Hi,
I am new to the forum. I have searched through the archives and while there have been strings that mention sitecore & ektron, none have the focus which I would like input in addressing.
My company is evaluation sitecore and ektron as finalists for a CMS (I am an online marketer…have no say in platform choice). Sitecore is very robust and has this online marketing suite. Its very sleek and I can see why it would be enticing, especially for an IT department because with testing and web analytics (WA) built in, its less work for them to do. [maybe, don’t know for sure]
With ektron, you integrate whatever WA platform you are working with. I myself am WA platform agnostic but here at the company I am at, they use GA (google analytics). So IT is initially hot for Sitecore because supposedly, all this stuff, WA; testing and other stuff is built in.
Here is the issue, no one at Sitecore can give me a straight answer on basic definitions. I mean things like what is a bounce, how is time on site calculated, etc… Why its important is that the company has over 167 plus web sites and there products are composed of what I would call, site ecosystems of web sites. They all link to each other. Since I started, we reconfigured the GA implementations from single siloed accounts with inflated bounce rates to GA implementations with cross domain tracking with event tracking to track external links off the sites. What this means is…we are able to track clicks off a site to one of our other sites in that ecosystem and its "not’ considered a bounce because when you employ event tracking it reduces the bounce rate.
Again, I am not married to GA…its just what they are using…yes…as an online marketer, I would love all that cool stuff, but if the underlying metrics underneath are wrong…what good is it. I went through Sitecore’s documentation and its obvious from their WA reports that they do not append the host url to the domain name, so how will we know where someone ultimately came from. There is no mention in the information from the company that I received that they have scenarios and usecases similiar to our sites that are in ecosystems.
So…is there anybody out there that has evaluated these products from an SEO/SEM/WA perspective (specifically sitecore) that can give me insight into this problem? Any input from an SEO/SEM/WA perspective on both of these products is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Forever a marketing ‘nerd’…DJKay