Those of you who have read my blogs for a while know that I am a big proponent of using as many SiteCatalyst features as possible.  However, in this post I am going to venture into uncharted territory by suggesting reasons to NOT use a SiteCatalyst feature – File Downloads.  While you may be skeptical about this, I ask that you hear me out on my reasons and alternative approach before passing judgment!

How Does the File Downloads Feature Work?
Before dismissing the File Downloads functionality, let’s take a minute to understand what it does.  Like most web analytics programs, SiteCatalyst provides out-of-the-box functionality for File Downloads such that when a website visitor clicks to download a file, it captures the file name in a special File Downloads report.  In reality, file downloads are treated a lot like Exit Links as far as SiteCatalyst is concerned.  The File Downloads report is very handy since you can open it and see which files are downloaded most like this:

Why I Don’t Like Using The File Downloads Report
As I have become more sophisticated in how I approach SiteCatalyst, I have found several flaws in the File Downloads report.  Here is a quick summary of my issues with it:

• One of my pet peeves of the File Download report is that it stores the path of the file with both an http:// and a https:// so you often times have the same file represented twice in your reports.  This throws off your data and it can confuse users.  You can modify this by tweaking your JavaScript file, but I wish there were an out-of-the-box option to do this.
• There is no easy way to see how each file download impacts website Success Events.
• Often times, I want to see where the website visitor was when they downloaded a particular file, especially if the same file can be downloaded from different pages on my site.  In the past, I have worked around this by modifying my JavaScript file to pass the file name to a custom sProp and then enabling the Previous Value Plug-in to store the previous pagename and enabling a Traffic Data Correlation between file name and Previous Page.  This provides a way where I can choose any file name and then break it down by pagename to see the ranked order of pages it was downloaded from.  Net Result – Out of the box File Downloads report doesn’t get me what I want.
• However, the real reason I don’t like the File Download report is that it ruins my Pathing reports.  I love pathing.  I like seeing where people go backwards and forwards through my site.  But when I look at the Next Page Flow report or the Next Page report, I am not getting an accurate picture if there are File Downloads on a page.  There are many cases where the most clicked element on a web page is a PDF that visitors download.  However, when I look at my pathing reports, this file is nowhere to be seen.  I can see it in the ClickMap report, but not in my SiteCatalyst pathing reports.  Therefore, when my users look at the next page report, they are looking at incorrect data due to the fact that 10% of visitors downloaded that PDF.

So What Should You Do…
I don’t like to complain without offering alternative solutions so the following outlines what I would do instead of using the File Downloads report.  Per my list above, at the end of the day, I have the following requirements for understanding File Download activity on my site:

• Easily see which files have been downloaded the most (and only once per file regardless of http or https)
• Understand from which pages visitors are downloading files
• See how each file download impacts my KPI’s
• Ability to see file downloads in my pathing reports so I can see what is really happening on each page

Seems reasonable enough right?  So here is how you accomplish all of these without using the File Download report:

1. Work with your developer to treat every file download as if it were a web page on your site such that it is passed to the Pagename variable (s.pagename)
2. Ensure that when passing the file name to the s.pagename variable, you strip out the http or https so you just get the raw file path (you can also strip out your domain to make the pagename shorter)
3. When creating this pagename, be sure to insert the phrase “file|” or “file:” in the pagename (or something similar)
4. Remove the File Download code from your JavaScript file (so you don’t get double-charged server calls)

So that doesn’t seem so hard does it?  But what does this actually get you?  Let me extol the countless benefits:

• Passing the file download name to the s.pagename variable means SiteCatalyst sees file downloads the same way it sees any page on your website.  This means you can see file downloads in Pathing reports so your next page and previous page reports will be accurate.
• If you remove the http or https you will only have one pagename for each file so you avoid the duplicate file issue I mentioned earlier.
• If you insert a file identifier (“file:”) then you can recreate the current File Downloads report you have today by just opening the Pages report and doing an advanced filter on “file:” in the Search area area.
• If you want to see which page visitors were on previous to downloading a specific file, you no longer need to use an extra sProp nor enable a correlation.  All you have to do is find the file in the Pages report and open the Previous Page pathing report.
• If, by chance, people link directly to your file downloads, you can also calculate the Bounce Rate of each File Download since it is now part of the pagename variable which has pathing (and thereby Single Access & Entries) by default.
• Anyone want to see Daily, Weekly and Monthly Unique Visitors for each File Download?  You just did it if you have those enabled on your Pagename variable (which most people have by default)!
• As I mentioned above, it is not easy to see how often each file on your web site “participates” in your key success events?  This is because you cannot enable Participation on the File Downloads report.  However, now that File Downloads are part of the Pagename report, you can easily enable Participation on the s.pagename variable (which you should already be doing) to see how often each file download impacts your key KPI’s.
• Last, but not least, if you have any correlations to the Pagename report (which is very common), you now have those correlations to every file on your website.  For example, if you have Pagename correlated to Visit Number or GeoSegmentation Country, you now have all file downloads correlated to these as well without having to pay for any extra correlations or variables!

All in all, you can get a lot of bang for your buck with this handy trick.  I think it can easily save you a few sProps, correlations and unique visitor CPM increases (I make no money on this blog so feel free to send contract savings my way )!

Final Thoughts…
Well there you have it.  These are the reasons why I have chosen to take an alternative approach to the File Download report and I think it makes a pretty compelling argument!  I will be curious to get your thoughts and see if you agree or disagree with me on this…

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.

Last week I shared a way to capture the various traffic sources (i.e. SEM, SEO, E-mail, etc…) so you could calculate the Bounce Rate for each of these Traffic Source types.  In this post I am going to build upon this and show you another cool way you can leverage this to have what I call Cross-Visit Traffic Source Attribution.

What is Cross-Visit Traffic Source Attribution?
As an online marketer, one of the things I want to see is how each traffic source leads to online success.  Within a visit, it is relatively easy to see which Traffic Source types lead to success.  Normally this is done by capturing the various campaign elements and using SAINT Classifications to roll these up into Traffic Source types.  However, what many marketers want to see is the overall mix of Traffic Source types that lead to success over several visits.  For example, maybe Paid Search is always the last thing your visitors are doing before placing an order, but maybe the first thing they did was to click on an SEO keyword.  I touched upon this a bit in an old blog post on Cross-Visit Participation which you can review here.  If your organization has a desire to see a high-level view of which combinations of Traffic Source types lead to success, then Cross-Visit Traffic Source Attribution may be your answer.

Implementing Cross-Visit Traffic Source Attribution
If you have followed the instructions I laid out in my last blog post, then you have already done much of the work required to enable this feature in your SiteCatalyst implementation.  Now that you have an sProp that contains the Traffic Source type set on the first click of each website visit, all you have to do is the following:

1. Pass this value to an eVar (Most Recent Allocation)
2. Implement the Cross-Visit Participation plug-in
3. Have the eVar expire when your primary success event takes place (i.e. Orders)

As a refresher, the Cross-Visit Participation plug-in stores a list of elements, in this case Traffic Sources, with each visit so when a Success Event takes place, you can attribute the success to the current string of cross-visit values.  For example, if someone comes to your site three times, first from SEO, second from E-mail and third from SEM and then places an order, the current value in the eVar would be “SEO|E-mail|SEM.”  As time goes by, and you have more website visitors, the combinations that occur most frequently will rise to the top (web analytics darwinism?).  Usually the single Traffic Sources will be at the top (i.e. SEO by itself or SEM by itself), but what I look for are the combinations that are at the top of the list.  I sometimes even hide the individual items using the advanced search feature (Tip=Show if it Contains “|”) so I can see only multiple session Traffic Sources:

The only warning I will give about using this functionality is that it might burst the bubble of some of your co-workers who think that their Traffic Source type is the “end all, be all” of success.  In my experience, many people bounce around quite a bit and the results can surprise you!

First Touch, Last Touch
When it comes to attribution, many talk about First Touch, Last Touch and All Touch, meaning which Traffic Source was the first that visitors saw in a sequence leading to success, the that visitors saw last or a list of all of the Traffic Sources that influenced the success.  In SiteCatalyst, the easiest way to implement First Touch and Last Touch is to use two separate eVars.  Both capture Traffic Sources, but one has Original Allocation and a long expiration (never or say 6 months), while the other eVar is set to Most Recent Allocation and expires at the Visit.  However, you can also use the new Cross-Visit Traffic Sources eVar shown above to do this.  Simply download the above report to Excel and then isolate the first Traffic Source or the last Traffic Source and add up the Orders (or use a Pivot Table) to see the total for each Traffic Source.

Traffic Source Influence (All Touch)
For me however, I am most interested in seeing the total influence of a specific Traffic Source (All Touch).  While this is not readily available in SiteCatalyst (since Linear eVar Allocation only works within one visit), you can use the new eVar mentioned above to quantify the potential impact/influence of a specific Traffic Source Type.  Here is how you do it:

1. Download the report above to Excel (you decide if you want to include the single Traffic Sources or only when multiple exist – as shown above)
2. Use an Excel Formula to set the Traffic Source Type for a specific Traffic Source Type (i.e. SEO) in all rows where it is found (see green column below)
3. Create a Pivot table off this new column (i.e. SEO) and look at the total Success Events (Orders in this example) that are associated with a row that contains the Traffic Source Type you chose in step two (in this case 754,328)
4. Take that total (i.e. SEO Influenced Orders in this case) and divide it by the Total Orders (in this case 76.07%).  This will show you how much SEO influenced Orders such that SEO was involved in a visit that ultimately led to an Order.

Finally, if you want to see Cross-Visit Attribution of individual Campaign elements (Tracking Codes) instead of Traffic Sources, you can apply the same principles shown in this post and my last post.

Hopefully, between this post and my last post, you will be able to answer the nagging Traffic Source questions that come up from time to time and help your organization better understand where it should use its precious marketing dollars…

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.

Thanks to all of you who took the time to complete my SiteCatalyst quiz.  I hope it was a fun way to put your knowledge to the test.

So for the rest of this post, I will show how people answered the survey and point out what answers I was looking for.  When looked at as an entire population, if I include anytime someone got the correct answer, the majority of people got 10 correct answers out of 15 (66.67%).  However if I just look at just those responses where the exact right answer was given (no incorrect answers included where you could check off multiple boxes), the average score went down to about 6 out of 15.  However, please bear in mind that I am not an educator so if you interpreted a question differently than I did and gave a different answer, it is probably my fault not yours so don’t lose any sleep over it!  On the bright side, one (anonymous) individual in Europe got 14/15 correct (I am resisting the urge to find you by IP address and hire you!).  Either way, I strongly encourage you to look at your answers and see which ones you missed and read the linked posts below so you can become a SiteCatalyst Ninja!!

Question #1 (Correct Answer=Traffic Variables (sProps))
This first question was intended to be an easy one.  Think of it as a way to build engagement and not scare you off.  Most of you got this answer correct, but I was surprised to see that 33% of you thought that you could enable Pathing on more than just Traffic Variables (sProps).  Keep in mind that one of the main reasons to use sProps is to enable Pathing.   If you need a refresher, please check out my past posts on Traffic Variables (sProps) or on Pathing.

Question #2 (Correct Answer=True)
For many of these True/False questions, it is hard for me to tell if you got the right answer based upon knowledge or luck, but I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt!  In this case 75% of you were correct in saying that it is possible to share a segment with other users in your company.  I show how to do this in my past post about the Admin Console.  Keep in mind that you can only share a segment within one report suite so if you have multiple report suites you are out of luck.  If you really need to share segments across multiple report suites, the only way I know to do this is to create them under a shared Omniture User ID and give that ID to multiple users so they can see the segments owned by that ID.

Question #3 (Correct Answer = ZERO)
This question is admittedly a difficult one.  To get this one right, you would have had to really been in the trenches with SAINT Classifications.  Those who have ever tried to classify a variable that has a value of “0″ in the Key column have probably learned this the hard way.  While you can classify a value of “1″ or “43,” there is no way to classify a Key value of “0″ in SiteCatalyst.  Therefore, you need to pass in a text value for “0″ so you can classify it later on.  Therefore, the best answer to this question is the 3rd answer below “ZERO.”

Question #4 (Correct Answer=When a Success Event takes place or after a specified Time Period)
You guys knocked it out of the park on this one.  The correct answer here is that an eVar can be expired when a Success Event takes place or based upon a time period.  This happens to be one of my pet peeves since I really wish you could expire an eVar based upon a Success Event or a time period (whichever comes first).  There are many cases where having this ability would have saved me a lot of time.  Maybe in a future release (or all of you can help me by requesting this as a feature request!).

Question #5 (Correct Answer=True)
Most of you got this one right as well.  One of the cool things about classifying Conversion Variables (eVars) is that if you have paid for full subrelations on the eVar it is based off of, you get full subrelations on all of the Classifications.   This can save you time and money!

Question #6 (Correct Answer= All but Conversion Variables (eVars))
This question was a hard one and another one of my pet peeves.  The correct answer is the second one “Conversion Variables (eVars).”  The security features in the Groups area of the Admin Console are very good and a much better way to hide reports from select groups of users than the Menu Customizer.  However, for some unknown reason, you can hide pretty much everything in SiteCatalyst except Conversion Variables (eVars), which are some of the most critical reports!  I am not sure why this one thing was omitted and I have been asking for this for some time.  Hopefully it is on the product roadmap.

Question #7 (Correct Answer=None of the Above)
This question probably caused some confusion due to the wording, but the correct answer here is “None of the Above” since I was looking for the best way to assign credit across multiple visits.  Most of you fell for the trap I set here and chose “Linear Allocation.”  Many people I talk to think that Linear Allocation of an eVar works across multiple visits, but it does not.  Linear Allocation only works within a visit (for the most part, but the details are a bit confusing!).  Therefore, the real best answer for this question was Cross-Visit Participation which I covered a while ago.  Cross-Visit Participation is the only real way to assign credit to an eVar across multiple visits.  If you are not familiar with Cross-Visit Participation, please review my previous post.

Question #8 (Correct Answer=None of the Above)
Importing offline or external data via Data Sources is a more advanced topic, but many of you look like you are familiar with it.  The majority of you got this one correct since none of the options provided here will allow you to back out data sources metrics.  For this reason you have to be extremely careful when importing Data Sources data since there is really no going back if you make a mistake!

Question #9 (Correct Answer=False)
This is one of those questions you used to get from your teacher and absolutely hate them afterwards when they told you the answer, so I will apologize in advance.  The key phrase here is “the only difference” so the correct answer here is “False.”  While the difference cited here is correct, there is one really big difference between Correlations and Subrelations that you need to know.  That difference is that you can correlate two sProps, five sProps or twenty sProps with each other, but with Subrelations it is an all or nothing proposition.  It would be great if you could Subrelate just two eVars together, but that is not currently possible like it is for sProp Correlations.  This is a key thing that every SiteCatalyst Ninja must know!

Question #10 (Correct Answer=Unique Visitor Counts an Pathing)
Most of you got this one correct.  The key disadvantages of Roll-ups are that they don’t de-dup uniques and you cannot do Pathing analysis.  But hey, they don’t cost a lot!  Personally, I tend to not use Roll-ups since I can duplicate a lot of the info they provide using the ExcelClient and I like Pathing and de-duped Unique Visitors so I tend to favor Multi-Suite tagged sites.

Question #11 (Correct Answer=Calculated Metrics)
Great job on this one as most of you got this one correct!  In my post about Conversion Funnels I explained all of the ways they can be used and highlighted what, in my opinion, is an oversight of the functionality that you cannot add Calculated Metrics to them.  I hope this ability will be available at some point in the future, but in the meantime, you should keep this in mind when determining whether you should pass in a metric organically or rely on a calculated metric.

Question #12 (Correct Answer=Page Views)
In this question, I allowed you to choose from the following metrics.  While most of you got this correct that the Page Views metric is available in Traffic Variable Correlations those of you who also said that you could add Visits, DUV’s and MUV’s were not correct.  Please keep in mind that only Page Views are available when using Correlations.

Question #13 (Correct Answer=Classifications cannot be used in DataWarehouse Segments)
I had a hard time figuring out how to word this question, but if you really understand SAINT Classifications, you should have been able to get this one right by the process of elimination.  As you can see, most people had a hard time with this one, but the correct answer did emerge in the end as the only true statement below is that Classifications cannot be used in DataWarehouse Segments.  We can deduce this by understanding that 1) Classifications can be used in correlations/subrelations, 2) Classifications can be used in Omniture Discover and 3) Classifications cannot have pathing enabled in SiteCatalyst (You can, however, apply Pathing to classifications in Omniture Discover, which you can read about in this post on Page Type Pathing).

Question #14 (Correct Answer=False)
While I have been using Advanced Segment Insight (ASI) segments for many years, I only recently figured out that you can change the ASI type from recurring to time slice and vice versa if you know what you are doing so the correct answer below is actually False (the whole double-negative thing!).  If you have a static ASI that has run for say last month, you can use the “Add Data” link to bring up the ASI segment set-up screen, change the type to Daily Recurring and make the start date the day after your ASI last ran.  Just be sure to uncheck the box that asks if you want to remove existing data or you will lose your past ASI data.  If the ASI you already have is a Daily Recurring, simply wait until it has finished its daily processing and click the “Cancel” link.  Once you have cancelled it, you can click the “Add Data” link, make the type “Time Slice,” select your dates and set it to run.  Again you have to be sure to uncheck the remove existing data checkbox.  I am not sure if this is “officially” supported, but I have done lots of testing on it and so far it has worked fine…

Question #15 (Correct Answer=>!)
This last question is one of those “inside secrets” that only true SiteCatalyst Ninjas know.  Unfortunately, only 32% of you got this one right as the correct answer is “>!” which is a way to tell if a value exists or not in a specific variable when using the segment builder.  I covered this in my Tips & Tricks are of the Segment Builder post so if you didn’t get this one correct, check out that post which has lots of goodies in it.

Well, there you have it.  Hopefully this was a fun way for you to see some of the things that SiteCatalyst Ninjas know.  If you keep reading my blog posts, I can (almost) guarantee you will learn everything that there is to 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.  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.

Did you ever go through your clothes closet one day and figure out that your never wear half of the stuff in there?  It seems like it is always much easier to buy new clothes than it is to discard old clothes.  Well, the same thing hold true for websites.  Most clients I worked with had thousands of web pages on their website, but in reality, only a fraction of them had an impact on their website success.  Having too many pages on your website costs your business money for maintenance, translation (if your company is international) and makes the design and navigation more complex.  Often times, these extra pages on your website make it more difficult for your visitors to do the small number of things you actually want them to do.  In this post, I will demonstrate how you can help “trim the fat” from your website.

Finding the Pages that Matter
So how do you determine which pages matter and which pages don’t?  The first step is to determine the website Success Events for which you want to optimize.  If you care about multiple Success Events, this analysis becomes more complex, but the concept is similar.  Therefore, in this post, we will assume a scenario where one website Success Event, Website Registrations,  is the primary objective.  The first thing we need to do is to ensure that a SiteCatalyst Success Event is being set for every successful Website Registration.  Once this is in place, you will want to talk to your Account Manager or ClientCare and tell them to enable Participation for the Website Registration Success Event.  As I covered previously in the Participation blog post, when Participation is enabled for a Success Event, Omniture will track every page in the flow leading to that Success Event and give each page “credit” for the success.  Over time, the pages that are the most often in the flow, or participating, in the eventual Website Registration will have high Participation scores and those that do not, will have low Participation scores.  Once Participation is enabled and has run for a while, you will see a report that looks like this:

While this is optional, from here, I like to download this data to Microsoft Excel or pull into into Excel using the ExcelClient so I can re-sort the data and create any totals I need.  In this case, I look and see that by the time I get to the 32nd page on my site, each page is participating in fewer than 1,000 of my 45,560 total Website Registrations  taking place in this time period.  Now it is important to keep in mind that many of the pages below the 31st page may have been in the flow of the top pages that led to success, but the data suggests that they were critical less often than other pages (for this particular Success Event).

If this website had 15,000 total pages, you could inform your web team that 31 website pages (.2%) accounted for the majority of your 45,560 Website Registrations.  This begs the question as to what purpose the other 14,969 pages are doing!!  However, I would not suggest you use this data to immediately start cutting pages from your website since there may be other purposes served by many of these pages, but rather, I do think it is reasonable to have an intelligent conversation about which pages should stay and which should go.  My philosophy is that a website is comprised of a set of KPI’s and pages help achieve those KPI’s, so if you can show that a page is not “Participating” in any of the top KPI’s, then it may just be taking up space (like that 80’s t-shirt that no longer fits!).  You may even find that this type of analysis leads to a smaller, simpler version of your website, which in turn makes the lives of your web developers much easier and allows them to spend more time on the pages that do matter!

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.