Segment Builder Best Practices [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

In the past two posts, I have described how you can lever­age Omni­ture DataWare­house and ASI to enhance your Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst web analy­sis projects.  Both of these tools use Omniture’s Seg­ment Builder which is the mech­a­nism for cre­at­ing the seg­ments which select the vis­i­tors, vis­its and page views you want to ana­lyze.  There­fore, a good under­stand­ing of how to cor­rectly build seg­ments using Seg­ment Builder is crit­i­cal to get­ting the most out of these tools (and Omni­ture Dis­cover which also uses Seg­ment Builder).  In this post I will share some tips and tricks that we at Omni­ture Con­sult­ing have learned in work­ing with the Seg­ment Builder (I will pre-warn you that this post may take a bit to sink in since Seg­ment Builder is a more advanced Site­Cat­a­lyst topic, but I promise it is worth it in the long run!).

Under­stand­ing Seg­ment Builder
To under­stand the Seg­ment Builder, you first need to under­stand the var­i­ous com­po­nents that it uses to build a seg­ment.  As shown in the image below, when you enter the Seg­ment Builder, you will see Con­tain­ers, Events and a Seg­ment Canvas.

First, we will dis­cuss the dif­fer­ent containers:

1. Page Views — Drag­ging a Page View con­tainer to the seg­ment can­vas will allow you to define which Page Views you would like to include or exclude from the seg­ment.  When eval­u­at­ing the Page View con­tainer, Omni­ture is, in effect, scan­ning through each Page View it finds within the spec­i­fied time frame and decid­ing whether it should be included or excluded.  There­fore, it may be the case that two dif­fer­ent Page Views from the same Visit may or may not be included in the seg­ment.  For exam­ple, let’s assume that you are build­ing a seg­ment where you only want pages where the lan­guage was Span­ish.  It may be the case that a vis­i­tor viewed ten pages dur­ing their Visit, but only two of those ten were viewed in Span­ish.  Using a Page View con­tainer, would mean that only these two Page Views would be included in the segment.
2. Vis­its — Drag­ging the Vis­its con­tainer to the seg­ment can­vas will allow you to define which Vis­its you would like to include or exclude from the seg­ment.  When eval­u­at­ing the Vis­its con­tainer, Omni­ture is, in effect, scan­ning through each Visit it finds within the spec­i­fied time frame and decid­ing whether the entire Visit should be included or excluded.  There­fore, if any of the cri­te­ria are met within the Visit, all data from that Visit will be included (or excluded if using the exclude tab) in the seg­ment.  Using the pre­ced­ing exam­ple, if the seg­ment look­ing for pages viewed in Span­ish were built using a Visit con­tainer, the entire Visit would be included since at least one of the pages was viewed in Span­ish (even though the major­ity were in English).
3. Vis­i­tors — Drag­ging the Vis­i­tors con­tainer to the seg­ment can­vas will allow you to define which Vis­i­tors you would like to include or exclude from the seg­ment.  When eval­u­at­ing the Vis­i­tors con­tainer, Omni­ture is, in effect, scan­ning through all data it has for each Vis­i­tor within the spec­i­fied time frame and decid­ing whether at any time the Vis­i­tor met the cri­te­ria.  If it finds that the Vis­i­tor has met the cri­te­ria, all Vis­its and Page Views for that Vis­i­tor will be included in the seg­ment.  Con­tin­u­ing the pre­ced­ing exam­ple relat­ing to pages viewed in Span­ish, if a Vis­i­tor had six site vis­its within the spec­i­fied time frame and in one of those Vis­its viewed at least one page in Span­ish, data from all six Vis­its would be included in the segment.

As you can see, the con­tainer you select can have an enor­mous impact on the data set that is returned in DataWare­house or ASI.  This is why I can­not stress enough the impor­tance of test­ing your seg­ments before using them in production.

The next item that can be added to the seg­ment can­vas is Events.  The Event con­tain­ers rep­re­sent the Suc­cess Events you have iden­ti­fied for your web­site.  If, for exam­ple, you have a Visit con­tainer and you add  the “Order” Event to it, then you are indi­cat­ing that only Vis­its in which an Order took place should be included in the seg­ment.  You can also define the Suc­cess Event in more detail, by click­ing on its name and adding addi­tional fil­ter criteria.

The most dif­fi­cult area of Seg­ment Builder to under­stand is the Seg­ment Can­vas.  To begin with, there are two tabs of the can­vas, one for Include and one for Exclude.  When deter­min­ing which data to include in your seg­ment, Omni­ture first looks to the Include tab and iden­ti­fies all data that is to be included and then pro­ceeds to elim­i­nate any data match­ing the cri­te­ria of the Exclude tab.  Once you have suc­cess­fully nav­i­gated the include/exclude tab, the next chal­leng­ing part is to under­stand how to set con­di­tions within a con­tainer.  To do this, you sim­ply click on the under­lined con­tainer name which brings up a win­dow that allows you to spec­ify the para­me­ters of that con­tainer.  Here you can choose almost any data point and spec­ify whether it should be equal to, greater than, con­tains, etc… and then choose or enter a value.  In addition, using the first drop-down box allows you to choose whether all of these con­di­tions need to be met (AND) or if just one need to be met (OR).  What­ever you choose in this drop-down box will change the cri­te­ria in the Fil­ter below.  In the image shown here, the user has cho­sen to use the OR clause so that a Visit can come from either the United States or the United King­dom.  One point of warn­ing: The #1 mis­take clients make in this step is that they for­get to click the “Add” but­ton when adding con­di­tions so be mind­ful of this!

The final thing to learn in build­ing a seg­ment is the nest­ing of con­tain­ers.  Here are some impor­tant guide­lines you should know:

1. Page View con­tain­ers can only have nested Events
2. Visit con­tain­ers can have nested Events and Page View containers
3. Vis­i­tor con­tain­ers can have nested Events, Page Views and Visits
4. If an Event is added to the seg­ment can­vas with no Page View/Visit/Visitor con­tainer, the Page View con­tainer is used by default
5. It is not pos­si­ble to add mul­ti­ple Events to a Visit con­tainer such that they form an OR clause, but to get around this, you can add mul­ti­ple Visit con­tain­ers to the can­vas and add one Event to each

The seg­ment Builder will usu­ally tell you when you are attempt­ing to add an invalid com­bi­na­tion, but it is good to learn what you can and can’t nest within the seg­ment builder.  Finally, it is impor­tant to under­stand what the Seg­ment Builder treats as AND/OR clauses when build­ing seg­ments.  If you want to add two or more items and have all of the con­di­tions met (AND) then you want to be sure that you nest them above the line of the con­tainer like this:

How­ever, if you want to the seg­ment to look for one con­di­tion or the other (OR), you would want to make sure that the items are out­side of the con­tainer line like this:

In the exam­ples shown here, the for­mer would include all Vis­its where the coun­try was “United States” and an Order took place, but the lat­ter would include all Vis­its where the coun­try was “United States” or an Order took place.  This is prob­a­bly the hard­est part and I encour­age you to tap into Omni­ture Con­sult­ing when build­ing com­plex segments.

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

1. Seg­ments built using the Page View con­tainer will return data the fastest, fol­lowed by the Visit con­tainer and the Vis­i­tor con­tainer.  When­ever pos­si­ble, attempt to use the low­est level con­tainer needed to get the data you need to improve pro­cess­ing time.
2. Clas­si­fi­ca­tions can­not be used as cri­te­ria in DataWare­house or ASI Seg­ment Builder seg­ments.  For this rea­son, if you believe that you will want to use a data point as seg­ment cri­te­ria, you may want to pass the data directly to a Traf­fic Vari­able or Con­ver­sion Vari­able instead of rely­ing upon a clas­si­fi­ca­tion.  Clas­si­fi­ca­tions can be used as seg­ment cri­te­ria in Omni­ture Discover.
3. Seg­ment Builder allows you to seg­ment on how many times a Suc­cess Event takes place which is very pow­er­ful.  For exam­ple, if you set a Suc­cess Event each time a vis­i­tor con­ducts an Inter­nal Search, you can build a seg­ment that looks for cases where “Total Inter­nal Searches is greater than 2″ to find repeat searchers.

Tips & Tricks
Since this post is really a sub­set of the DataWarehouse/ASI posts where we already pro­vided some real-world exam­ples, I am going to pro­vide some prac­ti­cal Seg­ment Builder tips and tricks instead of a real-world example:

• If you want to be sure you are includ­ing all data in your seg­ment, you can add a Page View con­tainer where IP Address con­tains “.” since all data col­lected by Site­Cat­a­lyst con­tains an IP address and all IP addresses con­tain a “.”

• If you want to build a seg­ment using a wild card such that a Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­able has a value (is not blank), you can use a “greater than !” in your seg­ment def­i­n­i­tion as shown here.

• Con­versely, if you want to build a seg­ment based upon the fact that a Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­able had no value you would use “less than !” in your seg­ment def­i­n­i­tion as shown here.

 

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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