(Estimated Time to Read this Post = 2.5 Minutes)

In the past, I have written about Bounce Rates, Traffic Source Bounce Rates and Segment Bounce Rates.  Hopefully this will be my last post related to Bounce Rates, but I recently found a “hack” to calculate and trend a Site Wide Bounce Rate in SiteCatalyst so I thought I would share it.  I define Site Wide Bounce Rate as the total number of Single Access Visits divided by the total number of website Visits.  Unfortunately, for some reason, this metric is very difficult to wrestle down in Omniture SiteCatalyst because you cannot view Pathing metrics (i.e. Entries, Single Access) in Calculated Metrics unless you are within an Traffic (sProp) report that has Pathing enabled.

To date, the way I have reported on Site Wide Bounce Rate was by pulling Visits and Single Access data into Excel using the SiteCatalyst ExcelClient.  Once there, I could divide the two and if I wanted to see it by day (or week or month), all I needed to do was to pull both metrics by day.  It was straightforward, but I could not add this to my SiteCatalyst Dashboards.

The Hack
So let’s say that you want to report a daily/weekly/monthly trend of your Site Wide Bounce Rate and add it to one of your executive dashboards.  Here are the steps:

• First you need to create the required calculated metric.  In this case you want to divide Total Single Access by Total Visits (or Total Entries which is the same thing).  I would recommend making this a Global Metric so all of your users have access to it going forward:

• Once this metric is created, open your Pages report, click the Add Metrics link and add the new Site Wide Bounce Rate metric to your list of metrics.  It will be under the Calculated Metrics area.  Place this new Site Wide Bounce Rate metric so it is the first metric and then add your regular Bounce Rate metric and finally add the Page Views metric and click the small triangle to sort by Page Views.  When you are done, it should look like this:

• When you click OK, you will be able to see a report that shows your most popular pages, the Bounce Rate for each page and the overall Site Wide Bounce Rate.  This report is handy for seeing how each page is doing in relation to the Site Wide Bounce Rate.

• However, our original objective was to see the trend of the Site Wide Bounce Rate and add it to a dashboard, so let;s get back on track.  To do this, all you have to do is click the “Trended” link shown in the report above.  As is always the case, trending will show you the left-most metric trended over your chosen date range (which is why it was important to put Site Wide Bounce Rate in the first metric slot!).  After clicking it, you will see a report that looks like this:

So the resulting graph is your Site Wide Bounce Rate and you can now add this to any SiteCatalyst Dashboard.  However, as you recall, I mentioned this is a “hack” so if you look closely you will see a bunch of pages in the data table for this report.  What is strange is that the values for each row are the exact same.  This is the place where you can see how much of a hack this is.  This data is pretty much useless so I recommend just adding the graph to your dashboards and ignoring the data table.  Perhaps in the future Omniture will let us add this type of Calculated Metric to the “My Calc Metrics” area so we don’t have to take such a convoluted path to add this trend graph to a dashboard!

Final Thoughts
So there you have it.  A quick hack in case you ever need to calculate Site Wide Bounce Rate for your HIPPO’s!  Enjoy!

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.  You can also hear Adam on the BeyondWebAnalytics podcast.  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.

Often times when I used to work with clients and now internally, I am surprised to see how many SiteCatalyst users don’t take advantage of Comparison Reports within the SiteCatalyst interface.  In this post I will review these reports so you can decide if they will help you in your daily analysis.

Comparing Dates
Hopefully most of you are familiar with this type of Comparison Report.  This report type allows you to look at the same report for two different date ranges.  To do this, simply open up an sProp or eVar report and click the calendar icon and choose Compare Dates when you see the calendar.  In the example shown here, I am going to compare February 2010 with March 2010:

For this example, I have chosen the Browser report, using Visitors as the metric.  After selecting the above dates, my report will look like this:

As you can see, SiteCatalyst adds a “Change” column where it displays the difference between the two date ranges.  This can be handy to spot major differences between the two date ranges.  In this case we can see that “Microsoft Internet Explorer 8″ had a big increase and that “Mozilla Firefox 3.5″ had a decrease (probably due to version 3.6!).  You can compare any date ranges you want from one day to one year vs. another year.

However, when you compare ranges that have different numbers of days, your results can be skewed.  For example, in the report above, March had three more days than February so that may account for why the differences between the two are so stark.  If this ever becomes an issue, you can take advantage of a little-known feature of Comparison Reports – Normalization.  In the report settings, there is a link that allows you to normalize the data.  When you normalize the data, SiteCatalyst makes the totals at the bottom of each report match and increases/decreases the values of one column to adjust for the different number of days.  I am not 100% sure what specific formula or algorithms are used to do this, but for the amount of times that you will use it, I would go ahead and trust it.  Below is an example of the same report with Normalization enabled:

If you look closely, you will see that the March 2010 column has been normalized when we clicked the “Yes” link shown in the red box above.  By doing this, SiteCatalyst has reduced the numbers in the March 2010 column to assume the same number of Visitors as there were in February.  If you want to normalize such that February is increased to match March, you simply have to reverse the date ranges so when you select your dates, March is the first column and February is the second column (the second column is always the one that gets adjusted).  As you can see, the “Change” column is now dramatically different!  In this version, “Microsoft Internet Explorer 8″ no longer looks like it has changed much.  I find that using this feature allows me to get a more realistic view of date range differences.

Finally, you may notice a tiny yellow box in the preceding report image (says “6,847″).  This is a secret that not many people know about.  When you normalize data, Omniture artificially reduces or increases the values in the normalized column.  But if you want to see what the real value is (if not normalized), you can hover your mouse over any value and you will see a pop-up with the real number!  If you look at the first version of the report (the one before we normalized), you will see the same “6,847″ number in the first row of the report… Pretty cool huh?

Comparing Suites
This second type of Comparison Report is the one that fewer people are aware of or have used.  In this type of comparison, instead of comparing date ranges you compare different report suites.  Obviously, this only makes sense if you have more than one report suite, but it also works with ASI slots so don’t assume this isn’t relevant to you if you have just one report suite.  Much of the mechanics of this are similar to the steps outlined above.  You simply open one report (in this case we will continue to use the Browser report) and then choose the “Compare to Site” link and choose a second report suite or ASI slot.  In this case, I am showing an example of the Browser report for two different geographic locations.  Since most report suites have different totals, I tend to use Normalization more in these types of comparison reports.

Final Thoughts
This covers the basics of Comparison Reports.  Hopefully you can use this to start creating these reports and adding them as scheduled reports or even to Dashboards.  In my next post, I will take this a step further and demonstrate an advanced technique of using Comparison Reports…

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.  You can also hear Adam on the BeyondWebAnalytics podcast.  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 the Web Analytics space, we spend a lot of time recording and analyzing what people do on our website in order to improve revenues and/or user experience.  While this implicit data capture is wonderful, you should be supplementing it with data that you collect directly from your website visitors.  Voice of Customer (VOC) is the term often used for this and it is simply asking your customers to tell you why your website is good or bad.  There are two main ways that I have seen people capture Voice of Customer:

1. Page-Based Comments – Provide a way for website visitors to comment on pages of your site.  This is traditionally used as a mechanism to get direct feedback about a page design, broken links or problems people are having with a specific page.  Unfortunately, most of this feedback will be negative so you need to have “thick skin” when analyzing this data!
2. Website Satisfaction – Provide a way for visitors to rate their overall satisfaction with your website experience (vs. specific pages).  This is normally done by presenting visitors with an exit survey where you ask standard questions that can tell you how your website is doing and compares your site against your peers.

There are numerous vendors in each of these spaces and the goal of this post is not to compare them, but rather discuss how you can integrate Voice of Customer data into your Omniture SiteCatalyst implementation.  In this post, I am going to focus on the first of the aforementioned items (Page-Based Comments) and specifically talk about one vendor (OpinionLab) that I happen to have the most direct experience with (their headquarters was a mile from my home!).  The same principles that I will discuss here can be applied to all Voice of Customer vendors so don’t get hung up on the specific vendor for the purposes of this post.

Why Integrate Voice of Customer into SiteCatalyst
So given that you can see Voice of Customer data from within your chosen VOC tool, why should you endeavor to integrate Voice of Customer and your web analytics solution?  I find that integrating the two has the following benefits:

1. You can more easily share Voice of Customer data with people without forcing them to learn [yet] another tool.  People are busy and you are lucky if they end up mastering SiteCatalyst, lest you make them learn how to use OpinionLab, Foresee Results, etc…
2. Many Voice of Customer tools charge by the user so if you can port their data into SiteCatalyst, you can expose it to an almost unlimited number of users.
3. You can use Omniture SiteCatalyst’s date and search filters to tailor what Voice of Customer each employee receives.
4. You can divide Voice of Customer metrics by other Website Traffic/Success Metrics to create new, interesting KPI’s.
5. You can use Omniture SiteCatalyst Alerts to monitor issues on your site.
6. You can use Omniture Discover to drill deep into Voice of Customer issues

I hope to demonstrate many of these benefits in the following sections.

How to Integrate Voice of Customer into SiteCatalyst
So how exactly do you integrate Voice of Customer data into SiteCatalyst.  For most VOC vendors, the easiest way to do this is by using Omniture Genesis.  These Genesis integrations are already pre-wired and make implementation a snap (though there are cases where you may want to do a custom integration or tweak the Genesis integration).  You can talk to your Omniture account manager or account exec to learn more about Genesis.

Regardless of how you decide to do the implementation, here is what I recommend that you implement:

1. Set three custom Success Events for Positive Page Ratings, Negative Page Ratings and Neutral Page Ratings.  These Success Events should be set on the “Thank You” page after the visitor has provided a rating.
2. Pass the free form text/comment that website visitors enter into an sProp or eVar.  If they do not leave a comment pass in something like “NO COMMENT” so you can make sure you are capturing all comments.  If you are going to capture the comments in an sProp, I recommend you use a Hierarchy variable since those have longer character lengths vs. normal sProps which can only capture 100 characters.
3. Pass the actual page rating (usually a number from 1 to 5) into an sProp.  I also recommend a SAINT Classification of this variable such that you classify 1 &2 as Negative, 3 as Neutral and 4 & 5 as Positive.  This classification should take less than 5 minutes to create…
4. Use the PreviousValue plug-in to pass the previous page name to an sProp.
5. Create a 2-item Traffic Data Correlation between the Previous Page (step #4) and Page Rating (step #3).  This allows you to see what page the user was on when they submitted each rating.

All in all, this is not too bad.  A few Success Events and a few custom variables and you are good to go.  The rest of this post will demonstrate some of the cool reports you can create after the above implementation steps are completed.

Share Ratings
As I mentioned previously, you [hopefully] have users that have become familiar with the SiteCatalyst interface.  This means that they have Dashboards already created to which you can add a few extra reportlets.  In this first example, let’s imagine that you want to graphically represent how your site is doing by day with respect to Positive, Negative and Neutral ratings.  To do this, all you have to do is open the Classification version of the Page Rating report (can be an sProp or eVar – your call) and switch to the trended view.  You should have only three valid values and I like to use a stack ranked graph type using the percentage to see how I am doing each day as shown here:

This graph allows me to get a quick sense of how my site is doing over time and can easily be added to any Dashboard.

You can also mix your newly created Voice of Customer Success Events with other SiteCatalyst metrics.  For example, while you could look at a graph/trend of Positive or Negative Comments by opening the respective Success Events, a better way to gauge success is to divide these new metrics by Visits to see if you are doing better or worse on a relative basis.  The following graph shows a Calculated Metric for Negative Comments per Visit so we can adjust for traffic spikes:

Find Problem Pages
Another benefit of the integration is that you can isolate ratings for specific pages.  The first way to do this is to see which pages your visitors tend to rate positively or negatively.  In the following report, you can open the Rating variable report (or Classification of it as shown below) and break it down by the Previous Page variable to see the pages that most often had negative ratings:

This will then result in a report that looks like this:

Alternatively, if you want to see the spread of ratings for a specific page, all you need to do is find that page in the Previous Page report and break it down by the Rating variable (or its Classification) as shown here:

Share Comments
As noted above, if you capture the actual comments that people leave in a variable, you will have a SiteCatalyst report that captures the first 256 characters of the comments visitors enter.  This report duplicates scheduled reports from your Voice of Customer vendor in that it allows you to share all of the comments people are leaving with your co-workers.  However, by doing this through SiteCatalyst, you gain some additional functionality that some VOC vendors don’t provide:

1. You can create a Traffic Data Correlation between the Comments variable and the Previous Page variable so you can breakdown comments for a specific page.  Therefore, if you have users that “own” specific pages on the website, you can schedule daily/weekly reports that contain comments only for those pages so they don’t have to waste time reading all of the comments left by visitors.
2. You can use the Search filter functionality of SiteCatalyst to scan through all of the visitor comments looking for specific keywords or phrases that your co-workers may be interested in.  In the example below, the user is looking for comments that mention the words “slow” or “latent” to be notified of cases where the visitor perceived a page load speed issue:

Set Alerts
Another cool thing you can do with this integration is set automated Alerts in SiteCatalyst so you can be notified when you see a spike in Negative Comments on your site.  This allows you to react quickly to broken links or other issues before they affect too many visitors (and help avoid #FAIL posts in Twitter!).  Here is an example of setting this up:

Review Problem Visits using Omniture Discover
Finally, if you have access to Omniture Discover, after you have implemented the items above, you can use Discover to do some amazing things.  First, you can use the unlimited breakdown functionality to zero in on any data attribute of a user that is complaining about your site.  For example, if you had visitors complaining about not being able to see videos on your site, you might want to see their version of Flash, Browser, OS, etc… or even isolate when the problem took place as shown here:

Additionally, you can use Discover to isolate specific comments and watch the exact visit that led to that comment.  This is done through a little-known feature of Discover called the “Virtual Focus Group.”  This feature allows you to review sessions on your site and see the exact pages people viewed and some general data about their visit (i.e. Browser, GeoLocation, etc…).  While not as comprehensive as tools like Clicktale, it is good enough for some basic analysis.  Here is how to do this:

1. Open Discover and find the comment you care about in the custom sProp or eVar report
2. Right-click on the row and create a Visit segment where that comment exists
3. Save the segment in a segment folder
4. Open the Virtual Focus Group (under Pathing in Discover)
5. Add your new segment to the report by dragging it to the segment area
6. Click “New Visit” in the Virtual Focus Group
7. Click on the “Play” button to watch the visit

Now you can watch how the user entered your site, what pages they went to and see exactly what they had done prior to hitting the Voice of Customer “Thank You” page.

Final Thoughts
So there you have it, a quick review of some cool things you can do if you want to integrate your chosen Voice of Customer tool and Omniture SiteCatalyst.  This is by no means the only way to do this, but merely a few suggestions that I have found helpful over the years.  If you have done other cool things, please let me know…

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.  You can also hear Adam on the BeyondWebAnalytics podcast.  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.

One of the old adages in business is location, location, location.  In this post, I will share a way that you can ease end-users into the data you want them to see by embedding key reports in to places they are already are frequenting.

Why Embed Reports?
In my experience, most users don’t log into tools (check the SiteCatalyst usage logs) and many ignore e-mailed reports.  But if you can provide relevant information in a context that is meaningful to them, you have a better chance of adoption.

Another barrier to web analytics adoption is that SiteCatalyst reports don’t provide a lot of context.  What I have longed for is a place where I could share more than a few sentences of information about the report an end-user is viewing.  However, for all of its virtues, SiteCatalyst does not provide a lot of tools to provide context to reports.  The ones I have seen are as follows:

1. Adding a text reportlet to a SiteCatalyst Dashboard.  This is ok, but it is hard to share a lot of information or graphics here.
2. Adding notes to reports.  Again, you are limited to basic HTML and it is difficult to replicate report notes to many report suites.
3. There is no real way to associate notes to reports that are e-mailed out other than a short description.
4. Adding notes to an Excel Dashboard.  This is what I have used the most, but Excel Dashboards can be harder to share and have issues for Mac users.

In addition to the above limitations, as stated earlier, I like to get reports closer to my end-users.  For these reasons, I choose to embed reports into Intranets and web pages.  For example, recently, our development team launched a cool new sidebar helper tool on the website affectionately known as “Super-Sassy.”  Instead of sending a report to my users telling them how the new tool has performed, why not show all recipients what the tool is with the associated data:

In the example above, I might show data related to our “Super-Sassy” tool along with explanations of all of the metrics on an Intranet page used by the people who designed and developed the tool.  This provides context for people who would not normally be using web analytics data and (hopefully) gets them excited about learning how the tool they have developed is being used.  I even included a button at the top that allows them to launch the full report in SiteCatalyst should they want to change the date range, country data set or dig into more detail.  Finally, in the embedded SiteCatalyst report, I can pre-filter the data using a search and pre-select the appropriate report suite and date ranges, which all goes a long way to simplifying things for people who are not web analysts.

Which do you think will be used more, the above report or the same report buried in an eVar report somewhere within the SiteCatalyst interface?

How’d He Do That?
So how do I do this?  Obviously embedding depends upon the environment you are trying to embed into so I will share the general principles and hoepfully you can apply them to your own envirnment.

One approach is to use SiteCatalyst Widgets.  About a year ago I showed how to use SiteCatalyst Widgets to embed reports into tools like iGoogle so I recommend you check out that post to see if that will work in your environment.

For today’s example, I am going to show what I did above, which is embedding SiteCatalyst reports into Google Sites.  If you are not familiar with Google Sites, it is a free template-based tool you can use to build team group pages, Intranets or any other site you’d like.  I like to use secure Google Sites to build Web Analytics portals or embed reports in existing Google Sites being used by teams at my organization.

Let’s imagine that your social media team has a Google Site that they use to track information about the company’s social media program.  This site has a page for the social media team, social media policies, articles related to social media, etc… Now let’s say that you have implemented some cool Omniture SiteCatalyst Twitter Integration which allows you to see how often your company’s branded keywords are mentioned on Twitter.  Wouldn’t it be cool if you could embed the report showing Twitter mentions directly into the social media team’s existing Google Site?  Here’s how to do it:

• Work with your social media team to add a page to their Google Site that describes the business question that your report aims to solve.  In this case it might be something like “How often is Salesforce.com mentioned on Twitter?”  On this page, you should provide some context, such as what keyword phrases you would characterize as a “Salesforce.com mention” so users know what makes up the metric.

• Next, in a new browser window/tab, create the SiteCatalyst report that you want to show your audience on the page.  You do this as you would normally create a report, by selecting the variable (eVar, sProp or Success Event) and the desired date range.

• Next is the tricky part, in the Google Site menu, insert a Google iFrame Gadget as shown here:

• Once this gadget is embedded, click the Properties link which will show the window below.  In your SiteCatalyst tab/window, use the new shortcut link feature (if you need a refresher on how to do this, see this post) to create a shortcut link to the report you created above.  Enter this shortcut link in the “URL to content” box.  Choose the sizing and border settings as you wish and when you are done, save the gadget.  The only bummer in this technique is that Omniture only keeps these shortcut links for one year which means that you would have to repeat this step with a new link once per year (please join me in lobbying Omniture to make these links indefinite!)

• Finally, save the new Google Site Page and you are finished.  You can go to the Google site and search on a phrase you included in your page (i.e. “Twitter”) and see the new page in the results list:

• When your users click on the page you created, they will see a page like the following:

Presto!  You now have a SiteCatalyst report embedded into a Google Site already used by your stakeholder that provides useful information and as much free text/graphic context as you would like to add!

How Much of a Web Analytics Geek Are You?
So the above example is specific to Google Sites, but there are many ways to create iFrames of the shortcut links or the Widgets discussed earlier.  However, if you do use Google Sites and are truly a Web Analytics geek, there is a checkbox in the Google Site setup that allows you to track how Google Site pages are used (using a tool that shall remain nameless here!).  Said tool would allow you to see how often people are accessing your wonderful new page and might look something like this:

Final Thoughts
Since most of you out there are more technical than I am, I expect that you can apply these concepts in ways I never imagined to do amazing things.  The goal of this post was simply to get you to “think outside of the box” and realize that there are many more ways to share your SiteCatalyst data other than e-mailed reports and SiteCatalyst Dashboards.  Enjoy!

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.

I know many Omniture clients that spend much of their time using SiteCatalyst for SEO and SEM tracking.  If you are one of these clients, the following will show you a fun little trick that you can use to improve your Search reporting by setting custom Search Success Events.

That Darn Instances Metric!
As a Search marketer, you tend to spend a lot of your time in the various Paid and Natural Search Engine reports within SiteCatalyst.  While in those reports, you would normally use the out-of-the-box “Searches” metric for most of your reporting.  If you stay in the Search reports, life is good, as you can use the Searches metric and any other Success Event to see what success takes place after visitors arrive from a particular Search Engine or Search Keyword.  For example, here is a report that shows Searches and Form Completions coming from various Search Engines:

However, as I blogged about a while back in my Instances post, the Searches metric is really a really a renaming of the dreaded SiteCatalyst “Instances” metric.  Why is that bad?  It means that if you need to see Searches in any other Conversion Variable (eVars) report, you are out of luck.  For example, let’s say that your boss wants to see a report that shows Searches and Form Completes (and possibly a Calculated Metric that divides the two) by Site Locale (each country in which you do business).  To do this, you would open the Site Locale eVar report and add Form Completes, but guess what…there is no “Searches” metric to add to the report since it only exists in the Search Engine reports!  Rats!

Let’s say you are an eternal optimist and you say, darn it, I can solve this!  I’ve read all of Omni Man’s blogs and there has to be a way to do this.  After pouring over past blogs, you finally arrive at the perfect answer!  I can use Conversion Subrelations to break the Search Engine report down by Site Locale while the Searches metric is in the report!  So you go back to the Searches report shown above and realize that all you have to do is use the green magnifying glass icon to and break the report down by the Site Locale eVar (which BTW will only work if Site Locale has Full Subrelations enabled).  I’m a genius, you think to yourself!  Then you wait for the report to load…brimming with anticipation only to see this…

Yuck!  What’s up with all of the “n/a” values?  Foiled again by the darn Instances metric!

Don’t Panic!
Don’t be so hard on yourself since if you got that far, you are ok in my book!  Just consider this a well earned lesson on why you have to be careful around any Instances metric (don’t fall for the same thing with Product Views!).  As always, I don’t like to just present problems since the Omni Man is all about solutions!  To solve this enigma, we have to find a way to get around the Instances metric.  At a high level, the solution is to set custom Success Events when visitors arrive at your site from a Search Engine.  I usually set a Natural Search, Paid Search and Paid + Natural Search metrics.  This can be done in several ways, but the easiest way is through the Unified Sources Vista Rule or the JavaScript equivalent known as the Channel Manager Plug-in (I recommend talking to Omniture Consulting about implementation details).  Regardless of how you implement it, once you have true custom success events set when visitors arrive from a search engine, you can use these success event anywhere within Omniture SiteCatalyst which means that you can now create the report you were looking for above like shown here:

The following are some other advantages of using a custom success events for Searches:

1. You can use these metrics in Calculated Metrics (i.e. Shopping Cart Additions/External Natural Search) without having to rely upon the ExcelClient
2. You can create Alerts on Paid or Natural Search metrics
3. You can add some cool SiteCatalyst Plug-ins or advanced features to the new Custom Search success events that make them even better than the out-of-the-box Searches metric (i.e. Avoid back button duplicate counting by using the getValOnce plug-in or Event Serialization).
4. You have an easy way to create a metric report for Searches (see below) and add it to a SiteCatalyst Dashboard

The only caveat I will give you is that the new custom Search metrics will probably never tie exactly with the out-of-the-box metrics, but in many cases you can make them more accurate and useful.  If SEO/SEM is something that is important to your organization, I suggest you talk to Omniture Consulting and give it a whirl…  Let me know if you come up with any other cool uses for this functionality…

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.

While there are many great out-of-the-box reports in Omniture SiteCatalyst, there is one key limitation to them that can cause problems from time to time.  This limitation is that you cannot apply  SAINT Classifications to out-of-the-box reports.  In this post, I will demonstrate why this can cause issues and how I get around this limitation.

What’s The Big Deal?
So you cannot classify some out-of-the-box reports.  What’s the dig deal?  Let me show you a real-life example of where this limitation comes into play.  Let’s imagine that your boss tells you that he needs to see a weekly report of the top 25 Natural Search Keywords leading to Site Registrations.  No problem!  Simply open the Natural Search keywords report, add the Site Registrations Success Event and schedule the report for delivery (easy enough!).  However, the life of a web analyst is never that easy.  Next your boss says that he needs to see the same weekly report, but broken out by Branded vs. Non-Branded Natural Search Keywords.  Uh oh!  Now you have a problem.  Your first thought is to use the ExcelClient to download the Natural Search Keywords report and then use a pivot table to group each Keyword into Branded vs. Non-Branded buckets.  However, you soon realize that this will soon become a maintenance nightmare as you will have to manually do this each week and there isn’t an easy way to distribute the report to all Omniture users like you can through a SiteCatalyst Dashboard.  So next, you recall reading a [brilliant] blog post about Classifications and realize that the easiest thing to do would be to classify the top 200-300 Natural Search Keywords and then add the Branded vs. Non-Branded Classification version of the report to a SiteCatalyst Dashboard.  This would only require a one-time work effort and barely any maintenance.  Problem solved!  However, when you go to the Admin Console to add a Classification to the Natural Search Keywords report, you soon discover, that there is no way to do this (why, Omniture why?).  The inability to classify this report can have a real negative impact on end-user adoption, which is why at times, this can be a big deal.

But this is not the only place where this limitation can haunt you.  Another common example, is the Visit Number report.  It is pretty cool that you can look at the Visit Number report and add a Success Event metric and see what percentage of success takes place within the first visit, second visit, etc…  But if your site has a “long tail” it may take many visits for success to take place.  How would you like to present your boss with a report about Internal Searches that looks like this:

While not the worst thing in the world, this report does not provide an easy way to perform analysis, nor does it “tell a story” at an executive level due to its level of granularity.  However, if you could classify the Visit Number report, you could create a more functional report like this:

Here we can more easily see that the bulk of Onsite Searches are being conducted by first timers and those who have been on the site many times which can lead to follow-on questions.

The following are some of the places where I have run into this limitation:

1. Search Keywords
2. Search Engines
3. Visit Number
4. Referrers/Referring Domains
5. GeoSegmentation Country, Region, City, etc…

The Workaround
So if this limitation has affected you or you could see how it might in the future, how do you get around it?  Thankfully, the solution is very easy if you know what you are doing.  To get around this problem, all you need to do is to use JavaScript (or in some cases a VISTA Rule)to copy the values stored in these out-of-the-box reports into regular Traffic Variables (sProps) and Conversion Variables (eVars).  By duplicating this data into custom variables, which can be classified, you can use the Menu Customizer to steer your users to the custom versions of each report (which contain the Classification) instead of the out-of-the-box versions.  I have seen this quick/easy solution help clients turn otherwise unused reports into versions that are popular amongst SiteCatalyst end-users.

Enjoy!

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.

A few weeks ago, with the release of SiteCatalyst v14.6, there were a few interface features added that people like me have been requesting for a long time.  While there were many new items released, two of the more simple ones can go a long way to making the lives of power users easier.  Below is a quick description of these two enhancements and why I like them.

Send Link
Have you ever worked hard to create a beautiful report in SiteCatalyst and wanted to share it with others at your company?  To do so, you usually have to save it as a Bookmark or to a Dashboard and then share that Bookmark or Dashboard and then tell users how to find it and add it to their list of Bookmarks or Dashboards.  Alternatively, you could send it to them in PDF/Excel/CSV format, but then they cannot manipulate it (change the dates, add different metrics, etc…).  Well all of that is a thing of the past now since you can now easily send a link to the exact report you are looking at to one of your peers.  The only prerequisite is that they have a log-in to SiteCatalyst and have security access to the report suite and variables used in the report.  This is a real time-saver and I think will be useful in driving SiteCatalyst adoption by getting people into the tool to explore vs. always looking at reports sent via e-mail.

To send a link to a report, simply click the new icon found in the toolbar…

…and you can copy this link and send it to people at your organization.  I was told that these links would be good for a year which should be plenty of time.  The way I am excited to use this feature is in PowerPoint presentations where you can put a screen shot of a report and then make the entire screen shot image a hyperlink to the real report so when you are presenting you can easily dive right into the report without having to fumble around to find different reports when you are short on time and/or in front of executives.

My only complaints/enhancement requests of this new feature are as follows:

• I would like to be able to have this feature for Dashboards as well
• It would be cool if you could e-mail the link to SiteCatalyst users be picking names from an address book since they all exist in the Admin Console anyway.  Even better if you could set-up some groups for people who you commonly e-mail
• In the future, it would be interesting if you could send the link to a Publishing List which would show the same report, but for a different report suite to different groups of people (however, this would mean you need to check a box to determine if the link is variable or not like Dashboard reportlets)

Update Dashboard Reportet
The second new feature I love is the ability to update Dashboard reportlets.  Using this feature, you can now make changes to a Dashboard reportlet much more easily than in the past.  Previously, to update a Dashboard reportlet, you would have to:

1. Open the Dashboard
2. Launch the reportlet into full view
3. Make your changes
4. Click to add the new version back to the Dashboard
5. Update the reportlet settings
6. Wait for the Dashboard to open
7. Delete the old version of the reportlet
   
8. Move the new version to the correct space (phew!)

Now you can accomplish the same thing by doing the following:

1. Open the Dashboard
2. Launch the reportlet into full view
3. Make your changes
4. Click the new link (shown below) to update the Dashboard reportlet

As you can see, this is much easier and much more intuitive for end-users.  In addition, you can even change report suites and view the same reportlet for a different data set and update it and it will be saved back to the Dashboard tied to the new report suite!  Very exciting for Omniture guys like me!

Well those are my two favorite enhancements, but I know there were many more made.  Let me know if you agree/disagree that these two items are useful or if there are other feature updates that you have found useful or if you have additional suggestions on how these two can be improved (maybe Omniture Product Management will end up reading these!).  Thanks!

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.