SiteCatalyst 15 Migration Benefits:

• The new context variables and processing rules
• Real-time segmentation (you’re living under a rock if you don’t know about that one!)
• Segment sharing between Omniture Discover and SiteCatalyst
• Upgraded dashboards (including segmentation of the dashboards themselves)
• True unique visitors (matching the # in Omniture Discover)
• Visits are now calculated for non-cookied visitors
• Full subrelations enabled on all eVars (i.e. conversion variables)
• Visitors, Visits and Page Views available on all reports
• Bounce Rate available on more reports
• More accurate calculation of time spent on site/page
• Deduplication of visitors in classification reporting and in merchandising eVars
• Enhanced video reporting and measurement
• Better Data Warehouse functionality such as editing a request, scheduling a previously created request, and better status/error reporting

I’m sure that I’m missing some things here, and that there are more benefits, but these are the ones that stood out for me as a regular user of these features. Now, a few of what might be challenges for some customers.

SiteCatalyst 15 Migration “Gotchas:”

• Segmentation will only work for data collected under the new platform. So, you will not be able to segment your data in SiteCatalyst prior to the migration. The implication here is that you will have to wait for year over year segmented data. However, how useful is that data really anyway? Tell me an actual change you’ve made on your site after looking at how Jan 2010 did compared to Jan 2011?
• In order to utilize the processing rules feature there will be a certification process that has to be passed. This is to safeguard the implementation integrity so that an accident does not cause a significant problem for an implementation.
• As with segmentation above, the new visitor metric will only be available from the date of the migration, moving forward.
• The new calculation of visits (i.e. the inclusion of non-cookied visitors) will increase your numbers for the visits metric. I’d doubt this will be a huge increase, but nonetheless, it will need to be something you are aware of and will need to educate your users as such.
• The new calculation of time spent will change this data moving forward only. The impact being that your time spent will be more accurate, but that again there is a change of which you will need to educate your users.
• Video measurement in SiteCatalyst 15 will require an upgrade to your video implementation. This probably won’t be any more complicated that your original implementation was, but it will need to be done. So, the tricky thing here is timing a video implementation that you need to do now, while knowing that you will eventually be upgraded to SiteCatalyst 15 and might have to recode it. Again, since I’m not privy to the upgrade timeline for everyone, this is something you’d need to discuss with your Omniture account manager. Also, I’d point out that this is about all that I know about the video measurement. The upgrade to video measurement will work for v14 and v15 as well (when it’s out of beta), so there is that good news.
• Segmentation is not in the Excel Client or Report Builder with the initial release of SiteCatalyst 15. I am positive that this will come at sometime down the road, but the point is that if you use these tools for reporting and dashboards, you will not be segmenting in them until the time that there’s an upgrade there.
• SiteCatalyst 15 will not provide ASI slots/segments. This makes sense since you will have segmentation, but the real challenge is to cope with not having access to those old ASI slots for reporting once you migrate to SiteCatalyst 15.

If you have any questions or other thoughts, leave me a comment below!

Context Variables:

Those familiar with SiteCatalyst are aware of what events, props and eVars are. With the release of SiteCatalyst 15, there is a new type of variable, the context variable. Here’s what you need to know about context variables in general:

1. There are an unlimited number of context variables
2. There is no character limits on what you can place in a context variable
3. You can name a context variable with any name you prefer (meaning that developers don’t need to worry about eVarX, propX, etc.)

To detail how a company might use a context variable, I will provide a code example of custom download measurement via traditional SiteCatalyst variables vs. context variables. The goal here is to track the name of the download, the URL of the download and a success event for the download.

Site Catalyst 14 and Prior (assume eVar1 and eVar2 are set by the implementation):

s.eVar1="download name"
if (s.eVar1){
s.prop1=”D=v1″
s.events=s.apl(s.events,’event1′,’,',2)
}

s.eVar2="Download URL"
if (s.eVar2){
s.prop2="D=v2"
}

SiteCatalyst 15:

s.contextData['Download Name']="download name";
s.contextData['Download URL']="download url";

That’s it!

SiteCatalyst 15′s solution is a little simpler (at least in terms of coding), huh?! What makes this great is that giving direction to your developer for implementation is extremly straight forward, and anyone looking at these varibles in the code, should be able to easily determine what’s gonig on. Keep in mind that you can make the names of the context variables anything you like. So now that these context variables are in place, the developers are no longer needed in the implementation of SiteCatalyst (for downloads anyway!).

Next, Processing Rules will bridge the gap between the context variables and SiteCatalyst reporting. So below we will continue discussing the implementation of download measurement while using the context varialbes above with the new processing rules.

Processing Rules:

Many may be famailar with Omniture’s Marketing Channel Report and the processing rules that go along with that great feature (if not you should be!). Now, Omniture customers can create processing rules in a similar way that will allow them to set events and variables (as well as more advanced options) based on simple or complex rule sets. To demonstrate how this is done, we will assume that our developers have implemented the two “download” context variables above.

Now you can login to the admin console of SiteCatalyst and setup two easy rules:

1. If “contextData["Download Name"]” is set at anytime, move that value to eVar1 and prop1 as well as set event1
2. If “contextData["Download URL"]” is set at anytime, move that value to eVar2 and prop2

That’s all you have to do to implement custom download measurement once your context variables are in place.

Context Variable and Processing Rule Caveats:

This could warrant an entire other blog post, but here’s a brief summary of a few caveats of which to be aware when using context variables and processing rules:

1. You will have to upgrade to the H23 version of the s_code (i.e. Omniture data collection code) in order to leverage context variables.
2. While context variables can be unlimited in length, you will still need to be aware of the total 2080 character limite in Internet Explorer. Also, the props and eVars within the reporting itself still have their limits. The advantage of the unlimited length is that you could create a processing rule to evaluate the entire context variable’s value. Ex: if a campaign code contains “google” then set eVar3 as “Paid Search.”
3. Don’t get your hopes up for SAINT here, the processing rules will not populate SAINT classifications.
4. Context variables are not stored. Once they are captured and used in any processing rules, they are not maintained by Omniture. So, any processing rule (as should be expected) would not work on old context or other data.
5. Obviously, the improper setup of a processing rule could compromise an entire SiteCatalyst implementation since processing rules are essentially a “VISTA Lite.”
6. Debugging an implementation could be tricky using context variables. While you can see the context variables in a debugger, it is the eventual processing rules that would determine how a report is actually populated. This means that not only will you have to validate the site-side implementation, but you will also have to validate the setup of any processing rules. Here’s an example of what you might see in a debugger (easy to read, and no more c1, v1, etc…):
    

7. The product string, cannot be set using context variables or processing rules. The product string is simply to complex. If advanced manipulation of the product variable is needed, then Omniture Engineering may need to be involved with an actual VISTA solution (unless you can do it on the code-side of course).

So, while segmentation is a great feature (maybe even the one that most users will value), the above features will enable Omniture customers to more easily manage implementations. The post above only scratches the surface of what can be done with context variables and processing rules. If you have any other questions,  leave me a comment below!

• Search Engine Name
• Paid Search Campaign Name
• Paid Search Ad Group
• Paid Search Keyword Phrase
• Paid Search Match Type

While all of this information is critical for the effective analysis of paid search campaigns, there is one limitation of SiteCatalyst that this does not help overcome. That is, the fact that directly within SiteCatalyst, you cannot subrelate by more than one classification to another. Yes, there are classification hierarchies, but the setup for this is in the admin console and is not as flexible as might be desired by many SiteCatalyst users. So, there is a simple solution that most company’s are not using. This simple solution is to create additional classifications that will mimic the ability to subrelate to additional levels of depth. So, in addition to the classifications above, the following additional classifications could be setup:

• Search Engine Name > Paid Search Campaign Name
• Search Engine Name > Paid Search Campaign Name > Paid Search Ad Group
• Paid Search Engine > Paid Search Keyword Phrase
• Paid Search Engine > Paid Search Match Type

As an example of how this might be used, the SiteCatalyst user could run a “Paid Search Engine > Paid Search Match Type” and then subrelate that to “Paid Search Keyword Phrase” to see a report that would look as follows:

• Paid Search Engine > Paid Search Match Type
  • Paid Search Keyword Phrase

OR…

• Google > Exact
  • Web Analytics

As you can see here, this mimics the effect of being able to subrelate to a third level. While this is not the perfect/ideal solution until unlimited drill down (without the hierarchy restrictions of the admin console), this simple concatenation of SAINT classifications should provide the users of SiteCatalyst reports and dashboards with more useful information on which to base business and marketing decisions.

http://ideas.omniture.com/t5/Adobe-Idea-Exchange-for-Omniture/allow-to-share-custom-reports-across-suites/idi-p/5763

Original Post:
Without a doubt, two of the most underused features of Omniture SiteCatalyst have to be menu customization (the ability to customize the standard menus in the left-hand navigation) and custom reports. When these two great features are combined, they can make the adoption of Web analytics (and of course Omniture SiteCatalyst) all that much easier for an organization. The great thing about these features are that they can be used to make you analytics reporting intuitive to your stakeholders. In fact, if you are not using this feature, I can’t see how your company is getting the most out of the SiteCatalyst user interface. Just as an example on my blog, here’s a screen capture of the SiteCatalyst Menu for my report suite:

As you can see here, I’ve changed the default menu to a great degree. But if a user were to log into Omniture SiteCatalyst where no menu customization has been applied, how would they know just where to look for information about the performance of internal search? From my menu above, it’s pretty obvious where to go for reporting on Internal search performance.

In addition to the custom menus, custom reports can also be inserted into these custom menu items. Most companies that have a significant marketing spend, will most certainly be using SAINT classifications to apply meta data to their marketing tracking codes. And, many marketing reports are the result of breaking down one marketing classification by another, or even breaking down something like paid search engines by most popular product categories. In stead of having to train your marketing team on how to do classification breakdowns, you should be creating custom menu folders for marketing channels where you also have custom reports where classification breakdowns have already been created.

In short, you are doing your stakeholders and your business a disservice if you are not fully leveraging custom menus and reports. If you are not doing this, I would challenge you to meet with the stakeholders of your company as soon as possible to identify custom reports that they could benefit from, and then making those available in custom menus.

The primary advantage of the SiteCatalyst plug-ins is that they allow you to implement SiteCatalyst and its more advanced features without the need to touch the server-side code. It should be noted thought that editing server-side code to pass dynamic data to SiteCatalyst is almost always the preferred avenue if it is available to you. That being said, Omniture has created many plug-ins that allow data to be sent to SiteCatalyst so that you can implement by only touching your basic “s_code.js” file that is a part of the implementation. Some of the more useful plug-ins (my opinion of course) include:

• Append List (s.apl)
  • This function is one of the most useful and versatile for someone without easy access to source code. As an example of how this function might be used, assume that you have a registration confirmation page that needs a success event fired. By using the “s.apl” function, you can write some very simple JavaScript that will detect the Omniture page name and if it is a match, this plug-in will fire your success event. All being coded from directly within the Omniture JavaScript file.
• Link Handler (there are 3 of these)
  • There are three flavors of the link handler plug-in. One controls clicks on regular links, another controls exit links and the last controls download links. The “s.downloadLinkHandler” plug-in is especially helpful if you want to track all of the PDFs on your site by setting a specific custom event for only clicks on PDFs, while at the same time sending the URL of the PDF into a commerce variable (a.k.a. an eVar). By using these three plug-ins, you can easily begin tracking the clicks of select links on your site.
• New vs. Repeat Visitors (s.getNewRepeat)
  • The name of this plug-in says it all. By using this one, you will be able to segment all of your visitors and their interactions with your site into behavioral groups for new and return visitors. Very useful when the Omniture prop and/or eVar is correlated or fully subrelated, respectively.
• Query Parameter (s.getQueryParam)
  • This might be the most basic plug-in, and is a part of almost every Omniture SiteCatalyst implementation that I’ve ever seen. While simple, it is extremely useful. Using this plugin, you can capture the value of any query string parameter and send that value to an eVar or prop. When you couple this plug-in with one like “s.apl” you have an easy way to capture your internal search phrases while at the same time setting a custom success event for internal searches.

These are but a few of the many plug-ins offered by Omniture. There are also more advanced ones such as:

• Channel Manager (advanced tracking of your campaign data)
• Cross Visit Participation (provides an understanding of campaign impact across visits)
• Form Analysis (enables reporting on form errors, abandonment, etc.)

This last few are more difficult to implement in most cases, and you might consider contacting a consultant here.

The plug-ins are one of the most useful features of a SiteCatalyst implementation but are often overlooked. I think that a session on a few of the more advanced plug-ins would be an excellent idea for an Omniture Summit session, don’t you?

As an Omniture user, I have always relied heavily upon tools like Omniture Discover, because of the fact that it lets you segment your visitors into more meaningful groups. So, I can easily see for an e-commerce site, that the people clicking on the “View Larger Image” link on a product details page have a conversion rate that is 200% higher that those visitors that do not click on that link. Shouldn’t I be doing something about that? Like running a test to optimize that link for the visitors that have not been clicking it?

If you are currently or will be running a site optimization solution like Omniture Test&Target, you should always be running monitoring campaigns on your site. This can allow you to always be tracking and reporting on how different segments of your visitors are converting on your site, allowing you to quickly act by launching a test that is targeted towards a high-value segment of your visitors.

You should consider targeting your site optimization efforts towards different segments of visitors such as:

• Logged in visitors (vs. not logged in)
• Visitors from paid search campaigns
• Visitors from natural search
• Visitors using specific keyword phrases on search engines
• Visitors from email campaigns
• Visitors that stop at a certain point in your conversion funnel
• First time visitors
• Repeat visitors
• Visitors that enter your site via a specific page
• Visitors from a specific geographic location

Targeting your site optimization efforts to segments for visitors is usually more effective than just launching a test that is served to all visitors of your site as if they were equal. The reason, is that with different segments, you have an idea of their intentions. For example, if you are targeting a test that changes laptop product imagery for visitors that are entering your site after searching for “laptops” on Google, you know that your test is being served to the segment of visitors that is actively considering purchasing a laptop at this time or in the near future.

When considering site optimization, always ask yourself for which group or segment of visitors is this test targeted? You should see your site optimization efforts paying off more quickly if you are targeting your tests.

One common excuse on the part of a lot of content and publisher sites is that they are not selling anything. If you are in business and making money while not selling anything, please let me know what business you are in so that I can start one up too! The reality of the situation is that often, it’s just harder to measure revenue from online activities and marketing for a content site or publisher. Your are in fact “selling” some product or service to the visitors to your site, whether or not that “sale” is made online. Once you’ve realized this, you should also realize that your site could be better at selling to its visitors. In order to start optimizing your site, the first step is to identify and track your “converions,” not just basic traffic data. For publishers or lead generation sites, these conversions could include (but are not limited to) any of the following:

• Page views
• Ad views
• Completion of a registration form
• Registration for a newsletter
• Completion of a contact form

Once you have identified your conversions on your site, you are ready to optimize your site so that you can get your visitors to view more ads, visit more pages, complete your lead generation forms, and sign up for your newsletter more than ever before.

Many site optimization platforms, such as Omniture Test&Target, will integrate directly with your already existing Web analytics solution, making it even easier to optimize your site since you won’t have to re-tag all of the conversions on your site. All optimization solutions should let you track “non-ecommerce” events in some fashion though, but if you can leverage your existing Web analtyics tagging, you should do so.

In terms of content sites, here are a few tests that you should be running on your content. These are what you might call the low hanging fruit common to a lot of content sites:

• If running paid search campaigns, test different ways of presenting calls to action for your conversions
• Test what you have above the fold of your homepage so that you can decrease bounce rate and increase conversions
• If you have search on your Web site, change how you are presenting search results

These are just a few, very generic options. The options available are unique to every company out there, and you each have your own opportunities to optimize your existing content.

• Omniture: http://www.omniture.com/press/635
• WPP: http://www.tinyurl.com/wppomniture 

I think that this was very big news, and that it will impact both Web analytics practitioners and other vendors alike. As I see it, here are a few (a very short, brief list) of the ways this partnership might affect us practitioners of Web analytics:

• With Omniture training an additional 500 WPP employees in Omniture technology, the available pool of people with Omniture on their resumes will significantly increase.
• There might be an internal impact at Omniture on their Best Practices group. Will Omniture keep consulting in house in light of this $25 million investment by WPP? How many Omniture consultants might be asked to leave Orem to work within a WPP company (as was basically stated in the press release)?
• This could be good for practioners that are savvy enough to realize the impact now, and broaden their skill sets outside of Web analytics alone.

There’s also the potential impact on other vendors:

• With the large client base at WPP the impact on competitors such as Coremetrics and WebTrends is obvious.
• The same large client base could also help Omniture in increasing use of other tools such as Test&Target (look out Optimost and SiteSpect), Merchandising (look out Endeca), Discover OnPremise (look out BI vendors), etc.
• What’s the impact on the many other consultancies out there that help companies with Omniture implementations and optimization?

Please let me know if you have any further thoughts on what the impact of this investment might mean for WPP, Omniture, us practioners of Web analytics or Omniture’s and WPP’s competition.

In closing, here are a few early thoughts on the WPP/Omniture news from some people on Twitter:

As a Web analyst working within a team of more traditional SQL-using, data analysts, explaining how an analytics solution answers the above question can be challenging. The 3 primary variables that are a part of a revenue attribution methodology include:

1. The order with which the campaign credited with the sell occurs in relation to other campaigns
2. The length of time that a campaign may receive credit for a sale
3. How attribution is split (or not) among multiple campaigns

As for order, the most common approach is last touch. In other words, if a visitor clicks through your email campaign today and then through your Google ad tomorrow, the Google ad will get all of the credit because it was the last campaign touched before the purchase. The problem of course, is that even though the email campaign was clicked first and might have impacted the sale, the email receives no credit. One alternative to last touch that gets around this is linear attribution. Basically, linear attribution would split the previously mentioned sale 50/50 between the email and the Google ad. But should it really be 50/50? In addition to last touch and linear, you can also have something like first, or original, touch, where the email would get all of the credit. So there are a lot of choices to mull over.

Now that I’ve talked about a few of the methodologies around the order of attribution, the variable of time needs to be added. Using the previous example, and assuming last touch as the order of attribution, how long after coming in through a Google ad should the ad get credit for the sale? Only if they buy within the visit? 7 Days? 30 Days? The most typical solution is 30 days. However, this could very well extend out to months if your Web site is one of lead generation where the sales cycle is weeks or months long. Also, if you send out daily emails, is 30 days really a good choice for attribution? If you don’t have the choice of a custom solution, then 30 days is probably your best bet right now since that seems to be the standard. But, just keep in mind that you might have the option of changing your attribution to any time preiod (or maybe even event on your Web site).

Earlier, I mentioned linear attribution as a method of splitting revenue between multiple campaigns. Aside from this even split among campaigns, there are not many other options out there. This is one of the biggest challenges in revenue attribution. One way around this is to export all of your analytics data by visitor ID for every visit (that’s a ton of data to say the least). Once you have this data, you can create your own methodology to tie a sale back to every visit by the visitor, and every campaign that they touched (and the time between) prior to the sale, all the way back to maybe even the first campaign code ever touch by the visitor. We’ve done this at my current job, and I can tell you that it is not something that is easy to recreate on an ongoing basis.

It would be great if there was some solution on the Web analytics vendor side that would let you create a truly custom attribution methodology. However, the problem there is that if you can customize every aspect of attribution, you might end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I mean here is that if you want to weight the last touch before a sale as being worth more than the campaign touches between the first and last, then you might be over valuing paid search if that is most often your last touch marketing channel.

So what is the solution?

As far as I am concerned, it is short sited to value everything as last touch. You can’t just ignore the fact that other campaigns have in someway influenced/impacted your visitor prior to making a purchase. To ignore this is to miss out on understanding and optimizing your marketing efforts from beginning to end. So, ditch last touch (in a perfect world, if you can).

Next, you’re going to need to create your own solution as to how to tie all of the different campaign touches together and appropriately attribute them to the sale. This is an easy thing to say, but not so easy to do obviously. In a later post I will try to flesh out an idea to actually do this.

Do you have any ideas as to how to improve upon existing ideas of revenue attribution? If you’re doing something custom yourself, let me know about it.