Alerts [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

While Alerts are not overly com­pli­cated, I am amazed how many cus­tomers I meet who are not using them. After all, once you set a large num­ber of met­rics by which to eval­u­ate your online busi­ness, who wants to spend all day check­ing to see if they go up or down when you can have Site­Cat­a­lyst auto­mat­i­cally inform you of unusual activity?  In this post I will cover the basics of Alerts in hopes that those who are not tak­ing advan­tage of them will begin to do so.

What Are Alerts?
Site­Cat­a­lyst Alerts are a mech­a­nism for you or your busi­ness users to be alerted when some­thing pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive hap­pens related to Site­Cat­a­lyst met­rics you care about.  Alerts can be set in many dif­fer­ent types of Site­Cat­a­lyst reports using an icon in the tool­bar as high­lighted below:

Unfor­tu­nately, Alerts can get a bit com­pli­cated because their func­tion­al­ity is dif­fer­ent depend­ing upon the type of report you are look­ing at when you click the above icon.  The fol­low­ing will explain what you can do with Alerts in the var­i­ous report types:

Site Met­rics Reports
Alerts for the Site Met­ric Reports are the eas­i­est to under­stand since they involve raw num­bers only.  As a refresher, the Site Met­ric reports include Page Views, Vis­its, Unique Vis­i­tors, Pur­chase, Orders and all of your Cus­tom Suc­cess Events.  When you choose to set an alert on these reports you will see a sub-screen like this:

In this screen, your only options are to choose a time frame (Hour, Day, Week, Month) and whether you want to be alerted if a value is Above, Below or Changed by a spec­i­fied per­cent.  As is the case with all Alerts, you can also spec­ify if you want to be alerted via e-mail or mobile device and can assign a name to the Alert.  Video, Mobile and GeoSeg­men­ta­tion Reports are the same as Met­ric Reports when it comes to Alerts.

Non-Site Met­rics Reports
Alerts for the other reports in Site­Cat­a­lyst are a bit more tricky since, in gen­eral, non-site met­ric reports allow you to choose which met­rics you want and dis­play many dif­fer­ent val­ues asso­ci­ated with those met­rics.  For exam­ple, any Con­ver­sion Vari­able (eVar) report allows you to add almost any met­ric to it and then dis­plays the var­i­ous eVar val­ues asso­ci­ated for those met­rics.  In the case of a blog site with an “Author” eVar report, adding the “Blog Post Views” metric will dis­play a list of Authors that had Blog Post Views and the num­ber of Blog Post Views for each Author in the met­ric col­umn.  Hence, it would make sense that when attempt­ing to set an Alert for an eVar report, you would need to spec­ify the met­ric and the eVar value to which you want the Alert to be tied.  There­fore, when click­ing the Alert icon in such a report, you will see a slightly dif­fer­ent screen that looks like this:

In this sit­u­a­tion, you will notice that there are two addi­tional items to select for the Alert.  The first is the Met­ric and the sec­ond is the Value.  Both can be set by using the drop-down boxes.  In the Met­ric drop-down box you select the met­ric for which Site­Cat­a­lyst will check to see if val­ues rise or fall.  This met­ric list is the same as the list of met­rics that you can add to the cur­rent report using the Add Met­rics link.  The Value drop-down box allows you to spec­ify for which Val­ues the cho­sen met­ric will be eval­u­ated.  The default is “All Items” which is the equiv­a­lent t the total at the bot­tom of the eVar report and will alert you if this total rises or falls above or below your cri­te­ria.  The next option in the Value box is “Top 1000″ but I can’t recall a time when I have ever used this.  The last item in the list is “Spe­cific Item” and this is extremely use­ful.  This option allows you to choose spe­cific eVar val­ues for which the selected met­ric will be eval­u­ated.  In the exam­ple above, we could select “Adam Greco” as the Author and Blog Post Views as the Met­ric and spec­ify that we want to be alerted any­time the daily Blog Post Views change by more than 25%.  How­ever, in real­ity, I tend to set Alerts on a weekly basis since choos­ing Daily will often end up send­ing you e-mails every Sat­ur­day and Sunday!

Impor­tant Things To Know About Alerts
The fol­low­ing are some impor­tant things to know about Alerts:

1. It is not pos­si­ble to set Alerts on Pathing reports and some Vis­i­tor Reten­tion reports
2. You can send an alert to mul­ti­ple peo­ple by adding e-mail addresses sep­a­rated by a comma
3. You can view all of your Alerts and make changes to them in the “Alerts” area found under the My Account drop-down at the top-right of the Omni­ture Suite tool­bar.  In this area you can also enable or dis­able the Alert as you wish if you only want to use the Alert sporadically
4. When you receive an Alert e-mail, there is always a link at the bot­tom that allows you to dis­able the Alert so those you send Alerts to will not be “spammed” for­ever by you includ­ing them on an Alert
5. You can set Alerts on Cal­cu­lated Met­rics by click­ing on the Alert icon from within the spe­cific Cal­cu­lated Met­ric report about which you want to be alerted

 

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.

Learn more about Omni­ture Consulting

Learn more about Omni­ture University