Participation [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Falling into the bucket of Site­Cat­a­lyst fea­tures that many clients are not famil­iar with, Par­tic­i­pa­tion is a handy fea­ture that can help you deter­mine which of your site con­tent ele­ments are lead­ing to suc­cess and which are not.  In this post, I will explain Par­tic­i­pa­tion and then illus­trate some advanced uses of it that even those famil­iar with it may not have tried.

What is Par­tic­i­pa­tion?
In order to fully under­stand Par­tic­i­pa­tion, I find that it is help­ful to first under­stand Allo­ca­tion (also known as Lin­ear Allo­ca­tion).  If a vis­i­tor to your web­site clicks on ten pages and then com­pletes a Suc­cess Event, Site­Cat­a­lyst “allo­cates” or divides the Suc­cess Event into equal parts and gives each pre­ced­ing page credit.  If the Suc­cess Event is a pur­chase of $100, all ten pages viewed prior to the Suc­cess Event and the page on which the Suc­cess Event takes place would be given credit of $10.  If the Suc­cess Event is a Counter Event, then each page would receive .10 credit.  These val­ues are aggre­gated, rounded and dis­played in the Pages report if you add a Suc­cess Event met­ric as shown here:

Most peo­ple never notice Allo­ca­tion because when they look at the Pages report they are look­ing at Page Views, Vis­its or Unique Vis­i­tors.  You can add mul­ti­ple Suc­cess Events to the Pages report and see the dif­fer­ent page allo­ca­tions for each Suc­cess Event met­ric (note: this func­tion­al­ity is unique to the Pages report).  While Allo­ca­tion met­rics can be use­ful, they have an obvi­ous down­side.  The more pages vis­i­tors view in a visit, the more diluted Allo­ca­tion is for each page.  For exam­ple, if a sec­ond vis­i­tor views 20 pages and then com­pletes the same Suc­cess Event, each page would get only .05 credit.  There­fore, Allo­ca­tion tends to reward vis­its with smaller num­ber of clicks and pun­ish vis­its with many clicks.  Depend­ing upon your busi­ness model and/or site objec­tives, this can be a pos­i­tive or a negative.

Hav­ing cov­ered Allo­ca­tion, let’s now get back on topic and define Par­tic­i­pa­tion.  Par­tic­i­pa­tion is a fea­ture that assigns equal credit to each item that “par­tic­i­pates” in the flow lead­ing to a Suc­cess Event.  So in the exam­ples above, whereas Allo­ca­tion would divide the $100 Suc­cess Event, Par­tic­i­pa­tion would assign full credit of $100 to every page the vis­i­tor viewed up until the point that the Suc­cess Event takes place.  When cus­tomers first hear about this, they are taken aback since the Par­tic­i­pa­tion val­ues are inflated and report totals will not match actual Rev­enue (or equiv­a­lent for a Counter Suc­cess Event).  The key to Par­tic­i­pa­tion is to focus the Par­tic­i­pa­tion val­ues of var­i­ous items in the report to see which pro­duces the most suc­cess.  Since this can be a bit tricky, I will go through another example:

In the above report, we can see a few pages of the Omni­ture Blog, the asso­ci­ated Page Views and Blog Post View Par­tic­i­pa­tion.  In this case, Omni­ture sets a Suc­cess Event each time a vis­i­tor views a Blog Post and through this report you can see how often each page leads to Blog Post Views.  For exam­ple, the “Adam Greco” page had 30 Page Views, but only was viewed in the flow lead­ing to 27 Blog Post Views (my awful head shot must have scared some folks off!).  In other words, the Par­tic­i­pa­tion met­ric is indi­cat­ing that there were 27 Blog Post Views, in the time frame of this report, in which the vis­i­tor viewed Adam Greco’s page prior to open­ing a Blog Post.

Finally, I like to take this a step fur­ther by cre­at­ing a cal­cu­lated met­ric that divides a Par­tic­i­pa­tion met­ric by Page Views.  When doing this, the higher the result­ing num­ber, the more that item (page in this case) gen­er­ates Suc­cess Events for every Page View it gets (effi­ciency).  I use this to do a “hidden-gem” analy­sis where you are look­ing for pages that may not get the most traf­fic, but when they do, con­vert at higher than aver­age rates.  In the exam­ple we have been using, you could call this cal­cu­lated met­ric “Blog Pull-Through” and add it to the pages report as shown here:

Of the pages shown in this report excerpt, the “ASI” post had the most “Blog Pull-Through” in that it was able to get 30 Blog Post Views out of only 8 Page Views or 3.75 Blog Post Views/Page View.

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

1. Par­tic­i­pa­tion can be turned on for most Site­Cat­a­lyst Suc­cess Events (exclud­ing some forms of Data Sources).  To enable Par­tic­i­pa­tion for a Suc­cess Event con­tact your Account Man­ager or Client­Care.  Once Par­tic­i­pa­tion is turned on for a Suc­cess Event, you add Par­tic­i­pa­tion met­rics to traf­fic reports by using the drop-down box in the “Add Met­rics” dia­log box
2. Par­tic­i­pa­tion is cal­cu­lated after the Suc­cess Event takes place, but affects pages viewed prior to the Suc­cess Event
3. Par­tic­i­pa­tion is cal­cu­lated on a per Visit basis
4. In Site­Cat­a­lyst, Par­tic­i­pa­tion Met­rics are not retroac­tive so they only show data from the point at which they are turned on
5. Par­tic­i­pa­tion met­rics are avail­able for most Suc­cess Events by default in Omni­ture Discover
6. Par­tic­i­pa­tion met­rics are pri­mar­ily used with Traf­fic Vari­ables (sProps), not Con­ver­sion Vari­ables (eVars)
7. By default, Par­tic­i­pa­tion met­rics are tied to the s.pagename (Pages) vari­able, but there are more advanced ways to use Par­tic­i­pa­tion by tying Par­tic­i­pa­tion met­rics to cus­tom sProps (see exam­ple below)

Real-World Exam­ple
In this week’s real-world exam­ple, I will attempt to explain a more advanced ver­sion of Par­tic­i­pa­tion (not for the faint of heart!).  In this exam­ple, a man­u­fac­tur­ing sub­sidiary of Greco Inc. has a web­site con­tain­ing thou­sands of prod­ucts and the Prod­uct team wants to under­stand which prod­ucts site vis­i­tors are look­ing at and, more impor­tantly, which prod­ucts get vis­i­tors to look at the most other prod­ucts.  The first ques­tion is answered pretty eas­ily by set­ting a cus­tom “Prod­uct View” Suc­cess Event and cap­tur­ing the prod­uct ID# in the Prod­ucts Vari­able.  The web ana­lyt­ics team’s first attempt to answer the ques­tion of which prod­ucts get vis­i­tors to look at other prod­ucts was to pass the prod­uct ID# to a cus­tom sProp and enable Pathing.  While this pro­vided some good infor­ma­tion, there were far too many prod­ucts to effec­tively use Pathing analy­sis.  The sec­ond attempt to answer the ques­tion was to enable Par­tic­i­pa­tion on the “Prod­uct View” event as described above, but the issue they ran into was that there were so many pages on the web­site that it was dif­fi­cult to ana­lyze the Par­tic­i­pa­tion met­rics for prod­uct amongst all of the other pages con­tained in the Pages report.

At this point, Greco Inc. turned to Omni­ture Con­sult­ing for guid­ance (shame­less plug!).  Their Omni­ture Con­sul­tant informed Greco Inc. that they could enable Par­tic­i­pa­tion on any sProp, not just s.pagename.  A nice thing about enabling Par­tic­i­pa­tion for the cus­tom sProp (Prod­uct sProp in this case) is that it removes all of the clut­ter sur­round­ing non-product pages which can be really help­ful.  Since they already had prod­uct ID#‘s in a cus­tom sProp, they could tie Par­tic­i­pa­tion to that sProp.  (Con­cen­trate here because this is about to get com­pli­cated!)  By doing this, each time a Prod­uct View took place, the Prod­uct View Suc­cess Event met­ric would be increased and the prod­uct ID# passed to the sProp on the Prod­uct View page would get one Prod­uct View Par­tic­i­pa­tion credit (for itself).  If, within the same visit, vis­i­tors viewed a sec­ond prod­uct, a Prod­uct View Suc­cess Event would take place for the sec­ond prod­uct and the sec­ond prod­uct would get one Prod­uct View Par­tic­i­pa­tion credit (for itself), but more impor­tantly, the first prod­uct they looked at would get a sec­ond Prod­uct View Par­tic­i­pa­tion credit since it was in the flow of another Prod­uct View Suc­cess Event (I told you it was going to be tricky!).  For those keep­ing score at home, here is how the count stands so far:

Just to make sure you get it, let’s go one step fur­ther and assume that the same vis­i­tor looks at one last prod­uct and exits.  At this point, the third prod­uct gets one Prod­uct View Suc­cess Event, one Prod­uct View Par­tic­i­pa­tion (for itself) and the first two prod­ucts get one more Prod­uct View Par­tic­i­pa­tion bring­ing the new totals to:

Once Greco Inc.‘s heads stop spin­ning, they imple­ment this accord­ing to the Omni­ture Consultant’s instruc­tions and by the next day they can see the fol­low­ing report by open­ing the “Prod­uct” sProp report and adding the fol­low­ing metrics:

 

Now Greco Inc. can look at prod­ucts by Page Views, Product View Par­tic­i­pa­tion (how many times each was in the flow of another Prod­uct View) or they can cre­ate a cal­cu­lated met­ric to divide Prod­uct View Par­tic­i­pa­tion by Page Views to see which prod­ucts have the most Prod­uct Views/Page View which can show you which prod­ucts get vis­i­tors to look at other prod­ucts.  Note that Par­tic­i­pa­tion will only count each ele­ment once so, in this case, if a user views the same Prod­uct more than once, it will get a sec­ond Page View, but no more Par­tic­i­pa­tion.  If you antic­i­pate this hap­pen­ing a lot, you can sub­sti­tute Vis­its for Page Views in the above Cal­cu­lated Met­ric.   All of this can be use­ful in answer­ing their ques­tion as to which prod­ucts get vis­i­tors to look at other products.

 

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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