Calculated Metrics [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Analytics · By On · 4 Comments
In this post, I will review Site­Cat­a­lyst Cal­cu­lated Met­rics to be sure that all of you out there know about them and how they can be used.
 
What Are Cal­cu­lated Met­rics?
Cal­cu­lated Met­rics are Site­Cat­a­lyst met­rics that are derived from exist­ing met­rics within your report suite.  Using com­mon oper­a­tors such as addi­tion, sub­trac­tion, mul­ti­pli­ca­tion and divi­sion, you can cre­ate new met­rics from exist­ing met­rics for use in your analy­ses.  Per­son­ally, I would say that 80% of my Cal­cu­lated Met­rics are ratios using divi­sion as I divide two exist­ing met­rics to cre­ate a third met­ric.  There are sev­eral ways to cre­ate Cal­cu­lated Met­rics, but the most com­mon way is to cre­ate them is through the “Add Met­rics” link within a report.  Once you click this link, you can select the Met­ric Type drop-down box and choose “Cal­cu­lated” to see a list of all exist­ing Cal­cu­lated Metrics:

From the next screen you choose the “Cre­ate New Met­ric” but­ton and you will see the screen below (you can also cre­ate new met­rics by click­ing on the col­or­ful icon next to the drop-down box).  In this screen, you can give the Cal­cu­lated Met­ric a name, choose its type and spec­ify the for­mula to be used.  In this case, I want to see how many Blog Post Views take place per Visit as a percentage:

Once you save this, you will be taken to the pre­vi­ous screen where you will now see the newly cre­ated Cal­cu­lated Met­ric in the list.

One impor­tant thing to note is that from this screen, you can choose to make a Cal­cu­lated Met­ric “Global” such that it appears to all Site­Cat­a­lyst users.  This is a pow­er­ful way to stan­dard­ize your orga­ni­za­tion on com­mon met­ric definitions.

Using Cal­cu­lated Met­rics
Once you have cre­ated a new Cal­cu­lated Met­ric, there are sev­eral things you can do with it.  To begin with, you can add it to a report as a met­ric as you would any other met­ric.  For exam­ple, if I have a Blog Author eVar report, I can add the newly cre­ated Blog Post Views/Visit metric:

As you can see here, since we had data for the two com­po­nents of the Cal­cu­lated Met­ric, Site­Cat­a­lyst can eas­ily pro­vide the ratio for each of the eVar report elements.

The next thing you can do with Cal­cu­lated Met­rics is to view the over­all met­ric itself with­out break­ing it down by a Traf­fic Vari­able or Con­ver­sion Vari­able.  This type of report is iden­ti­cal to what you would see when look­ing at the raw data of a Site­Cat­a­lyst Suc­cess Events.  You open this report by click­ing on the “My Calc Met­rics” area in the Site­Cat­a­lyst tool­bar and select­ing the met­ric you want to review.  The result­ing report will show you the Cal­cu­lated Met­ric data in a sim­i­lar for­mat to a Suc­cess Event Metric:

Cal­cu­lated Met­rics can be also used in Excel­Client data blocks, though many times I find it eas­ier to cal­cu­late these for­mu­las in Excel.

Finally, in addi­tion to creating/editing Cal­cu­lated Met­rics from within the Add Met­rics win­dow, you can also mod­ify them from within the Admin Con­sole as shown here:

 

 

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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  • http://www.fuelinteractive.com Melissa Kavanagh

    Hey Adam — as usual, a great post. Is there a way to get Site­Cat­a­lyst to total a cal­cu­lated met­ric? For exam­ple, I’ll use a “total acqui­si­tions” met­ric that adds email newslet­ter signups, con­tact form sub­mis­sions, and other form sub­mis­sions into 1 met­ric. While I can see that met­ric bro­ken down by refer­ring domain, or key­word etc., I can’t get a “total acqui­si­tions” sum over­all. At the bot­tom of every report, it totals those suc­cess events, but shows N/A for the cal­cu­lated met­ric. In your exam­ple above, what is your over­all per­cent­age for the timeframe?

    Any sug­ges­tions? Maybe this is dif­fer­ent in SC14 — I’m still using13.5.

    Thanks!

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco Adam Greco

    Melissa — You are quite right. This is a known issue and is on the prod­uct road map to be rec­ti­fied. For now, I would pull the data down to Excel using the Excel­Client and total it there…

    Adam

  • Peter Pot­ter

    Hi Adam,

    Just one quick ques­tion. When a report is made global as per the com­ment extracted below. How do you edit these for the com­pany if a rule requires changing?

    “One impor­tant thing to note is that from this screen, you can choose to make a Cal­cu­lated Met­ric “Global” such that it appears to all Site­Cat­a­lyst users. This is a pow­er­ful way to stan­dard­ize your orga­ni­za­tion on com­mon met­ric definitions.”

    Regards

    Peter

  • http://Merrell.com Bran­don Bassett

    Adam,

    Great post. I noticed you can­not cre­ate basic order con­ver­sion as a cal­cu­lated met­ric in SC14 due to vis­its being a traf­fic vari­able and orders being a con­ver­sion vari­able (response from sys­tem is “Invalid met­ric com­bi­na­tion sup­plied”; con­ver­sion = orders / vis­its — a sta­ple ecom­merce metric).

    Another thing I noticed is that you can cre­ate the met­ric in SC13.5 and pull it as a report in SC14. Do you know why SC14 won’t allow you to cre­ate the met­ric but the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of SC will? Also, will the next release of SC fix the problem?

    Thanks