWAC). The team walked away with the first place prize (including $5,000 and an LCD HDTV), Biggest Fan Support Award, and the Audience Choice Award.

The team won first out of eighty-eight teams that participated in the competition this semester. Chris Haleua, Tucker Christiansen, and David Woolsey, all business students, put more than 65 hours of work into the competition—and it paid off.

“We put our hearts into it and the results show this because of our hard work and dedication,” Haleua says.

Haleua and Christiansen both won first place in the competition last semester and did not give up trying to win a second time.

“We delved straight into it,” Christiansen says. “We went to all the reports and based our critique of them on our research.”

The event, run semiannually by Omniture, an industry leading web analytics company centered in Orem, and sponsored by the Rollins Center for eBusiness, allowed students to be trained on Omniture’s award-winning web analytics software, SiteCatalyst. The students then took that knowledge and studied the effectiveness of the Backcountry.com web site, an outdoor sporting goods company and an Omniture client.

During the competition’s two rounds of judging, student teams were charged with the task of analyzing the Web site’s analytics and making recommendations that would help convert visitors into revenue.

“Real numbers are the key to winning the competition, and the finalists separated themselves from the rest because they were focused on real revenue,” says Thomas Gosney, OWAC student lead. “Finalists paid attention to the numbers that would realistically change a business’ everyday operations, not to theoretical changes or marketing techniques.”

The second-and third-place teams in the competition also took home their fair share of prizes. Bryant Hoopes, of the The Online Authority, won second place in the event and the prize of $2,500 and a PlayStation 3, while Rob Nelson and Doug Burnett of X3 Analytics earned third place and won $1,000 and a video iPod Nano.

This semester the event also involved a record number of student participants.

“This semester’s event was the biggest and most successful Omniture Web Analytics Competition we’ve ever put on,” says Jeff Brown, program manager of the eBusiness Center. “What makes this event so great is that student participants get a hands-on approach to an industry that is a fundamental aspect of today’s online business world. Teams become real consultants using real data to analyze and solve real problems.”