15 for 15: Potpourri of Remaining Awesomeness

We’ve still got a few posts remain­ing in our “15 for 15″ series, but today I wanted to high­light some fea­tures that haven’t been cov­ered else­where in a short “pot­pourri” post with no real theme, other than that there are some great things in Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 that you might not know about yet.

Key Met­rics report

Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 intro­duces a new report called “Key Met­rics.” You will find it in the Site Met­rics area on the left nav­i­ga­tion menu. The pur­pose of the report is to allow you to add up to five site-level met­rics (such as Page Views, Unique Vis­i­tors, Rev­enue, Reg­is­tra­tions, Leads, Inter­nal Searches, etc.) and com­pare these met­rics against one another so you can eas­ily iden­tify diver­gent or con­ver­gent trends. (There is a nor­mal­iza­tion fea­ture which puts these widely vary­ing met­rics on the same scale.)

In the graph shown above, I’m com­par­ing total Unique Vis­i­tors, Check­outs, Orders, Store Loca­tor usage, and Reg­is­tra­tions. I turned on nor­mal­iza­tion, so it’s clear to me how these met­rics trend com­pared to one another. Next, I can do a few things.

• First, I can apply a seg­ment. This is where the report begins to become really pow­er­ful. I can see how these five met­rics (or any oth­ers) trend dif­fer­ently against one another for mobile users (as an exam­ple) com­pared to other users, lead­ing to ques­tions like, “Why are check­outs way up among mobile users while rev­enue is flat?” Any of the seg­ments that you can build and use in Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 can be applied in this report, mak­ing it as easy as pos­si­ble to see the rela­tion­ship between met­rics on your site for key vis­i­tor or cus­tomer segments.
• Sec­ond, I can add this report (with or with­out a seg­ment applied) to a dash­board for dis­tri­b­u­tion through­out my orga­ni­za­tion. Why dis­trib­ute five dash­board reportlets show­ing crit­i­cal met­rics when you can dis­trib­ute just one that allows any user to see trends over­laid clearly? Instead of hav­ing to build these dash­boards man­u­ally using Excel Client or Report­Builder, you can use this fea­ture to begin to tell a story that leads to the kinds of ques­tions and answers that really move the prover­bial needle.

Report Suite-specific Cal­en­dar Events

One of the most pop­u­lar ideas in the Idea Exchange since its incep­tion has been the sug­ges­tion to make cal­en­dar events—the abil­ity to over­lay your line graphs in Site­Cat­a­lyst with notes detail­ing events that occurred on cer­tain dates so that your data is always in context—report suite-specific. Pre­vi­ously, they had been company-specific, which means that an event which per­tained to a par­tic­u­lar area of your busi­ness would be dis­played on all graphs con­tain­ing the given date range, even in report suites which had noth­ing to do with the event. This was con­fus­ing and, in some cases, mis­lead­ing for orga­ni­za­tions with more than one or two pro­duc­tion report suites.

As one user told us, “Recently, I tried to mark a cal­en­dar event in Site­Cat­a­lyst to note a pro­mo­tion we did for one of our sites. I quickly real­ized that mark­ing a cal­en­dar event marked that date on every report for every site we track. This is not use­ful. The fact that I ran a pro­mo­tion on Site A is of no rel­e­vance what­so­ever to Site B and actively makes all reports except one harder to understand.”

We lis­tened! With the release of Site­Cat­a­lyst 15, you now have the option of mak­ing a new cal­en­dar event spe­cific to a sin­gle report suite; alter­na­tively, you can still apply cal­en­dar events to the entire com­pany if desired. And the best news of all? This fea­ture is avail­able to both Site­Cat­a­lyst 14 users and Site­Cat­a­lyst 15 users. Every one of you can use this fea­ture today.

When you go to Favorites > Cal­en­dar Events, you will see that there is a link allow­ing you to choose a report suite. Cur­rently, this fea­ture allows you to select either a sin­gle report suite or an entire com­pany. Now your users can see these con­tex­tual nuggets of insight at a much more gran­u­lar level, lead­ing to far greater clar­ity and bet­ter unearthing of insights.

Vari­abil­ity of Last-Touch Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel override

Sounds con­fus­ing, right? Here’s what happened.

The orig­i­nal release of the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels report gave you the abil­ity to define what­ever chan­nels make up your online mar­ket­ing mix, then com­pare those chan­nels side-by-side visu­ally on both a first-touch and last-touch basis. (Why be lim­ited to just one, right?) One of the lim­i­ta­tions that we quickly heard was that the “Direct” (no refer­rer on first page view of visit) and “Inter­nal” (inter­nal refer­rer on first page view of visit) chan­nels were over­writ­ing other, more salient chan­nels sim­ply because they hap­pened later in that visitor’s history.

Let’s say a user came to your site three times. The first time, he came via paid search. The sec­ond time, he came via an e-mail cam­paign. The third time, he came directly, and then pur­chased. Users wanted the abil­ity for that pur­chased to be tied to the E-mail chan­nel, rather than direct.

As of the release of Site­Cat­a­lyst 15, you now have con­trol over this over­write. (And yes, this one is also avail­able in Site­Cat­a­lyst 14!) If there are chan­nels that should not over­write an exist­ing last-touch value, you have the abil­ity to ensure that they don’t. In the exam­ple just given, you can decide whether the pur­chase should be cred­ited to Direct or E-mail. Here is that exam­ple rep­re­sented visually:

As an admin user, I can go to the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel Man­ager in the Admin Con­sole and uncheck the box in the “Over­ride Last-Touch Chan­nel” col­umn for any chan­nel that should not over­ride an exist­ing value. Typ­i­cally this will be “Direct” and “Inter­nal,” as described above, but in the­ory you can turn this off for any chan­nel if you want it to receive credit only if there isn’t a pre­vi­ous last-touch value per­sist­ing from a pre­vi­ous visit.

To make things clear, we also added a mes­sage that you will see when­ever you define pro­cess­ing rules for a chan­nel that won’t over­ride an exist­ing chan­nel. It will say, “Only with new engage­ments (won’t over­ride exist­ing chan­nels)” clearly in the rule setup, so there will be no doubt how this rule will func­tion when it begins to act on your data.

Con­clu­sion

I really could keep going, but in the inter­est of time and word count, I’m going to stop here. I want to re-emphasize—even though I’m sure you are sick of hear­ing it from me—that we really are lis­ten­ing to your ideas and your com­ments and votes in the Idea Exchange. Each of these three ideas came directly out of feed­back we received there and elsewhere.

Also, it’s worth point­ing out that two of these three ideas are avail­able to all Site­Cat­a­lyst users today, regard­less of access to Site­Cat­a­lyst 15. You can begin using cal­en­dar events at the report suite level and con­trol­ling how your con­ver­sions are allo­cated to mar­ket­ing chan­nels immediately.

Please leave a com­ment and share with us any other favorite fea­tures in Site­Cat­a­lyst 15—or recent addi­tions to Site­Cat­a­lyst 14—that we haven’t cov­ered here!

As always, if you have any ques­tions about any­thing in this post, or about any­thing else related to the Adobe Online Mar­ket­ing Suite, please leave a com­ment here or con­tact me on Twit­ter and I’ll do my best to get you the infor­ma­tion that you need.