Multi-Suite Tagging [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

One topic that I find con­fuses many of my cus­tomers is Multi-Suite Tag­ging.  For this rea­son, I wanted to devote a post to this and pro­vide some basic infor­ma­tion about what it is and when it should be used.

What Is Multi-Suite Tag­ging?
Multi-Suite Tag­ging is a fancy name for send­ing Site­Cat­a­lyst data to two or more report suites.  So when would you want/need to use multi-suite tag­ging?  I have seen Multi-Suite Tag­ging used most often in the fol­low­ing situations:

1. A com­pany has a sim­i­lar web­site in dif­fer­ent geo­graphic loca­tions and wants to com­pare the same met­rics for each region
2. A com­pany has a sim­i­lar web­site, but many dif­fer­ent brands and wants to com­pare the same met­rics for dif­fer­ent brands
3. A com­pany wants to pro­vide a sub­set of data to one group.  For exam­ple, the cus­tomer ser­vice group can only see cus­tomer ser­vice page data, but other groups can see all web­site data

The value of Multi-Suite Tag­ging can best be seen through an exam­ple.  Let’s imag­ine that Greco Inc. is a hold­ing com­pany that has var­i­ous retail brands under dif­fer­ent names.  Both retail brands (let’s say Brand A & Brand B) pro­vide sim­i­lar prod­ucts and most peo­ple don’t know that they are both owned by Greco Inc.  The CEO of Greco Inc. would like to see web­site data for each busi­ness sep­a­rately, but also have a com­bined view so he can see per­for­mance across all of Greco Inc.

To accom­plish this, each page on Brand A would send data to the “greco_brand_a” and “greco_global” report suites, while each page on Brand B would send its data to the “greco_brand_b” and “greco_global” report suites.  There­fore, each page on both sites is send­ing two image requests to Omni­ture — one for the Brand site and one to a Global site that con­sol­i­dates all data.

So how is this done?  There are two dif­fer­ent ways to imple­ment Multi-Suite Tagging:

1. Mod­ify the “s_account” value in your .js file to include more than one report suite ID
2. Uti­lize a VISTA rule to route data to addi­tional report suites

Here is an exam­ple of item #1 above from Omniture’s Imple­men­ta­tion Manual:

(NOTE: The data col­lec­tion sub­do­main, shown above as ‘suite1,’ is pop­u­lated using the s.visitorNamespace vari­able, and is typ­i­cally not spe­cific to indi­vid­ual report suites. The exam­ple above is pro­vided for the pur­pose of illus­trat­ing the comma-separated list of report suite IDs in the image request URL, and is not meant to sug­gest that your data col­lec­tion domain should be changed when using multi-suite tag­ging. In the vast major­ity of cases, you should not change the s.visitorNamespace vari­able when imple­ment­ing multi-suite tagging.)

Regard­less of the method used, the result is that all data col­lected on a page is sent to more than one data set within SiteCatalyst.

Using Multi-Suite Tag­ging
So build­ing upon the pre­vi­ous sce­nario, we can now see how Greco Inc. can take advan­tage of Multi-Suite Tag­ging.  Let’s say that the Greco Inc. CEO’s first pri­or­ity is to see Rev­enue by Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel.  Since there are two sep­a­rate report suites involved, it is now pos­si­ble to use the “Com­pare to Site” fea­ture within most Site­Cat­a­lyst reports to run the same report show­ing two dif­fer­ent data sets.  In this case, Greco Inc. would open the Brand A report suite, nav­i­gate to the Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel report (a SAINT clas­si­fi­ca­tion of Cam­paigns) and then add Rev­enue as the desired met­ric.  This will dis­play all Brand A Rev­enue bro­ken down by Mar­ket­ing Chan­nel.  From there, all that is needed is to select the “Con­fig­ure Report” option and then select “Com­pare to Site” and select the Brand B report suite.  The result is a report that looks like this:

Of course, it is pos­si­ble (and often nec­es­sary) to add the nor­mal­iza­tion option when met­rics are dif­fer­ent between report suites.

But wait…there’s more!  Since Greco Inc. has decided to cre­ate a Global report suite, all vis­i­tors to either the Brand A or Brand B web­site have the same Site­Cat­a­lyst “Vis­i­tor ID” in the Global report suite.  This means that as far as the global report suite is con­cerned, Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst con­sid­ers Brand A and Brand B to be one mas­sive web­site with dif­fer­ent URL’s.  This is impor­tant because it enables you to do the following:

1. See paths that vis­i­tors took from the Brand A site to the Brand B site (and vice-versa).  This allows you to see if the same per­son is vis­it­ing both of your brands which can be inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion (espe­cially if you fos­ter “co-opetition”)
2. Get a de-duplicated count of unique vis­i­tors among all of the sites that you own.  For exam­ple, let’s say that Brand A has 20,000 monthly unique vis­i­tors and Brand B has 15,000 monthly unique vis­i­tors (for a total of 35,000 monthly unique vis­i­tors).  That sounds great, but if you look in the Global report suite, you might see that you only truly have 30,000 monthly unique vis­i­tors if the same vis­i­tor went to both sites (5,000 such vis­i­tors in this example).
3. Cre­ate Seg­ments using cri­te­ria from mul­ti­ple web­sites (i.e. Show me vis­i­tors who looked at a prod­uct on Brand A’s site and brought some­thing on Brand B’s site)
4. Uti­lize Par­tic­i­pa­tion to see what pages on Brand A’s site lead to suc­cess on Brand B’s site (and vice-versa)
5. Uti­lize Cam­paign Track­ing at a higher level to see what mar­ket­ing cam­paigns led to suc­cess across mul­ti­ple sites

With Great Power, Comes Great Respon­si­bil­ity…
The pre­ced­ing exam­ple under­scores one of the most impor­tant things to con­sider when using Multi-Suite Tagging:

It is crit­i­cal that most or all Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­ables be con­sis­tent amongst any report suites that are Multi-Suite Tagged

In the exam­ple above, it is some­what easy since Rev­enue is always set in the same man­ner in Site­Cat­a­lyst.  But imag­ine that one of the items the Greco Inc. CEO wanted to see was Web­site Reg­is­tra­tions.  If Brand A’s web­site stored this in Suc­cess Event #1 and Brand B’s web­site stored Reg­is­tra­tions in Suc­cess Event #4, it would be impos­si­ble to com­pare the two from within Site­Cat­a­lyst (you would have to use the Excel­Client instead).

The sit­u­a­tion gets even worse when you con­sider the Global report suite.  If you recall, we men­tioned that data for both Brand A and Brand B was com­bined in a Global report suite.  Now imag­ine that Brand A is count­ing Web­site Reg­is­tra­tions in Suc­cess Event #1, but Brand B is count­ing E-mail Sub­scrip­tions in Suc­cess Event #1.  Now the Global report suite has two dif­fer­ent met­rics being com­bined (Brand A Web­site Reg­is­tra­tions + Brand B E-mail Sub­scrip­tions) into the same met­ric.  That ren­ders Suc­cess Event #1 use­less in the Global report suite and defeats its entire inten­tion!  In fact, I have often had to be the bearer of bad news to clients who have made busi­ness deci­sions based upon a Global report suite met­ric, only to have me show them that the num­bers they were look­ing at all along were incorrect.

There­fore, using Multi-Suite Tag­ging, while extremely pow­er­ful, requires advanced fore­thought about your set-up and coor­di­na­tion between dif­fer­ent brands and/or geo­graphic loca­tions.  If you are inter­ested in avoid­ing com­mon mis­takes, I strongly rec­om­mend you con­tact Omni­ture Con­sult­ing and con­sider their Cor­po­rate Gov­er­nance con­sult­ing project which is designed to help clients avoid the com­mon pit­falls of large, multi-site implementations.

Impor­tant Things To Know About Multi-Suite Tag­ging
The fol­low­ing are some impor­tant things to know about Multi-Suite Tagging:

1. Since Omni­ture is stor­ing addi­tional data for you through Multi-Suite Tag­ging, you have to pay for the addi­tional server calls (though Omni­ture charges a reduced rate for these)
2. Omni­ture also pro­vides some­thing called a Global Rollup Suite that aggre­gates data from mul­ti­ple indi­vid­ual report suites.  These are more cost-effective than Multi-Suite Tag­ging, but do not pro­vide inter-site pathing, de-duplicated unique vis­i­tors, Traf­fic Data Cor­re­la­tions, DataWare­house, etc…
3. It is not pos­si­ble to cre­ate a Multi-Suite Tagged Global report suite using his­tor­i­cal data so it is best to plan for this ahead of time or pick a date at which you plan to coor­di­nate your sites and launch the Global suite.

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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