Classifications (a.k.a. SAINT) [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Clas­si­fi­ca­tions (also known by the acronym SAINT for Site­Cat­a­lyst Attribute Import­ing and Naming Tool), or the process of clas­si­fy­ing an Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­able, is a topic that tends to con­fuse many of my clients. Hav­ing been a cus­tomer myself, I can under­stand why Clas­si­fi­ca­tions can be daunt­ing, but the truth is that once you under­stand them, they are not very dif­fi­cult and can save you a lot of time. In this post I will cover the basics of Clas­si­fi­ca­tions and how you can use them.

What are Clas­si­fi­ca­tions?
So what exactly is a Clas­si­fi­ca­tion? Tech­ni­cally speak­ing, when you “clas­sify” a Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­able you are estab­lish­ing a rela­tion­ship between a vari­able and meta-data related to that vari­able. Clas­si­fi­ca­tions are most fre­quently used in the Cam­paigns area so I will use that as a way to explain them. Most clients send cam­paign traf­fic to their site using a track­ing code. This track­ing code is an iden­ti­fier that may rep­re­sent a spe­cific key­word pur­chased on Google, such as “goog123.” This iden­ti­fier is passed into the s.campaigns vari­able so you can see what site suc­cess events take place after vis­i­tors come to your site from that cam­paign code. But what if, instead of view­ing Cam­paigns just by the track­ing code, you want to see cam­paign results by Search Engine or Key­word or Cam­paign Chan­nel? Do you have to cre­ate a new con­ver­sion vari­able for Search Engine, another for Key­word and yet another for Cam­paign Chan­nel? If so, you would use up many of your fifty vari­ables on Cam­paigns alone! Thank­fully, you can use Clas­si­fi­ca­tions to make your life eas­ier! Since each track­ing code could have a Search Engine, Key­word or Cam­paign Chan­nel, you can sim­ply cre­ate three Clas­si­fi­ca­tions of the Cam­paigns vari­able to rep­re­sent each. You are essen­tially telling Site­Cat­a­lyst that there is a direct rela­tion­ship between the Cam­paigns vari­able and these three other “meta-data” val­ues. By doing this, Site­Cat­a­lyst will allow you to slice and dice site Suc­cess Events by all four vari­ables with no addi­tional tagging!

So How Does It Work?
To clas­sify a Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­able, the first thing you (or some­one with Admin rights) need to do is to set-up the Clas­si­fi­ca­tion in the Admin­is­tra­tion Con­sole. To do this, you select the appro­pri­ate report suite(s) and then choose the vari­able you want to clas­sify as shown here:

In this case we will add the three pre­vi­ously men­tioned items as Clas­si­fi­ca­tions of the Cam­paigns vari­able. Once you have added the three Clas­si­fi­ca­tions, you should see this…

…and within Site­Cat­a­lyst you will see a new report for each clas­si­fi­ca­tion like this:

Now that your clas­si­fi­ca­tions are set-up, you need to pro­vide Site­Cat­a­lyst with the val­ues for each track­ing code for which you expect to receive data. This is nor­mally done by upload­ing a spread­sheet using a tem­plate pro­vided by Site­Cat­a­lyst. If you have more than 20,000 rows, it is rec­om­mended that you use the FTP fea­ture to upload your Clas­si­fi­ca­tion data (Infor­ma­tion on using FTP can be found in the user man­ual). To upload Clas­si­fi­ca­tion data, sim­ply go to the Admin area within Site­Cat­a­lyst (top-right) and choose “SAINT Clas­si­fi­ca­tions” from the drop­down box. There you choose the vari­able for which you want the tem­plate and click the down­load but­ton to save the tem­plate to your com­puter like this:

Next, you can open the Clas­si­fi­ca­tion tem­plate (I use Microsoft Excel) and fill in the data so that it looks like this:

Note that while it is rec­om­mended that as much data is uploaded as pos­si­ble, it is not required that all data be filled out. In this exam­ple, it does not make sense for the “CNN” line item to have a Search Engine or Key­word value so those are left blank. When you are done com­plet­ing the file, you can use the “Import File” tab to upload your spread­sheet and within an hour or so, all Clas­si­fi­ca­tion data will be avail­able in SiteCatalyst.

After all of this is com­pleted, you will be able to see the fol­low­ing four reports within SiteCatalyst:

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

1. Every Clas­si­fi­ca­tion that you make will cre­ate a new Site­Cat­a­lyst report. These new reports show you the selected met­rics using the Clas­si­fi­ca­tion value. If no value is uploaded, items will be placed in a “None” row if Con­ver­sion Vari­able or omit­ted if a Traf­fic Vari­able.
2. Clas­si­fi­ca­tions are retroac­tive. This means that if you make a change to the SAINT file above and re-upload, the new val­ues will over­write the old val­ues. For exam­ple, if for track­ing code “msn998” you real­ize later that the key­word was “VCR,” not “TV,” you can change it and re-upload and the Key­word report will then reflect “VCR.”
3. You can clas­sify any Traf­fic Vari­able (sProp) or Con­ver­sion Vari­able (eVar) and there is no addi­tional charge for doing this.
4. Any Traf­fic Data Cor­re­la­tion or Con­ver­sion Sub­re­la­tion that is enabled for the vari­able you are clas­si­fy­ing will also be enabled for any Clas­si­fi­ca­tion of that vari­able. For exam­ple, since the Cam­paigns vari­able comes with full sub­re­la­tions by default, any clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the Cam­paigns vari­able will have full Sub­re­la­tions as well.
5. Pathing is not avail­able on Traf­fic Clas­si­fi­ca­tions within Site­Cat­a­lyst (but is avail­able in Omni­ture Dis­cover). Many clients attempt to use Clas­si­fi­ca­tions on their Page Name Traf­fic vari­able as a way to apply “friendly” page names only to later find out that they can only see pathing reports for the “unfriendly” name!
6. You can­not clas­sify out-of-the-box Site­Cat­a­lyst reports such as Browser, GeoSeg Coun­tries, etc… How­ever, if this is impor­tant, you can use a VISTA rule to pass this data to a cus­tom vari­able which can then be classified.

Real-World Exam­ple
In this ver­sion of our real-world exam­ple, our com­pany, Greco Inc. is focus­ing on its retail sub­sidiary. The online mar­ket­ing depart­ment would like to see what search terms vis­i­tors are search­ing upon to see which con­tent it should spot­light. Using the infor­ma­tion from our pre­vi­ous post they decided to pass the inter­nal search terms entered to a traf­fic vari­able as shown here:

How­ever, in addi­tion to look­ing at this laun­dry list of product-related terms, they would like to group the prod­ucts being searched into the Prod­uct Cat­e­gories they use to struc­ture the web­site. To do this, they enable an “Inter­nal Search Term Group­ing” Clas­si­fi­ca­tion for the Search Term vari­able and pro­ceed to create/upload the fol­low­ing Clas­si­fi­ca­tion file:

The result is a more stream­lined report that allows Greco Inc. to view Search Terms by Prod­uct Cat­e­gory, as shown below, with­out any addi­tional tag­ging to the site! Based upon this, it is easy to see that the “Bed Bath & Table Linens” prod­ucts are being searched the most, a fact that was not appar­ent using the Search Term report…