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.

By default, most Omniture SiteCatalyst clients are tracking their external Marketing Campaigns using Campaign Tracking.  These reports allow you to see how many Success Events take place on your site for each type of Campaign you run (i.e. E-mail, Paid Search, etc…).  However, I am surprised how rare it is that Omniture clients are tracking their Internal Campaigns (also referred to as Internal Promotions) to the same extent.  Most websites promote products or content on their site through the use of display ads, buttons or links.  These Internal Campaigns should be tracked in the same way as external campaigns.  While I have touched upon this concept a bit in the past in the Conversion Variable post and the Products Variable post, in this post, I will provide the basics on Internal Campaign tracking.

Why Track Internal Campaigns?
So why should you track Internal Campaigns?  At most organizations, there is constant debate about which website promotions perform better than others.  This is especially the case for high-profile pages like the Home Page.  For example, the screen shot below shows four distinct Internal Campaign Promos:

While you can try to see how often visitors are clicking on each promotion item by looking at Pathing reports (look how many people went from Page A to Page B where you had a promotion on Page A), this takes a lot of time and won’t help you if you have multiple links to this same destination page on the same page.  You can try to use the ClickMap feature of SiteCatalyst, but in my experience, ClickMap data is not wholly accurate.  If you have a tool like Test&Target then you can easily test and promote content that is proven to be the best in each content area, but if you don’t, you can use Internal Campaign tracking to provide some basic information.

How to Track Internal Campaigns?
Tracking Internal Campaigns is done through an eVar.  As I have pointed out in the past, the s.campaigns variable in SiteCatalyst is really nothing more than a predefined eVar with Full Subrelations.  Therefore, you can track Internal Campaigns in the same way.  I tend to do this using the getQueryParameter plug-in which captures a code placed in the URL and passes it to the Internal Campaigns eVar.  These codes can be whatever you like, but the parameter identifier should be different from what is used for external campaigns.  In the fictitious example shown here, a user has clicked on a website banner and the destination URL has a “pid” parameter which passes the code “home_hero_112″ to the Internal Campaigns eVar:

As you can imagine, the hardest part of Internal Campaign Tracking is adding tracking codes to each promotion link on your site.  However, this can be built into the process of banner/promo creation and done on a going forward basis if needed.  All you need to do is to come up with a logical naming convention or if you want, you can even just use numeric codes and use SAINT Classifications to add meta-data later.  When using SAINT for Internal Campaigns I tend to use the following Classifications:

1. Page on which the promo banner was shown
2. Location on page of promo banner
3. Format (i.e. GIF vs. Flash)
4. Creative Copy (i.e. $50 off vs. 10% Discount)
5. Owner of the Promo

How to Use Internal Campaigns?
Once you are passing Internal Campaign codes to an eVar, it is time to use the data for analysis.  The most basic way to do this is to open the Internal Campaigns eVar report and look to see how many of your website Success Events take place after a visitor clicks on one of your Internal Campaign elements.  You can see an example of this in the following report:

In this example, I have set an additional “Internal Campaign Clicks” Success Event to track each time a visitor clicks on an Internal Campaign promo item.  You could rely on the “Instances” metric, but as I have stated in this post, I am not a big fan of this.  This new “Internal Campaign Clicks” metric is an internal equivalent to the Clicks metric set by default for External Campaigns.

However, there is one difference between Internal and External Campaigns to keep in mind.  Unlike External Campaigns that usually have one value per visit, visitors can click on multiple Internal Campaigns within one session.  Therefore it is important that you understand the principles of eVar Allocation so you understand which Internal Campaign element will get credit for website Success Events.  If you want to go really deep with Internal Campaigns, you can even set multiple eVars such that you have the following:

1. One eVar to store the first Internal Campaign clicked in a visit (First Value)
2. One eVar to store the last Internal Campaign clicked in a visit (Most Recent)
3. One eVar to store all Internal Campaigns clicked in a visit (Linear) [remember that Linear Allocation is only Visit-based!]
4. One eVar to store all Internal Campaigns clicked across multiple visits using Cross-Visit Participation

One of my favorite reports to run is one in which I look for synergistic effects between External and Internal Campaigns.  Since the External Campaigns eVar comes with Full Subrelations, you can automatically break it down by the Internal Campaigns variable.  Doing this allows you to see which combinations of External campaigns and Internal Campaigns lead to success.  For example, it may be the case that a particular Paid Search Keyword, when combined with a specific Internal Campaign promo converts above the average for the site.  These hidden gems can help you boost overall conversion and are found by simply opening a Subrelation report between the two variables as shown here:

Finally, another benefit of tracking Internal Campaigns is that it enables you to improve your building of DataWarehouse Segments to include visitors who have/haven’t seen a particular Internal Promo.  This information can be valuable to re-marketing efforts in general.

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 this post, I am going to delve into an advanced topic that very few of my past Omniture customers had dealt with – Extracting Unique Visitor ID’s for re-marketing purposes.  Unless you have done a few Genesis integrations, this is most likely functionality that is new so I will do my best to keep it simple and explain why it is useful.

Why Extract Unique Visitor ID’s?
The easiest way to explain this topic is through an example.  Let’s imagine that your business sends lots of marketing e-mails to customers and prospects.  Each of these e-mail recipients, has a unique ID in your e-mail system (we’ll use Responsys for this example).  If you are a good web analyst, you should have set-up your e-mails so that when an e-mail recipient receives an e-mail and clicks on one of its links, they arrive at your website with both a campaign ID and a unique e-mail ID.  For example, your e-mail link may resolve to:

www.test.com?cid=springmailblast&mid=bd69c458909

Setting these in Conversion Variables (eVars) will allow you to see how each e-mail performed (through the campaign ID) and how often each e-mail recipient visited the site (through the e-mail ID).  If you aren’t doing this already, I suggest you start there.

Now let’s say you are capturing these ID’s.  What most intelligent marketers want to do is to segment their website behavior and then see if they can re-market to those who meet certain criteria.  For example, let’s say that you want to send a re-marketing e-mail to all e-mail recipients who came to your site from the e-mail and then filled out a specific offer form.  To do this, you would need to find a way to identify the e-mail ID’s of those completing the specific offer form you care about.  For an advanced SiteCatalyst user, this would be pretty easy since they would know that they could simply use a Conversion Variable Subrelation report to breakdown the Offer ID eVar value by the E-mail User ID eVar, but you would need to pay for Subrelations on one of these eVars.  However, there is a pre-built feature of SiteCatalyst that is available to do this using Data Warehouse.  In fact, SiteCatalyst has had the ability to extract Unique Visitor ID’s for many versions, but it is rarely used.  This feature allows you to tell SiteCatalyst which eVar stores your Unique User IDs (e-mail ID in this case) and will allow you to easily extract those ID’s using Data Warehouse.  By using this feature, you can automatically create a Data Warehouse Segment that pulls the Unique Visitor ID’s you are looking for and then simply tell SiteCatalyst what data points you want as you would in a normal Data Warehouse request.  As I mentioned, this is a bit more advanced, but pretty cool (even though it is sufficiently well hidden!).

How It Works
So how does it work?  The first step is to tell SiteCatalyst which eVar you are going to use to store your Unique Visitor IDs.  Please note that this is not the same as replacing Omniture’s Visitor ID in your js file.  To learn more about that, see this post.  Adding this value in the Admin Console will not affect your unique visitor counts in any way.  In this example, we will use e-mail ID’s which I have labeled “Responsys ID” and to do this we go to the Admin Console.  In the Admin Console, you select the report suite(s) and under the conversion area, select “Unique Visitor Variable” as shown here:

On the next screen, you simply choose the eVar that stores your Unique Visitor ID (Responsys ID in this example) as shown here:

Believe it or not, you are done!  But what does doing this actually do?  Now if you go to reports in this report suite, you will see a very subtle difference.  Per the example above, we want to identify all of the E-mail ID’s of people who looked at a particular website offer.  To do this, we will go to the eVar report that stores all of our website Offer ID’s which might look like this:

Normally, if you click on an eVar value in a report it will take you to a what is known as an “Item-Specific Summary” report which details how often and what percentage that eVar value was involved in each website success event.  I find that very few people actually use that report and often go to it once, panic and then hit the back button (I do encourage you to explore that report, but in the interest of staying on topic, I will continue)!  However, once you have enabled your Unique Visitor ID variable in the Admin Console, clicking this row will not take you to the Item Specific Summary report, but rather, will present you with a magical new option shown here:

If you then click on the new row that you see “Extract visitor IDs for event…” you can select the success event that you want (in this example we are looking for Form Completes).  Doing this will pop open a new screen that outlines what you are looking for like this:

From this screen, you choose the “Request” button at the bottom and you will be e-mailed a list of the ID’s that match your criteria.

In addition, you will also be taken to the Data Warehouse request manager screen (assuming you have security access to Data Warehouse) and you will see a new segment (see screen shot below) created that matches the criteria you are looking for (in this case, all Responsys ID’s that had a Form Complete and the form matched the specific Offer ID we selected from the eVar report).  While this screen is optional, I believe it is presented in case you want to further refine the segment or add additional data fields to your Data Warehouse report:

At first, I was skeptical and didn’t believe that my click in an eVar report had actually led to a full blown Data Warehouse segment having been created, so if you have any doubts, you can click the Edit Segment button and see the actual segment definition:

Now all you have to do is to add any data points you want to see related to the report area and use this newly created segment.  Obviously, you would want to include the Responsys ID’s in this example (I wish this would be pre-selected in the new Data Warehouse screen, but what can you do?), but you can add any others that you wish.

Additional Information
As you can see, while powerful, this functionality can get pretty involved!  If you have implemented Genesis integrations, you will find that much of this functionality comes bundled with Genesis so the Unique ID’s you need are automatically extracted and sent to partners for you through API’s.  However, I think it is useful to understand how this User ID extraction works, especially if you plan to do advanced customer segmentation.

Finally, keep in mind that there are many other ways to use this functionality beyond the simple e-mail example here.  One of the most powerful uses of this feature applies to sites where users login to the website.  In these cases, you can store the user’s ID (or a hashed version of it using DB Vista) and perform some amazing analysis and re-marketing to registered users.

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 discussed a topic which I called Segment Pathing, which allows you to see how Pathing on your site differs by Visitor Type or Campaign Tracking Code.  In this post I will build upon this concept with one of the most popular topics in the Web Analytics field: Bounce Rates.  While I am not as enthusiastic about Bounce Rates as many others in the field, I do understand their importance and why people like them them.  However, one of my gripes with the Bounce Rate metric (which I have always defined as Single Access/Entries) is that there is not an easy way in SiteCatalyst to see Bounce Rates for different types of visitors or Campaigns.  Unless they have Omniture Discover or are experts at ASI Segments, most of the Omniture clients I worked with were primarily looking at Bounce Rates for the entire population.  While this is OK, I think we can do better than that.  In this post I will show you how I create Segment Bounce Rates.  However, to get the most out of this post, I strongly encourage you to read my prior post on Bounce Rates and my previous post on Segment Pathing before reading this post.

Segment Bounce Rates
As I just described, my goal when looking at Bounce Rates is to be able to tell my peers how visitors are bouncing off key pages based upon both the page and the segment.  In my previous post, I highlighted two segments that I commonly use: 1) Visitor Type (i.e. Customer vs. Non-Customer) and 2) Campaign Tracking Code (i.e. visitors from Google keyword A vs. Yahoo keyword B).  If I can dissect how each segment bounces off pages, I can determine if I need to create different versions of pages for each Visitor Type or Campaign Code or I can use this information to build future A/B Tests using a tool like Test&Target.  As I mentioned in my last post, this is a moot point if your organization already has Omniture Discover, but as is always the case in my blogs, my goal is to show you how to do things if you only have access to SiteCatalyst.

Implementing Segment Bounce Rates
The good news is that if you have already followed my instructions from my previous post on Segment Pathing, you are 95% of the way to being done with implementing Segment Bounce Rates!  As a quick recap, in my last post I described a process in which you concatenate the Page Name with another Traffic Variable (sProp) that contains a segmentation that you care about (i.e. Visitor Type).  Once you have these values concatenated on every page, you enable Pathing so you can see paths or pages by segment.  However, when you enable Pathing on this new sProp, you immediately gain access to the two metrics that you need to calculate Bounce Rate: Single Access & Entries.  Therefore, without even knowing it, by implementing Segment Pathing, you have also implemented Segment Bounce Rates!  All you need to do is to create the Bounce Rate Calculated Metric (which hopefully you already have as a Global Calculated Metric) and you are done.

So how do you see the results of your work?  All you need to do is to open the new concatenated sProp and add the Bounce Rate metric to the report.  In the example shown below, I will use the Campaign Pathing sProp which shows Campaign Tracking Codes concatenated with Page Names.  I will add Visits, Single Access, Entries and Bounce Rate to the report:

As you can see, the Bounce Rate for each Tracking Code/Page Name combination is displayed and you can sort by any metric you wish.

As a best practice, I like to conduct a text search filter to isolate one Page Name so I can see how the Bounce Rates differ for the same page with different Campaign Tracking Codes.  In the following example, I filtered on the phrase “:Home Page” and limited my results to see only Home Page Entries and the associated Bounce rates of each Campaign Tracking Code:

Keep in mind that I am only showing a few simple examples here and that this functionality can be extended to any segment of your choosing.  If you want to get really advanced, you could even concatenate multiple items together, such as Visitor Type + Campaign Tracking Code + Page Name.  This would allow you to see how different Visitor Types, coming from specific Campaign Tracking Codes, landing on specific Pages, navigate your site or Bounce off pages (i.e. Customer:ggl_1:Home Page).  Just don’t go too crazy since there are character limits on sProps and you don’t want to exceed the 500,000 monthly unique limits on sProps.

Final Thoughts
As you can see, you get a “two for the price of one” deal if you do all of the steps in this post and the previous post.  If you don’t have access to Omniture Discover and want to see how people navigate through your site or bounce off your site pages by specific segment, I suggest you give this a try and see if it helps you.

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 past blog posts I have discussed SiteCatalyst Pathing Analysis in general and some specific examples (i.e. Success Event Pathing).  In this post, I will share a more advanced technique I call Segment Pathing which is often used to extend the capabilities of Pathing Analysis.  While this technique can be used in many different ways, I will use Visitor Type Pathing as the primary example and way to explain the concept.

What Is Segment Pathing?
Most of you are probably familiar with the idea of Pathing and that SiteCatalyst Pathing Analysis tracks the order in which a visitor looks at pages, sections or anything else on your site.  As such, it is normal to pass a page name or section name value to a Traffic Variable (sProp) so you can then enable Pathing.  However, there are often cases where you want to see how different segments of your visitors navigate through your site.  For example, what pages do New Yorkers look at first vs. those from Chicago?  Are there Pathing differences between younger vs. older visitors?

In order to see how these different segments navigate your site, you have the following options:

• Create an ASI Segment for the population you care about and look at Pathing reports there
• Utilize Omniture Discover (assuming you have paid for that), create a Segment and view Pathing reports

But what if you don’t have Discover and you don’t want to burn up an ASI segment perpetually for this Pathing Analysis?  The answer is to use Segment Pathing which I will demonstrate here.

An Example: Visitor Type Pathing
In this example, let’s assume that your organization has a cookie that stores (to the best of its ability) the current visitors customer status.  Often times companies assume that a visitor with no cookie value is a “Non-Customer” and those who have logged in or purchased something are “Customers” (obviously this is subject to cookie deletion).  Now let’s assume this this Visitor Type is passed to a SiteCatalyst Traffic Variable on every page.  Obviously, the name of each page is passed on each page and should be set to the s.pagename Traffic Variable.  Therefore, you have Page Name and Visitor Type, but no way to see pages by Visitor Type.  All you have to do is to set a new Traffic Variable (sProp) that concatenates these two values together in a format like this:

[VISITOR TYPE]:[PAGE NAME] or “Customer:Home Page”

If you do this on every page of the site and then have your Account Manager enable Pathing on this new sProp, you now have an intersection between Visitor Type and Page Name on each page and can use any of the many Pathing reports (including Fallout and Pathfinder) for this new variable.  SiteCatalyst experts long ago realized how simply concatenating values together into one SiteCatalyst variable could yield powerful results.  By using this technique, you can now select the appropriate “Visitor Type” concatenated value in the Next Page Flow report to see what “Customers” do on your Home Page:

as compared to “Non-Customers” viewing the same page:

As you can see here, Non-Customers have a much higher exit rate from the Home Page than Customers do, but without the use of this Visitor Type Pathing, it might be difficult to spot this since you are looking at Pathing for all segments lumped together.

Keep in mind, however, that this is just one example of how you can do Segment Pathing.  One of my favorite uses of this technique is to concatenate Campaign Names or Campaign Tracking Codes and Page Name so you can see how visitors from different Campaigns navigated through your site.  In the more advanced version of this shown below, you can see a Pathing Flow for visitors who arrived at a website from a Tracking Code “ggl_1″ and landed on the Video Games page.  By concatenating these two values, we can see how visitors arriving from the “ggl_1″ Campaign Tracking Code navigated the site as compared to those arriving from a different Campaign Tracking Code.  In fact, we can also see how people coming from the same Campaign Tracking Code (i.e. “ggl_1″ navigated the site differently when they arrived on a different page (i.e. a page different than the “Video Games” page).

Note that in the example below, the Campaign Tracking Code is not concatenated with the Page Name on every page, but rather just on the first page.  In this case, this was done because of the massive number of potential Campaign Tracking Code & Page Name combinations, which could lead to a “uniques” issue in SiteCatalyst.  However, the good news is that since Pathing reports only show values that took place after the element before it, by simply selecting the value of “ggl_1:Video Games,” we are guaranteed that all path views after it had to be preceded by the selected value.

Final Thoughts
As you can see the implementation of this through the use of variable concatenation is not terribly difficult.  However, before you run out and concatenate all of your Traffic Variables together, keep in mind the following:

• You do not want to enable Pathing on too many sProps since it will cost you $$$ and could result in report suite latency
• While powerful, this technique is more of a “hack” so if you are going to be doing a lot of segmentation, I encourage you to invest in Omniture Discover which is a much easier way to do Segment Pathing

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.

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.

When using Omniture SiteCatalyst, Pathing analysis is one of the truly unique things that is not easily replicated by other analysis tools.  While your company can find a way to track how often each of your key Success Events are taking place, you would be hard-pressed to get data warehouse tools to duplicate the Pathing analysis available in SiteCatalyst.  However, too many Omniture clients are limited in their thinking when it comes to Pathing, relegating it to Pages or Site Sections.  In past blog posts I have covered a few unconventional ways to use Pathing (i.e. Success Event Pathing), but there are many more ways to leverage Pathing.  In this post, I will show you one of my favorite uses of Pathing – Page Type Pathing.

What is Page Type Pathing?
So what is Page Type Pathing?  To fully understand it, I need to put it into context.  Imagine you are a web analyst at a company and your boss comes to you and asks “What is the fallout of visitors starting from the Home Page and then navigating to Product Pages, then Product Sign-up Forms and finally the Product Form Thank You Page?”  Well that sounds easy enough, but is it?  You can create fallout reports from each product, but what if you have hundreds of products?  You can look at Site Sections, but you may have many of those as well.  After a while, you may resign yourself to creating a massive dashboard with fallout reports for each product.  Just then, your boss reiterates that what she wanted was a fallout of all of the steps for all of the products in one overall fall-out report (and she wants it every week from now on!).  Besides learning the valuable lesson that you should always ask more questions before doing analysis, you are bummed because you don’t know how to do this other than manually add together all of these individual fall-out reports.

What your boss is asking for is what I call Page Type Pathing.  This is the ability to deconstruct your website so that you group all of your pages (or at least your key ones) into buckets that represent page types.  I think of it in the same way that species are grouped into classes like mammals or amphibians.  Many executives don’t have time or care about page or section-level Pathing since it contains too much “noise” (and they have limited attention spans!).  By lumping pages into a small number of meaningful page types, you can take a step back and see a 50,000 foot view of where people are going on your website.  Sometimes, page-level Pathing can make it hard to see that 30% of your visitors go from the Home Page to Product Pages since all you can see is individual page paths to product #1 or product #2.  By implementing Page Type Pathing you can end up with a new pathing report that looks like this:

Plus, since having Pathing enabled allows you to see all Pathing reports, you can create high-level Fallout reports using the same Page Type Traffic Variable (shown here in Discover):

Implementing Page Type Pathing
So how do you do this?  There are actually a few different ways to do this so how you implement it will depend upon which Omniture products you have and your ability to get tagging done at your organization.  I will outline the ways I recommend doing it, but there may be other ways.

The Old Fashioned Way
The most straightforward way to implement this is to create a new Traffic Variable (sProp) on every page and pass in the value that you have chosen as the Page Type for that page.  Obviously, you need to identify what you think your Page Types are ahead of time.  The values I recommend as Page Type Values are: Home Page, Product Page, Registration Page, Search Results Page, Checkout Page, Thank You Page, Content Page, etc…  However, setting a new sProp on every page can be a tagging nightmare as many of you can attest to if you have worked with IT to clean up your Page Names.  If you have a good Content Management System (CMS), you can add Page Type as a required meta-data field (be sure to make it a picklist!) for website pages and have your content owners enter it for each page.  But if getting tagging done is too difficult or you have too many pages to make the CMS approach feasible, go on to the other options…

Discover
If your company is lucky enough to have Omniture Discover, it is your lucky day!  Implementing Page Type Pathing in Discover can be done in less than 24 hours if you know what you are doing (or reading this blog!).  One of the benefits of Omniture Discover is that you get Pathing on SAINT Classifications which is not possible in SiteCatalyst. Therefore, if you create a “Page Type” Classification of the Page Name sProp, you can simply use Microsoft Excel to fill in a Page Type value for each page on your site and upload it using SAINT.  The next day, after Discover processes its data, it will pick up that new Classification and presto, you have Page Type Pathing in Discover!  Just be sure to thank the person at your organization who got you Discover or maybe you can use this as a reason to get it!

DB Vista
If tagging or CMS aren’t options and you don’t have Discover, what then?  Don’t despair, I won’t leave you in a lurch.  You can use Omniture’s DB Vista tool to get Page Type Pathing working.  Simply create a spreadsheet like described in the Discover approach above, but when you are done, tell your Omniture Account Manager that you would like to purchase a DB Vista Rule in which you upload a table of Page Type values for your Pages and have the DB Vista rule do a lookup on this table and pass the Page Type value to a Page Type sProp on every page.  As you add new pages to your site, you simply upload new rows to the DB Vista table.  There is a nominal charge for DB Vista rules, but it is worth it.

So there you have it, Page Type Pathing in a nutshell.  Once you have this functionality working you will be amazed by what you can learn about how people are navigating your site and I have seen it used by companies to drastically simplify their website with great results.  Finally, don’t forget to combine this functionality with segments using Advanced Segment Insight (ASI) or Discover so you can see the same cool Page Type Pathing reports for 1^st time visitors, people from Google, etc…

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.