As we (in the US) near the holiday in which we give thanks for what we have, it is traditional to think about those who don’t have as much as we do and those who try to help them.  In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I’d like to use this post to get your help on a project I am working on and possibly inspire you to join me in the cause.  Please read on to learn more…

Colin Powell, 1/1/1 & Thanksgiving
Last week, at my company’s annual Dreamforce conference, Colin Powell gave a riveting keynote speech to almost 10,000 attendees.  In his speech, he spoke about change, America and, most importantly, giving back to others.  We heard how many years ago, Colin Powell was part of the inspiration for the Salesforce.com 1/1/1 model of corporate philanthropy that has since been adopted by other companies in the area.  Besides the notion of donating 1% of equity and 1% of product, this model also includes a provision that each employee spend 1% of their time helping others.  This time can be spent at homeless shelters, hospitals or other similar venues.  Alternatively, this time can be spent using your skill set to help others that need help.

Ever since I joined the company, I have planned to use my 1% time to spend a week helping a non-profit or charity using my area of expertise – web analytics. After all, while many of us use web analytics to increase revenues, there are many organizations where an increase in conversion rates determine how many people can eat or receive life-saving medicines.  Therefore, I am actively looking for your help to find an organization that meets the following criteria:

1. Is a non-profit or charity
2. Has a web analytics tool or would like to have help in the area of web analytics (preferably Omniture SiteCatalyst where I know the most, but any tool will do!)
3. Would be able to devote some time with someone like me doing volunteer analysis or web analytics tagging work

If any of you out there know of organizations that meet this criteria, please e-mail me at adam@the-omni-man.com.

Care to Join Me?
Between the Colin Powell speech, Thanksgiving and Avinash Kaushik’s generosity of contributions through his books, I started thinking that there may be more that all of us could do.  I have encountered many brilliant blog readers and seen many ingenious #measure folks out on Twitter and wondered if there were others who might be interested in doing something similar.  With all of this talent out there, wouldn’t it be great if each person reading this were to donate a few days of their time and web analytics expertise to helping a non-profit or charity with web analytics? This would be great for these organizations, the industry as a whole and altruistic to boot!  Therefore, if any of you out there get caught up in the Thanksgiving spirit (I recommend watching Planes, Trains and Automobiles!) and feel like “paying it forward,” so to speak, please e-mail me your name, location and I will see if I can match up people expressing interest in volunteering with any names of organizations needing help that I hear about…

Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving!

Adam Greco is the Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com.  You can read his previous Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst blog at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ and can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamgreco.  Please send questions and comments to adam@the-omni-man.com.

Please note: I am no longer an employee of Omniture and the content/views expressed here are my own and not those of Omniture.

A few weeks ago, Ben Gaines (@OmnitureCare) wrote a great blog post about tracking Internal Search.  In this post, I am going to add a few additional tips I have learned over the years…

Correlate Internal Search Term & Page Searched From
Knowing what people searched for on your site is certainly valuable, but knowing the exact page they searched for each term from is even more valuable.  Having this allows you to see what content visitors think they should be able to find on each page.  This is like gold to your content folks who can look for terms that are consistently searched for on a specific page and make a case that they need to add or improve content.

Setting up SiteCatalyst to do this is very simple.  All you have to do is pass the Internal Search term to a Traffic Variable (sProp) (as Ben showed) and then set a second sProp with the previous page name value (use the Previous Value plug-in) and create a Traffic Data Correlation for these two sProps.  When you are done, you will be able to see two cool things:

1) What terms are searched for on a specific page:

2) For any given term, what pages are visitors searching for that term:

Group Internal Search Terms
In Ben’s post, he discussed how to eliminate duplicate terms by taking upper/lower case out of the equation.  In addition to this, there are times when you might want to group specific keywords together into buckets since they represent the same type of search.  For example, if you manage a travel site, you might want to group all City internal search terms by State and Region so you can supplement your analyses.  This is easily done by taking advantage of SAINT Classifications which allow you to bucket your internal Search Keywords however you would like.  Here is an example of a SAINT File you could use in the preceding example:

Use Compare Feature to find differences between Dates
Once you are tracking internal search terms, you can use the Date Comparison feature in SiteCatalyst to see how the same internal search terms perform in two different time periods.  You access this feature from within the SiteCatalyst Calendar window.  Below is an example of looking at how the top internal search terms for September perform in October:

As you can see, by using the date comparison feature, SiteCatalyst will show you the difference between the two time periods so you can be aware of significant changes.  Simply click the difference column and you can see the search terms that changed the most/least (depending upon whether you sort ascending or descending).

Use Compare Feature to find differences between Report Suites
In a similar manner, if your implementation has multiple report suites (or ASI Segments), you can use the Compare feature to see how internal search terms vary by suite/segment.  For example, if you have a Customer Segment and a Non-Customer Segment, you can see what internal search terms each group is looking for:

In the above report, we can see that Non-Customers are more apt to search for careers, while Customers are more interested in detailed product information.

One cool thing you can do with this is to combine this data with Test&Target by FTP’ing the most popular search terms to a Word Cloud program and having Test&Target show the appropriate Word Cloud based upon a cookie value indicating customer status.  That is a great way to proactively use your web analytics data to create a better experience for your users!

Trend Search Page Exits
One way to see how good or bad your internal search results are is to look at how often visitors exit your sie on the search results page.  While this isn’t a guarantee that your search results are bad, most of my clients agree that search results page exits are not normally an indicator of success!  Therefore, I like to trend this and set alerts to monitor this.  Here are the steps to do this:

1. Open your Pages report and find your Search Results page in the list
2. Click on its name and in the sub-menu choose Paths – Next Page report
3. Unfortunately, Exited Site might be one of your highest next pages, but in this case it is a good thing since you that makes trending it easier (I haven’t figured out how to trend it id it isn’t in the Top 5!).  Once you are looking at your list of Next Pages, click the “Trended” link to see the top five next pages trended.
4. From here, I usually refine the report to only show the Exited Site and Home Page (for some reason SiteCatalyst won’t let you see just “Exited Site” so you need to have one other value – not sure why – so I normally choose Home Page)
5. Finally, change your date range and View by (i.e. day, week, month) and you will see a report like the one below where I am trending Exits and clicks to the Home Page by percent over time.  You can now add this graph to a dashboard to monitor it over time…

Use Counter eVars!
There are two ways you can use Counter eVars with internal search.  First, per my last blog post, you can use the # of Pages Counter eVar concept to track how many pages visitors view prior to doing a search to see how your website design is functioning.  I showed this in my last post:

Second, you can track the # of internal searches in a counter eVar so you can see how many internal searches each visitor has done prior to completing your desired success event.

Track Recommended/Filtered Search Results
Many companies provide internal website searchers with recommended search results or filtered results based upon the search term as shown here:

You can use SiteCatalyst to track whether the visitor clicked on your organic links or the recommended/filtered links.  All you need to do is add a query string to links in each distinct area and capture that in an eVar when visitors click on these links.  For example, the eVar values may be “organic link click” or “filtered link click” which will show you the distribution.  You can take it further by passing this to an sProp and correlating it to the search term to see which internal search terms lead to visitors clicking each type of result.

These are just a few of the fun things you can do with internal search tracking…

Adam Greco is the Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com.  You can read his previous Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst blog at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ and can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamgreco.  Please send questions and comments to adam@the-omni-man.com.

Please note: I am no longer an employee of Omniture and the content/views expressed here are my own and not those of Omniture.

This week I will round out my Pages in Conversion trilogy by discussing a # of Pages Viewed Counter eVar.  Two posts ago I discussed some of the benefits of setting a Page View Success Event and in my last post I showed some of the cool things you can do by setting a Page Name eVar.  While this post will not be as “meaty,” I wanted to share a quick tip that can help you out for a few cool analyses.  If you haven’t already, I suggest you read my last two posts as it might be helpful.

Counter eVar Refresher
About a year ago I blogged about what a Counter eVar was in the following Counter eVar post.  If you are unfamiliar with Counter eVars, I suggest you review that post before continuing.  In a nutshell, a Counter eVar allows you to increment an eVar with a numeric value (usually incrementing by one) when a specific action takes place.  For example, if you would like to count how many times website visitors conduct searches on your website prior to adding an item to the shopping cart, you would use a Counter eVar to store a numeric value in each website visitor’s cookie so that when the Cart Addition Success Event takes place, you can associate that number of internal searches with that Cart Addition.

# of Pages Viewed Counter eVar
OK.  So now let’s get into this week’s topic.  I often like to set a Counter eVar on each page of the website so I have a running count of how many website pages the current visitor has viewed.  Setting this is pretty simple as you only need to set a Counter eVar to “+1″ on each Page View and if you are setting a Page View Success Event it can be done concurrently.  So what does setting this # of Pages Viewed Counter eVar get you?  Well, no matter what Success Events take place on your website, it may be interesting to see how many pages the active visitor has/had viewed prior to that Success Event taking place.  For example, let’s say you are trying to drive website Lead Capture Form Completions and you want to know if Forms are being completed relatively quickly (after 1-3 pages) or taking more time (after 10 pages).  This is not easy to do with out-of-the-box SiteCatalyst reports.  You can see Average Page Depth of each Form Page, but I find that very limiting.  Using this Counter eVar, you have a simple, clean way to see how many pages visitors had seen prior to completing a Form (in this example):

However, you get more than just this.  Since all eVars break down all Success Events, this one Counter eVar will work with all of your Success Events so you can see any Success Event broken down by # of Pages Viewed.  All you have to do is add a different Success Event to the report above and you can see how many pages it took visitors to perform that action.  In the following example, we can now see how many pages visitors see prior to performing an Internal Search:

In this case, we can see that about 50% of all Internal Searches are taking place in the first four pages that visitors see.  This could be expected, but if your goal is to improve page content and navigation, this might be an indicator of how well your changes are doing over time…

Use with Subrelations
As they used to say in the commercials: “but wait…there’s more!”  The above reports only scratch the surface of what you can do with this new Counter eVar.  For example, let’s imagine in the first example above that we now want to see how many pages it takes to get visitors to complete a specific website form.  If you are capturing the name of the Forms on your website in another eVar and it has Full Subrelations, you can see the following:

Again, the same concept would apply to other Success Events so in the Internal Search example above, you can use subrelations to see how many pages website visitors had viewed prior to searching on a specific phrase.

Don’t Forget Classifications
One quick little enhancement to the # of Pages Viewed eVar is that you can use SAINT Classifications to bucket pages viewed into more manageable groupings.  For example, you can see the same Form Completions report above in more concrete buckets by using SAINT to see the following:

Final Thoughts
That is the quick overview of setting a # of Pages Viewed Counter eVar.  Here are a few final things to keep in mind:

1. As with all eVars, you need to determine when it will expire.  I tend to like to keep the # of Pages to an expiration that is longer than a visit so if a visitor comes back multiple times, you can see how many total Page Views they had done across more than the current visit.  You can use “Never” to see all Page Views or if you have one key Success Event, you can expire the eVar at that event and then start the counter over.
2. You can use the same SAINT Classification file for all Counter eVars so if you create it once, be sure to re-use it.

Adam Greco is the Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com.  You can read his previous Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst blog at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ and can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamgreco.  To be alerted to new blog posts, I recommend subscribing to this blog via e-mail using the tool provided on the top-right of this page.  Please send questions and comments to adam@the-omni-man.com.

Please note: I am no longer an employee of Omniture and the content/views expressed here are my own and not those of Omniture.

In my last post, I described some of the benefits of using a Page View Success Event.  In this post I will continue along the same theme by describing the benefits/uses of a Page Name Conversion Variable (eVar).  I recommend you read my last post on the Page View Success Event prior to reading this post as the two go hand-in-hand.

Setting a Page Name eVar
Setting the Page Name in an eVar, while somewhat nontraditional,  can be used for many different purposes.  In this post I will cover just a few, but I am sure those reading this can come up with many more.  The implementation of this couldn’t be easier.  Simply pass the s.pagename value to an eVar and you are done!  The following sections will outline how I use this variable once it is set.

Campaign Pages
Let’s say that you are running a bunch of online marketing campaigns and you want to see how many pages on the website people coming from each Campaign Tracking Code view.  In SiteCatalyst, the main way to figure this out would be to use DataWarehouse, ASI or Discover unless you read my last post and had set a Page View Success Event.  But now let’s take it a step further.  What if you want to see the pages that visitors from each Campaign Tracking Code viewed on your website.  Easy right?  Not so fast.  There is really no easy way to see this in SiteCatalyst using out-of-the-box reports.  One way to do this would be to use the Get&Persist Plug-in to pass the Campaign Tracking Code to a Traffic Variable (sProp) on each page of the visit and then use a Traffic Data Correlation to correlate this new sProp with the Page Name variable, but that is a lot of work!  The other way is to use a Page Name eVar.  By default, your Campaign Tracking Code report will store and persist the Campaign Tracking Code for multiple page views (you choose your time frame in the Admin Console) so if you begin to store Page Names in another eVar, you will have an intersection between Page Name and Campaign Tracking Code on each page.  That allows you to use a Conversion Variable Subrelations report to see all Pages viewed by visitors coming from each Campaign Tracking Code  You can see this by opening up the Campaign Tracking Code report, selecting the Page View (Event) metric and clicking the icon next to a specific Tracking Code to break it down by the Page Name eVar.  Once you have done this, you should see a report like this:

Channel Pages Tracking
If you role up your Campaigns to higher-level Marketing Channels using SAINT Classifications you can use the concept from the Page View Event post to see how many pages are viewed on your site after visitor arrive from each Marketing Channel.

You can then break this report down by the Page Name eVar to see the most popular pages for each Marketing Channel:

While this is not as granular as viewing Pathing by Campaign (as I demonstrated in this post) , it can give you a high-level view of what pages are popular for each different marketing channel.  If you are using the Unified Sources DB VISTA Rule or Channel Manager plug-in, it gets even better as you can see what pages people coming from another website or SEO are viewing on your website by breaking down a particular SEO keyword or external website link by Page Name:

Internal Search Follow-On Pages
If you are properly tracking Internal Search on your website, you should have Internal Search Terms stored in an eVar so you can use this concept to break down Internal Search Terms by this new Page Name eVar (while using the Page View Event) to see what pages visitors view after they search on each specific Internal Search Term:

What Page Does Success Take Place?
Another side-benefit of setting a Page Name eVar is that you can see on which page a Success Event takes place.  For example, if you set a “File Download” Success Event and a file is available on several pages, you can subrelate each file name with the Page Name eVar to see which page is the most popular for downloading each file.

Conversion Variable QA
Finally, there is a completely different use for the Page Name eVar – Quality Assurance.  Often times, you will run into situations where you have eVars that have bad data or no data at all (the dreaded “None” row!).  Often times, these issues are hard to troubleshoot.  However, if you have a Page name eVar, your life is much easier.

Let’s say that you have forms on your website and when visitors complete a form, they are required to enter a “Company Size” field which is stored in an eVar.  However, there are many cases where you are seeing the Form Company Size eVar with no data.  This might mean that IT forgot to make the field required on some of the Forms (would never happen right?).  How do you figure out which forms are causing the issue?  All you have to do is the following:

1. Open the eVar report that has data issues with a relevant Success Event metric (Form Company Size and Form Completes in this example)
2. Find the row that has bad data or no data (“None” row)
3. Click the breakdown icon to break the report down by the Page Name eVar
4. The resulting report (see below) will show you a list of Page Names where SiteCatalyst set the Form Complete Success Event, but did not have a corresponding Form Company Size eVar value

You can then send this report to your IT team to help them find pages where there may be tagging issues.  You could even schedule this as a recurring report to you and IT so you are alerted when similar issues arise in the future, which helps with overall data quality.  Keep in mind that this will only work if the eVar you are looking at has Full Subrelations or you add Full Subrelations to the Page Name eVar (see below).

Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are many different uses of this functionality.  The following are some final pointers related to this topic:

1. As previously noted, if you plan to use the Page Name eVar extensively for testing, I would recommend that it have Full Subrelations so you can QA all eVar reports, not just those that already have Full Subrelations.
2. In one of the rare times I ever tell clients to do this, I would recommend that you set the Page Name eVar to expire at the Page View in the Admin Console.  Expiration beyond that will probably add little value and only slow down reporting.  There are some special things you need to do here if you use Custom Links so I would advice you speak to Omniture  Consulting about this.
3. Consider Classifying the Page Name eVar by Page Type, Page Product Category, etc… to increase the value you get from this eVar.

Adam Greco is the Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com.  You can read his previous Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst blog at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco/ and can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamgreco.  To be alerted to new blog posts, I recommend subscribing to this blog via e-mail using the tool provided on the top-right of this page.  Please send questions and comments to adam@the-omni-man.com.

Please note: I am no longer an employee of Omniture and the content/views expressed here are my own and not those of Omniture.