Developer Q&A with Rudi Shumpert, Web Developer at Ariba

Rudi Shumpert is the marketing web developer at Ariba, Inc., the leading provider of spend management solutions, responsible for Omniture integration. He has 14 years experience in web application development technologies and has recently been working on improving the effectiveness for Ariba’s web analytics program. Lately Rudi has been actively integrating Ariba’s instance of Omniture with a variety of external data sources, including Twitter and Yahoo pipes. Rudi has also been innovating around video tracking, creating new ways to track post-production flash video, Windows media, and even YouTube files. We recently chatted with Rudi to learn more about his development work with Omniture:

Q: What were some of the drivers behind your Twitter integration? What data are you pulling and how are you using that to improve Ariba’s marketing efforts?

A: For Twitter we have a set of search terms including our brand name that we are monitoring. Currently for those terms, we are capturing the user name, full text of the tweet, and the search term. With that we can see by search term the conversations taking place. This also provides a historical view into these conversations as well. Part of our marketing effort is to be part of the conversations about Ariba and the areas we specialize in. Being able to have this data and monitor it within SiteCatalyst is exciting.

Q: You recently integrated Omniture with Yahoo Pipes. What did you integrate and why?

A: We found a user created pipe called “Social Media Fire Hose” and it is just that. This particular pipe will search blogs, news agencies, and numerous other social media sites on any set of terms you provide. It will also return the data in a JSON format that is easy to consume and parse. This data combined with the data pulled from Twitter, gives us a more complete view of the “buzz” on the terms we are searching for. And it will provide us with a greater ability to join these ongoing conversations.

Q: You recently did some innovative work to improve your ability to track flash video. What problem were you trying to solve here and how did you solve it?

A: We have a large collection of video files in our online Resource Library for our users. (Webinars, demos, etc.) in various formats (wmv, flv, and even some on YouTube) and from a maintenance standpoint I wanted to find one player, one method to be able to track them all, and get the same level of useable metrics from each format. The task of converting our entire library of wmv files to flv was not a good solution to the problem. A few weeks back I read a blog post about a player from LongTail video, called JW player that would play wmv, flv files, & YouTube videos, and also had an open API for being able to work with the players event listeners. After a bit of research and testing I was able monitor the events and track all the video events we needed and submit the data into Omniture. This method has allowed us to track all the videos in our existing library without having to spend time converting videos or embedding code into a custom flv player.

Q: What’s next on your integration roadmap with Omniture?

We are in the beginning phases of using Genesis to integrate Salesforce & Omniture to provide both sales and marketing a better view into the interests of our web visitors. Aside from that we will continue to enhance the tagging of elements on our site to improve the level of detail in the Omniture reports.

• Jeff Minich
• 0 responses
•  Web analytics

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