Cross-Visit Participation [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

In one of my ear­li­est blog posts, I dis­cussed how Con­ver­sion Vari­ables (eVars) have dif­fer­ent types of allo­ca­tion.  For exam­ple, if some­one comes to your site mul­ti­ple times from a few dif­fer­ent cam­paign track­ing codes, you can choose to give credit for any Suc­cess Event to the first track­ing code or the last track­ing code using allo­ca­tion.  The same is true for every eVar, but there may be times when you want to see all of the val­ues passed to an eVar prior to the Suc­cess Event tak­ing place.  In this post I will explain how to do this in Site­Cat­a­lyst through Cross-Visit Participation.

Cross-Visit Par­tic­i­pa­tion
So what is Cross-Visit Par­tic­i­pa­tion?  In Omniture-speak, it is a JavaScript plug-in that con­cate­nates a series of val­ues into an eVar for attri­bu­tion pur­poses.  As alluded to above, the most com­mon use of this plug-in is for what we call Cam­paign Stack­ing.  For exam­ple, let’s say that a vis­i­tor comes to your site from a CNN Dis­play Ad and the track­ing code is “cnn_123” and the same vis­i­tor comes the next day from a Google Paid Search key­word with the track­ing code “ggl_456” and then applies for a credit card.  In this case, if you were using the Cam­paign Con­ver­sion Vari­able (eVar) and the allo­ca­tion was set to “Most Recent” then the credit card appli­ca­tion suc­cess event would be attrib­uted to the Google key­word.  How­ever, that vis­i­tor may never have con­ducted a search on Google had he/she not seen the dis­play adver­tise­ment on CNN so we may inad­ver­tently reduce the bud­get for CNN and increase it for Google only to be sur­prised later that we are not get­ting as many credit card appli­ca­tions as before.  Some­times a lit­tle (incor­rect) data is worse than no data at all!

Omni­ture is well aware of this attri­bu­tion issue and is tak­ing steps to improve the over­all accu­racy in the future.  In the mean­time, the Omni­ture Con­sult­ing team has cre­ated the Cross-Visit Par­tic­i­pa­tion plug-in (some­times referred to as Cam­paign Stack­ing) that lets you see the entire pic­ture.  So in the pre­ced­ing exam­ple, while the Cam­paign eVar would always have the lat­est track­ing code value, the plug-in would pass the his­tor­i­cal string to a cus­tom eVar:

By doing this, when the credit card appli­ca­tion suc­cess event is fired, the Google track­ing code will get credit in the Cam­paigns report, but in the eVar12 report, the string “cnn_123:ggl_456” would get credit so you, as the online mar­keter, could see what per­cent­age of all credit card appli­ca­tions involved each com­bi­na­tion of track­ing codes.  This infor­ma­tion can then be moved to Excel using the Excel­Client, where more in-depth analy­sis can take place.

Vari­a­tions of Cross-Visit Par­tic­i­pa­tion
How­ever, the value of this plug-in reaches far beyond the realm of cam­paigns.  There are many fun and cre­ative ways you can use this plug-in such as:

1. Track­ing which site tools/calculators vis­i­tors used prior to success
2. Track­ing which prod­ucts vis­i­tors viewed prior to success
3. Track­ing which videos vis­i­tors viewed prior to success
4. Track­ing which search terms vis­i­tors entered on your site prior to success

The list goes on and on.  Any time you want to see a con­cate­nated list of val­ues in the order that they took place, you can con­sider using the Cross-Visit Par­tic­i­pa­tion plug-in.

Impor­tant Things To Know About Cross-Visit Par­tic­i­pa­tion
The fol­low­ing are some impor­tant things to know about Cross-Visit Participation:

1. You need to work with Omni­ture Con­sult­ing to set-up this plug-in
2. You must spec­ify the max­i­mum num­ber of val­ues you want to con­cate­nate in the plug-in and the time period for them to be con­sid­ered ger­mane in impact­ing conversion
3. The plug-in will not store dupli­cate values

Real-World Exam­ple
In this real-world exam­ple, I will build upon the pre­ced­ing cam­paign exam­ple by using the Cross-Visit Par­tic­i­pa­tion plug-in to cap­ture Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels.  Let’s imag­ine that your CMO comes to you and wants to know how often Greco Inc. is pay­ing to drive peo­ple to its site from var­i­ous Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels.  The CMO is pri­mar­ily inter­ested in see­ing if paid acqui­si­tion con­vert­ers are always com­ing to the site first from Paid Search and then Paid Dis­play or vice versa.   Due to bud­get cuts, ad spend­ing may have to be cut back and the CMO needs to jus­tify which chan­nels and chan­nel com­bi­na­tions are impor­tant to con­tin­u­ing to drive applications.

To answer this ques­tion, you would need to clas­sify Cam­paign Track­ing Codes by Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel and use Cross-Visit Par­tic­i­pa­tion to “stack” Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels (i.e. Paid Search, Dis­play Ad, E-mail, etc…).  The clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Cam­paign Track­ing Codes by Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel should be straight­for­ward (if you have read the SAINT Clas­si­fi­ca­tions post).  The sec­ond item needed is a con­cate­nated string of “stacked” Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels so you can see the inter­play between them prior to web­site con­ver­sion.  There are many ways to “stack” the chan­nels rang­ing from cre­at­ing SAINT Clas­si­fi­ca­tions of stacked cam­paign track­ing codes to cap­tur­ing the chan­nel by using the Get Query Para­me­ter plug-in (I sug­gest you work with Omni­ture Con­sult­ing to iden­tify the best approach for your organization).

Once you have both of these set-up, you are ready for analy­sis, so let’s dig in.  Let’s say that Greco Inc. has a Cam­paign Chan­nel Con­ver­sion report, which is the report of clas­si­fied cam­paign track­ing codes, set to “Most Recent” allo­ca­tion as follows:

As you can see in this report, only 16.49% of Com­pleted Appli­ca­tions are com­ing from Paid Dis­play as com­pared to 66.59% com­ing from Paid Search (in this case, let’s assume e-mails are inex­pen­sive) so your first thought might be to cut the Paid Dis­play bud­get.  How­ever, if we look at the report that shows the “stacked” Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels described above, we can see the inter­ac­tions that vis­i­tors took with all Mar­ket­ing Chan­nels prior to com­plet­ing an appli­ca­tion as shown in this report:

When we look at this report we notice some­thing inter­est­ing.  Dis­play Ads are often times part of the mix that leads to suc­cess, but Paid Search is most often the one that is the last touch prior to con­ver­sion.  In fact, if we add up all of the times that Paid Dis­play is part of the mix (or used indi­vid­u­ally) the per­cent impacted is 47.43%.  If you only looked at the first report (Cam­paign Chan­nels) you would see a skewed pic­ture since the “Most Recent” allo­ca­tion would attribute most of the suc­cess to Paid Search.  Thus, you have to ask your­self, how much of my suc­cess would still come through if Paid Dis­play were not in the mix?  At 16.49% you might be will­ing to take the risk to save some money, but at 47.43%, you may not be will­ing to do so and might con­sider some more in-depth test­ing prior to mak­ing any rash mar­ket­ing spend decisions!

This is just one exam­ple of how Cross-Visit Par­tic­i­pa­tion can add more con­text to your analy­ses so that you can make the best mar­ket­ing deci­sions possible.

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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