Admin Console Tips [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Since many of the cus­tomers I work with are not given Admin­is­tra­tor rights to Site­Cat­a­lyst, they are often unaware of some of the cool things they are miss­ing.  In this post, I am going to cover some of my favorite Admin Con­sole tips so that you can pester your Site­Cat­a­lyst Admin­is­tra­tor and show them how to make your life easier!

Report Suite Seg­ments
A while back, I wrote a post on how to cre­ate vis­i­tor Seg­ments for use in DataWare­house and ASI. Cre­at­ing these seg­ments can be tricky at times and often requires a lot of test­ing.  Wouldn’t it be great if some­one at your orga­ni­za­tion who is well versed in cre­at­ing Site­Cat­a­lyst Seg­ments could cre­ate a bunch of them and share them with every­one else?  Well you can, but may not know about it!  In the Admin Con­sole, there is a place where an Admin can add as many Seg­ments as they would like and all other users can then take advan­tage of them.  As shown here, I have cre­ated two basic Visit-based seg­ments which can now be seen by any­one using that report suite (note that you can­not share Seg­ments across report suites!):

Once this is done, when other users of that report suite use DataWare­house or ASI, they would see the following:

As you can see, the two Seg­ments the admin­is­tra­tor cre­ated appear in the list, but are “locked” for every­one else.  Obvi­ously, users can cre­ate as many of their own seg­ments as they want, but using these global seg­ments can go a long way to ensur­ing “apples to apples” reporting.

Default Met­rics
Do you ever get annoyed that every time you cre­ate a new con­ver­sion report, Site­Cat­a­lyst always defaults to cer­tain met­rics (i.e. Rev­enue or Orders)?  Maybe your site doesn’t even sell any­thing!  Did you know that you can choose which met­rics show up in reports by default?  For exam­ple, in my case, the met­rics I use the most often are Blog Post Views, Vis­its and Blog Posts.  Why not have each new con­ver­sion report I open default to these instead of what Site­Cat­a­lyst wants to show me?  To do this, you have your Admin­is­tra­tor set the report suite default met­rics in the admin con­sole (again, these are on a report suite by report suite basis):

Keep in mind that once you start work­ing with reports in a ses­sion and alter the met­rics, those met­rics will be used until you logout and will not revert back to the default metrics.

Quick Tip: If you want to set dif­fer­ent met­rics for each Con­ver­sion Report instead of using the same three above, simply:

1. Open the Con­ver­sion Report
2. Add/remove met­rics as needed
3. Same as a Cus­tom Report
4. Move the new Cus­tom Report to the appro­pri­ate place in the menu using the Menu Customizer
5. Hide the orig­i­nal ver­sion of the Con­ver­sion Report  using the Menu Customizer

Track Key Vis­i­tors
If you have ever dreamed of being a “pri­vate eye” you will like the Key Vis­i­tors fea­ture.  In real­ity, it is not ter­ri­bly excit­ing, but it can be fun.  The idea behind Key Vis­i­tors is that you can spec­ify up to five domains or IP addresses from which you are receiv­ing traf­fic and see traf­fic form these in sep­a­rate reports.  Usu­ally, clients use these to track com­peti­tors as shown here:

Once you have enabled these, you can see Page Views by these Key Vis­i­tors (found under the Vis­i­tor Pro­file » Vis­i­tor Details area of the left nav­i­ga­tion) and what pages on your site they have viewed:

Using this, we can see that some Web­Trends folks have taken a keen inter­est in some of our blog posts .  Please note that these reports do not count traf­fic referred from these domains, but rather traf­fic that orig­i­nated from the domains.  In other words, the report above is show­ing traf­fic where the visitor’s ISP was reg­is­tered as web​trends​.com, not traf­fic sent to blogs​.omni​ture​.com from web​trends​.com (though if they wanted to send us traf­fic they could!).

Paid Search Detec­tion
I can’t tell you how many times I have had an irate client call me and tell me that they are not see­ing any data in their Paid Search Key­words or Paid Search Engines reports.  They tell me that they have added track­ing codes and query string para­me­ters, but the reports are not show­ing any data — Site­Cat­a­lyst must be bro­ken!  I then pro­ceed to ask them if they have enabled Paid Search Detec­tion in the Admin Con­sole so that Site­Cat­a­lyst knows which query string iden­ti­fiers it should treat as Paid Search and which ones it should not.  That is usu­ally when I hear a long pause…  Hope­fully this has not hap­pened to you, but just to be sure, please ver­ify that your Admin­is­tra­tor has this set-up cor­rectly (this can be applied to mul­ti­ple report suites at one time).  It looks like this:

Once this is set-up, all search engine traf­fic will be split out into Nat­ural and Paid reports instead of being lumped together into the “All” reports found in the Traf­fic Sources area.

Find­ing Meth­ods Allo­ca­tion
Many of my clients that use the Find­ing Meth­ods reports (i.e. Refer­ring Domains) do not think about how those reports use Allo­ca­tion.  In the Con­ver­sion Vari­able post, I explained the dif­fer­ent eVar allo­ca­tions, but there are spe­cial allo­ca­tions asso­ci­ated with the Find­ing Meth­ods reports.  These reports nor­mally “expire” val­ues at the end of the Visit and only have “First Value” and “Lin­ear” as allo­ca­tion options.  How­ever, you can mod­ify these expi­ra­tions such that these reports expire when a Suc­cess Event takes place if that Suc­cess Event takes place prior to the Visit end­ing (since the longest these reports will expire is a Visit).  You can see the var­i­ous options here:

Inter­nal URL Fil­ters
Often times, you have mul­ti­ple domains that are part of your entire web­site infra­struc­ture.  For exam­ple, your web­site might be www​.abc​.com but you also have a mar­ket­ing “micro-site” with the domain www​.abc​-rocks​.com.  In this case, Site­Cat­a­lyst would not know that the lat­ter is owned by your orga­ni­za­tion and it might treat refer­rals from www​.abc​-rocks​.com to www​.abc​.com as if they were com­ing from a ran­dom Inter­net site.  While there may be some cases where that is what you want, it is more likely that you would like to treat www​.abc​-rocks​.com as though it is no dif­fer­ent than www​.abc​.com.  To accom­plish this, Site­Cat­a­lyst pro­vides an Inter­nal URL Fil­ters area in the admin con­sole.  On this page, you can spec­ify which domains you want to treat as part of your site and which are truly exter­nal to your site.  In this case, you would add the following:

There­fore, if you ever look at your refer­ring domains report and notice domains that your com­pany owns, tell your Admin­is­tra­tor that they need to add them to the list above and they will not appear in the refer­ring domains reports again.

Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Hier­ar­chies
For those of you who have mas­tered SAINT Clas­si­fi­ca­tions, Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Hier­ar­chies offer a way to take things to the next level.  Often times there are rela­tion­ships between the var­i­ous items that you set-up as Clas­si­fi­ca­tions and Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Hier­ar­chies allow you to “nest” clas­si­fi­ca­tions so you can build reports that break­down the item being clas­si­fied into log­i­cal buck­ets.  For exam­ple, let’s say that you sell elec­tron­ics and have many dif­fer­ent types of Prod­ucts.  You have already clas­si­fied Prod­ucts into Prod­uct Group, Prod­uct Sub­Group and Man­u­fac­turer.  These clas­si­fi­ca­tions allow you to slice and dice all of your Prod­uct data by any of these ele­ments sep­a­rately, but what if you wanted to see Prod­uct met­rics by Prod­uct Group, then for each Prod­uct Group bro­ken down by Sub­Group, etc…?  To do this you would use the Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Hier­ar­chies area of the Admin Con­sole and drag over all of the clas­si­fi­ca­tions you want nested as shown here:

As shown above, you can choose from any clas­si­fi­ca­tions that have been set-up for the Prod­ucts vari­able.  Once you have done this, you save it and when you look at the Prod­ucts report area you will see a spe­cial icon indi­cat­ing that a Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Hier­ar­chy exists and will have the abil­ity to drill down by all of the items you have added to the hierarchy:

In this view, we can see Prod­ucts bro­ken down by Prod­uct Group, Prod­uct Sub­Group and Man­u­fac­turer and the Rev­enue and Orders for each.  Click­ing on “Apple” or “Sony” would take us to the low­est level, which in this case is Prod­ucts.  You can cre­ate mul­ti­ple clas­si­fi­ca­tion hier­ar­chies for the same vari­able and you can cre­ate clas­si­fi­ca­tion hier­ar­chies for any Con­ver­sion vari­able that has classifications.

Have a ques­tion about any­thing related to Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst?  Is there some­thing on your web­site that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best prac­tices you want to share?  If so, please leave a com­ment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@​omniture.​com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so every­one can learn! (Don’t worry — I won’t use your name or com­pany name!).  If you are on Twit­ter, you can fol­low me at http://​twit​ter​.com/​O​m​n​i​_​man.

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