OmnitureCare mailbag

I like blog posts that have solid themes, but some­times there are ques­tions I’d like to answer that may not be long enough to con­sti­tute their own post. In such cases, I’ll use a “pot­pourri” for­mat sim­i­lar to the pop­u­lar Bill Sim­mons mail­bag recur­ring fea­ture on ESPN​.com to hit a bunch of dis­parate top­ics in a sin­gle blog entry. So I hope you’ll for­give me as I bounce around a bit here and answer a few excel­lent ques­tions that I received via e-mail or Twit­ter within the past cou­ple of months that I haven’t been able to turn into sep­a­rate blog posts.

Q: What is a list vari­able, and how can I use it to mea­sure ad impres­sions on my site?

BG: Cus­tom Traf­fic (s.prop) vari­ables allow you to pass a “list” of val­ues, using a delim­iter of your choos­ing. This is great for sites want­ing to mea­sure things like ad impres­sions, where you may have mul­ti­ple ads on a sin­gle page. Here’s an exam­ple where impres­sions for three dif­fer­ent ads can be passed into Site­Cat­a­lyst on a sin­gle page view:

s.prop7=“1784713|4849122|0665781″

Site­Cat­a­lyst will break this value at the pipe (assum­ing that pipe was the cho­sen delim­iter), gen­er­at­ing a report that looks like this:

Of course, we’d want to add friendly names and group­ings to these raw IDs (in the case of ads, these group­ings might be part­ner names, page loca­tion, etc.), which can be done using SAINT. And while pathing and data cor­re­la­tions are not avail­able for list props in Site­Cat­a­lyst, cor­re­la­tions on list props absolutely are avail­able in Dis­cover and Data Warehouse.

(You prob­a­bly also want to track ad clicks. You can do this by apply­ing cus­tom link track­ing code to each of the ads in the onclick event han­dler, and pass­ing the ad ID either into a prop or into the link name. You can then get side-by-side report­ing on impres­sions and clicks using Excel Client,  Report Builder, Dis­cover, and/or Site­Cat­a­lyst dashboards.)

Q: Let’s say a user clicks a link in an e-mail and views one page on my site. Then they leave, but return to the e-mail and click a dif­fer­ent link, which leads them to view a dif­fer­ent page on my site, within 30 min­utes. Would this be con­sid­ered a bounce on the first page that the user viewed?

BG: No. A bounce is typ­i­cally defined as [Sin­gle Access] / [Entries]. The fact that the Sin­gle Access met­ric is included in this cal­cu­la­tion means that the numer­a­tor will only have a value when the entire visit con­sisted of one page. In the sce­nario described in the ques­tion, the user makes a sec­ond page view before the visit has expired, thus remov­ing the entire visit from inclu­sion in the bounce rate calculation.

Q: Can I copy cal­cu­lated met­rics across report suites?

BG: Cal­cu­lated met­rics cre­ated in the Admin Con­sole in Site­Cat­a­lyst can absolutely be dupli­cated across report suites. Here’s how you do it. In the Admin Con­sole > Report Suites page, select all of the suites to which you want to copy the met­ric, includ­ing the suite that already has the met­ric applied to it. At the bot­tom of the result­ing page, you’ll get a list of all cal­cu­lated met­rics that have been applied to at least one of the suites you selected:

Click the “Edit” icon for the met­ric that you want to copy:

This will load up the cal­cu­lated met­ric in the editor:

You don’t even have to do any­thing here! Just press “Save.” The met­ric will be auto­mat­i­cally copied to all of the suites that you selected. This can be really use­ful for com­mon cal­cu­lated met­rics that you use across all of your suites, such as Page Views per Visit, Vis­its per Monthly Unique Vis­i­tor, or Vis­i­tor Con­ver­sion (e.g., [Orders] / [Daily Unique Vis­i­tors] or some­thing along those lines).

Q: How do I “push” a book­mark to spe­cific users in my account?

BG: The “push book­mark” fea­ture is a little-known but excel­lent way to dis­trib­ute reports to indi­vid­ual users. Typ­i­cally, when a book­mark is shared, oth­ers may access it, but it remains the prop­erty of your user account. “Push book­mark” copies the book­mark to other accounts so that Once you have saved a book­mark, go to My Account > Book­marks and click “Make Pub­lic.” This opens up access to the report for other users. The “Make Pub­lic” icon will appear in color, and you will see a “Users” link next to it:

Click this link to launch a pop-up win­dow con­tain­ing a list of all users on your account. Sim­ply select the desired recip­i­ents of the book­mark and click “Save.” These users will receive the book­mark on the tool­bar that spans the top of the Site­Cat­a­lyst user interface:

So there you have it; four tips that I hope will help some of you. Let me know whether you like/hate this sort of a blog post and I’ll adjust my plans accord­ingly. And regard­less, please feel free to con­tact me per­son­ally with ques­tions, com­ments, etc. at any time via Twit­ter or e-mail (omni­ture care at omni­ture dot com).