SiteCatalyst Interface Time-Savers [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

In this post I will men­tion some cool Site­Cat­a­lyst inter­face fea­tures that you may not be aware of, but could save you some time and avoid stress (just in time for the hol­i­days!).  My hope is that there are more out there that you may have found so please feel free to add them as com­ments at the end of this post.

Col­lapse Left-Navigation Menu Bar
Ever look­ing at a report with a lot of met­rics and wish you didn’t have to scroll?  Many peo­ple out there don’t know that you can col­lapse the Site­Cat­a­lyst left-navigation bar to increase your report screen size.  Sim­ply click on the “minus” sign above the menu to col­lapse and the “plus” sign to expand:

Double-Click to Add/Remove Met­rics
Most of you should already know this, but in Site­Cat­a­lyst v14 you can double-click to add/remove met­rics in the “Add Met­rics” win­dow.  For those of you using v13.x, hold down the CTRL key down when click­ing on met­rics to get the same result.

Double-Click to Rename Dash­board Reportlets
Ever want to change the name of a report­let on a Site­Cat­a­lyst Dash­board?  Bet you didn’t know that you could double-click on it to rename it!

View Reports in Trended View
Most Site­Cat­a­lyst reports allow you to switch from the default “Ranked” view to a “Trended” view which shows you the con­text of the data.  This is use­ful for see­ing if things are head­ing in the right direc­tion.  You can let Site­Cat­a­lyst pick the Top 5 items to trend or you can spec­ify the five items you want to trend.  If you want to see more than 5 of your data points trended, you can do this by using the Excel­Client.

Add Tar­gets to Site­Cat­a­lyst Reports
While it is nice to look at your Site­Cat­a­lyst reports and see that the trends are going up or down (depend­ing upon which way you want them to go), some­times that is not enough.  Out in the real-world, there are mean bosses who want to hold you account­able for your met­rics!  If this sounds famil­iar, you might want to check out a sel­dom used fea­ture of Site­Cat­a­lyst called “Tar­gets.”  Tar­gets allow you to define met­rics for spe­cific time­frames and then show you how you are per­form­ing toward the tar­gets that you set.  Let’s say I showed you the fol­low­ing graph:

You would most likely say that it looks like things are going pretty well.  Rev­enue is trend­ing up and there are not many sit­u­a­tions where you want Rev­enue to go down!  It may be time to head out early, take a well deserved vaca­tion or ask for that raise you have been long­ing for!

But what if I then showed you the same graph, but with a Tar­get added to show you where your boss expects your met­rics to be…

Uh-oh, sud­denly you are not feel­ing so con­fi­dent!  This is why Tar­gets are impor­tant since in web ana­lyt­ics, con­text is king!  You can set Site­Cat­a­lyst Tar­gets man­u­ally through the inter­face or import them using an Excel Spread­sheet.  I encour­age you to dig into the user man­ual and learn more about Tar­gets when you have the time.

Reor­ga­nize Menus and Hide Menu Items
Did you know that you could com­pletely re-organize the left-navigation menus of Site­Cat­a­lyst?  Does the notion of Traf­fic vs. Con­ver­sion Vari­ables not seem intu­itive to you?  Do you want to hide some Site­Cat­a­lyst reports that you don’t think your orga­ni­za­tion will care about?  You can do all of this and more in the Admin Con­sole by cre­at­ing your own menus and adding/removing items.  Sim­ply select the report suite(s) you care about and open the “Menu Cus­tomiza­tion” tool.  For exam­ple, below you can see that there are a few Traf­fic reports related to “Day Part­ing” (time of day, day of week) buried within the Cus­tom Traf­fic 1–10 report folder:

You can eas­ily cre­ate a new “Day Part­ing” folder and drag these reports there instead of hav­ing to hunt for them under the Traf­fic reports folder.  When you are done, it looks like this:

Upon sav­ing, all users will see the menus the way you arrange them and you can use the “Restore Defaults” but­ton to return to the orig­i­nal menu struc­ture if it is ever needed.  For obvi­ous rea­sons, this func­tion­al­ity is lim­ited to Administrators.

Save Cus­tom Reports
Have you ever opened a Con­ver­sion (eVar) report, added the exact met­rics you wanted, cho­sen the per­fect graph and sorted on the per­fect met­ric?  It is a great feel­ing when you get a Site­Cat­a­lyst report exactly the way you want it.  Once you have done this, why would you ever want to have to go through all of that work again?  While you can add the report to a dash­board or as a book­mark, you would then have to take the addi­tional step to share it with co-workers.   If you are ok with every­one see­ing this report, you can save it as a “Cus­tom Report.”  To do this, sim­ply cre­ate the report as you’d like it to be seen by oth­ers and click the “Cus­tom Report” icon from the tool­bar and give it a name and save:

Once you have one or more Cus­tom Reports, they will show up in a folder at the bot­tom of the left-navigation bar.

Of course, you can also move these Cus­tom Reports any­where you want in the menu struc­ture using the Menu Reor­ga­ni­za­tion tool described above.

Cre­ate Global Cal­cu­lated Met­rics
Have you ever cre­ated a Cal­cu­lated Met­ric that you wanted every­one at your orga­ni­za­tion to know about?  Per­haps you and your coun­ter­parts have dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions for Bounce Rate which dri­ves your supe­ri­ors crazy.  Using Global Cal­cu­lated Met­rics, you can cre­ate Cal­cu­lated Met­rics and push them out to your orga­ni­za­tion.  As long as the user has Admin­is­tra­tor priv­i­leges, these Global Cal­cu­lated Met­rics can be cre­ated on the fly from the Met­rics Builder…

…or through the Admin Console: