Conversion (Success Events) [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Site­Cat­a­lyst Con­ver­sion Vari­ables
Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst breaks its vari­ables into two types: Traf­fic and Con­ver­sion.  As dis­cussed in my last post, Traf­fic Vari­ables allow you to seg­ment traf­fic met­rics (i.e. Page Views) and uti­lize Pathing, whereas Con­ver­sion Vari­ables allow you to quan­tify and seg­ment the suc­cess actions taken by your site vis­i­tors.  The Con­ver­sion area of Site­Cat­a­lyst is made up of two dis­tinct vari­able types — Suc­cess Events and Con­ver­sion Vari­ables (also known as eVars).  In this post I will dis­cuss Suc­cess Events, fol­lowed by Con­ver­sion Vari­ables in my next posts.

Suc­cess Events & KPI’s
Before explor­ing Suc­cess Events, it is worth­while to dis­cuss Key Per­for­mance Indi­ca­tors (or KPI’s).  Hope­fully you are famil­iar with the term, but just in case, KPI’s are the met­rics used to deter­mine the health or suc­cess of your web­site.  If the goal of your web­site is to get vis­i­tors to pur­chase things then your KPI’s might be Rev­enue, Orders & Units. Alter­na­tively, if the goal of your web­site is to gen­er­ate leads, then you may mon­i­tor a “Leads Gen­er­ated” KPI.  The rea­son I bring up KPI’s here is because most web­site KPI’s take the form of Suc­cess Events in Site­Cat­a­lyst so the two go hand in hand.  When I begin work­ing with an exist­ing client, the first thing I look at is whether the key actions they want vis­i­tors to take on their site are defined as Suc­cess Events and if so whether these Suc­cess Events have data.  Unfor­tu­nately, more often than not, I find that clients have done much more with their Traf­fic Vari­ables than they have with their Con­ver­sion Variables.

Site­Cat­a­lyst Suc­cess Events
Site­Cat­a­lyst Suc­cess Events are Con­ver­sion Vari­ables that count the num­ber of times site vis­i­tors com­plete an action on your site.  Unlike Traf­fic Vari­ables which serve as dimen­sions or break­downs of a Page View/Visit/Unique Vis­i­tor met­ric, Suc­cess Events are always num­bers.  Through tag­ging, you tell Site­Cat­a­lyst when users have taken the action(s) that you want them to take and Suc­cess Events are increased accord­ingly.  There­fore, each Site­Cat­a­lyst Suc­cess Event has an asso­ci­ated graph that shows its met­ric total for any given time­frame (see exam­ple below).

Suc­cess Events can be either Stan­dard or Cus­tom.  Stan­dard Suc­cess Events include a select few actions that are preva­lent on retail web­sites such as Rev­enue, Orders, Units, Cart Addi­tions, etc…  Cus­tom Suc­cess Events are avail­able for use for any site action you deem wor­thy of track­ing.  Omni­ture pro­vides the abil­ity to have up to 86 Suc­cess Events, though many of these are reserved for use in Gen­e­sis Part­ner inte­gra­tions (future topic).  As a rule of thumb, I tell my clients that if there is an action on the web­site that is fun­da­men­tal to the exis­tence of the web­site, it should be tracked as a Suc­cess Event.  If you or one of your co-workers won’t get pro­moted (or fired!) based upon the out­come of the Suc­cess Event, it may not be wor­thy of being a Suc­cess Event.  In real­ity, I find that most of my clients use fewer than 20 suc­cess events, mainly to avoid “analy­sis paralysis!”

Con­ver­sion vs. Traf­fic
One area where I see clients get con­fused is in the rela­tion­ship between Site­Cat­a­lyst Traf­fic Vari­ables (also known as sProps) and Con­ver­sion Vari­ables.  In Site­Cat­a­lyst, there is a clear dis­tinc­tion between these vari­able types such that each vari­able type has its own spe­cific pur­pose.  When you think of Traf­fic Vari­ables you should think about Page Views, Unique Vis­i­tors and Pathing.  When you think about Con­ver­sion Vari­ables you should think about Pur­chases, Lead Form Sub­mis­sions, etc…
 In Site­Cat­a­lyst, you would never attempt to segment/breakdown Suc­cess Events by a Traf­fic Vari­able (You can do this in Omni­ture Dis­cover, but not in Site­Cat­a­lyst).  For exam­ple, in my last post we saw an exam­ple where Page Views were bro­ken down by lan­guage (Eng­lish or Span­ish).  In Site­Cat­a­lyst, you would not break­down a Rev­enue Suc­cess Event by the Lan­guage Traf­fic Vari­able to see Rev­enue where vis­i­tors pre­ferred Span­ish.  This is because the pri­mary pur­pose of Traf­fic Vari­ables is to count Page Views and enable Pathing, not break down Suc­cess Events.  How­ever, don’t panic because in sub­se­quent posts we will learn how Con­ver­sion Vari­ables allow you to do this and much, much more!

Real-World Exam­ple
Let’s say go back to our fic­ti­tious Omni­ture client Greco Inc., which has one of its web prop­er­ties in the Online Edu­ca­tion space.  A key com­po­nent of their online edu­ca­tion web­site is to get vis­i­tors to view a demo of an online course so they can get a fla­vor of the over­all expe­ri­ence of being an online stu­dent.  In this case, when the vis­i­tor clicks to view the Course Demo, Greco Inc.‘s mar­ket­ing man­ager works with IT to set a Suc­cess Event and there­after can track the progress of this met­ric using the asso­ci­ated Site­Cat­a­lyst report:

In sum­mary, this post cov­ered the basics sur­round­ing Suc­cess Events and when they should be used.  In future posts I will cover the fol­low­ing addi­tional items related to Suc­cess Events:

1. Adding Suc­cess Event reports to dash­boards for dis­sem­i­na­tion to web­site stakeholders
2. Down­load­ing Suc­cess Event data to Microsoft Excel so it can be merged with other data
3. Using Suc­cess Event data in Site­Cat­a­lyst Cal­cu­lated Met­rics and Con­ver­sion Funnels
4. Set­ting Alerts to be noti­fied when Suc­cess Event data changes
5. Ensur­ing Suc­cess Events are not set more than once (de-duplication)
6. More advanced uses of suc­cess events

Stay tuned for my next posts in which I will round out the con­ver­sa­tion on Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­ables by dis­cussing Con­ver­sion Vari­ables…

Have a ques­tion about any­thing related to 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 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!)