Success Event Pathing [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Analytics · By On · 5 Comments

This week, I was work­ing with a client and men­tioned an idea that I have imple­mented at a few clients which I call Suc­cess Event Pathing.  This is just a con­cept that I thought up and is by no means a proven “best prac­tice,” but I thought I would describe it here and see what you all think about it.  Please review the con­cept and add a com­ment below stat­ing if you like it or hate it…

What is Suc­cess Event Pathing?
As described in the Suc­cess Event post, Omni­ture cus­tomers set Site­Cat­a­lyst Suc­cess Events when vis­i­tors per­form an action on a web­site (or within a wid­get).  We use these Suc­cess Events to mea­sure how well our online prop­erty is per­form­ing against pre­de­fined busi­ness goals.  How­ever, for those who are design­ers or infor­ma­tion archi­tects of an online prop­erty, some­times we are less con­cerned with how often some­thing hap­pens as we are in when it hap­pens.  For exam­ple, if the goal of our web­site is to get vis­i­tors to view videos and read blogs, in hopes that they will sub­mit a lead gen­er­a­tion form, it would be inter­est­ing to under­stand the order in which vis­i­tors per­form these actions.  The order these events take place may impact the way we design nav­i­ga­tion or think about the var­i­ous lev­els of the web­site.  We may have ques­tions such as:

  1. What is the first Suc­cess Event vis­i­tors tend to take?
  2. What is the most com­mon order that all vis­i­tors per­form our web­site Suc­cess Events?
  3. What is the suc­cess event most often per­formed directly before our pri­mary “money” Suc­cess Event?

Below is an exam­ple that will show you what Suc­cess Event Pathing looks like when imple­mented.  Let’s imag­ine that you have Suc­cess Events for Blog Post Views, Video Views, Prod­uct Views, Newslet­ter Sign-ups and Lead Gen­er­a­tion Form Sub­mis­sions.  Once imple­mented, you would like to see pathing reports show­ing the pathing order as shown here:

Deter­min­ing the order in which Suc­cess Events take place using page-level pathing can be very dif­fi­cult since the same Suc­cess Event can take place on many dif­fer­ent pages (i.e. Prod­uct Views) and many pages don’t have any Suc­cess Events.  There­fore, my con­cept is to pro­vide Suc­cess Event Pathing which is a pathing report that only con­tains entries rep­re­sent­ing your website’s define Suc­cess Events so you can see, at a 20,000 foot level, how vis­i­tors per­form these actions.  Make sense?

Imple­ment­ing Suc­cess Event Pathing
So how do you imple­ment this idea?  Well the first step is to make sure you have prop­erly tagged all of your site Suc­cess Events.  Once this is done, you have to pass the name of the Suc­cess Event to a Traf­fic Vari­able (sProp) on the page in which it occurs.  There are a few ways to do this:

  • Use JavaScript to look for a Suc­cess Event being set and pass a pre­de­fined name to the new cus­tom sProp at that time
  • Use a VISTA rule to set the cus­tom sProp value when each Suc­cess Event takes place

Regard­less of how you set it, the ulti­mate goal is to sim­ply add a value (name) to the cus­tom sProp for each Suc­cess Event that makes sense to you and your users when the Suc­cess Event takes place.  Once com­pleted, speak to your Account Man­ager or Client­Care and have pathing enabled for that sProp and you will be able to see reports like the one above.  As is always the case with pathing, keep in mind that the reports are for Vis­its only (not across mul­ti­ple vis­its).  If you need to see this infor­ma­tion across vis­its, please speak to your Account Man­ager who can put you in touch with our advanced solu­tions team.  Finally, if the same Suc­cess Event takes place on more than one page and you have a need to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between them, you could con­cate­nate the page­name and the Suc­cess Event into the sProp (or a sec­ond sProp).

That’s it.  Use­ful?  Worth­less?  Please let me know what you think?

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.

Learn more about Omni­ture Consulting
Learn more about Omni­ture University
Tagged with → • •  
  • Seth

    Hey Adam,
    We’re a new Omni­ture cus­tomer and I just spend a bunch of time catch­ing up on all your old blog posts. Now I’m afraid I won’t have any­thing else to learn at Omni­ture Train­ing next week!

    I think suc­cess event pathing could be a seri­ously use­ful tool for any­one who has the flex­i­bil­ity to tag up a large pro­por­tion of their site with suc­cess events. Unfor­tu­nately, we’re run­ning a site that has three or four entirely sep­a­rate areas with dif­fer­ent user expe­ri­ences, so to keep our­selves under 30 suc­cess events, we’ve had to tag up only the most impor­tant events.

    I think that your idea strikes at a greater prob­lem with pathing, though. We have pathing enabled on our page names, of course, and also on our three lev­els of site hier­ar­chy; it’s great to see how users are flow­ing from one of our three or four main areas to the oth­ers. Suc­cess event pathing seems like it’s mainly insert­ing another level of detail into the equa­tion (which is great, because the more choices you have the bet­ter chance one of them will work well for you). But now, I could have five dif­fer­ent ways of look­ing at paths through my site — the three lev­els of site hier­achy, the page names, and the suc­cess events. You could imag­ine even more lev­els com­ing into the pic­ture — pathing from visit to visit, for exam­ple (first visit, this vis­i­tor went through user reg­is­tra­tion; sec­ond visit they went through user train­ing slideshows; third visit they responded to a poll; etc.). The exist­ing pathing func­tion­al­ity is highly flex­i­ble, but I have to imag­ine that there’s some cre­ative way to visu­al­ize paths within sev­eral hier­ar­chi­cal lev­els of data at once (with­out need­ing to drill), includ­ing page names, suc­cess events, and even maybe some­thing as-yet undis­cov­ered like visit num­ber, all in the same graph­i­cal representation.

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/agreco Adam Greco

    Seth — On your first point, if tag­ging is an issue, you can always use a VISTA rule or a query string para­me­ter to set Suc­cess Events. Let me know if you need more info on this. On your sec­ond point, I see no prob­lem with many dif­fer­ent types of pathing. I have many clients that have pathing enabled for 10 sProps. Each of these is totally sep­a­rate so they don’t inter­min­gle and mess each other up. On your last point, I know of no way in SIte­Cat­a­lyst to do pathing across mul­ti­ple vis­its or to com­bine these dif­fer­ent pathing types together (other than con­cate­nat­ing val­ues into a new sProp). Per­haps that can be done in Dis­cover OnPremise…

    Adam

  • Seth

    Hi Adam,
    Good call using query string para­me­ters or VISTA rules to set suc­cess events — I hadn’t thought of that — though I don’t think it gets us around our prob­lem of want­ing to min­i­mize the num­ber of suc­cess events we’ve set up in the report suite.

    I agree with you that pathing is highly use­ful when used on a sin­gle sProp, but, in addi­tion, inter-visit pathing or a hierarchical-sProp path visu­al­iza­tion could be a killer new functionality.

  • http://www.murdoch.edu.au Tim Elle­ston

    Hey Adam,
    You men­tioned above that this doesn’t work from visit to visit. How easy/difficult is it to get it to work across vis­its? We have a really long sales cycle; lead start/lead com­plete are within the same visit, within the same tool, but they might come back to another tool and do lead start/lead com­plete, then come back again and do app start/app com­plete. Even the app start and app com­plete are gen­er­ally not com­pleted within the same ses­sion as we have save and resume on the apply online appli­ca­tion tool.

    Can this be accom­plished through the s_code using GetAnd­Per­sist, or does it require a VISTA rule?

    Thanks
    Tim

  • http://www.roundarch.com Cindy

    Adam,
    Thanks for the post and the idea.

    Tim’s com­ment above sparked an idea for me. What if we were able to read the “visit num­ber” from the cookie and append that value to the suc­cess event name? Could Omni­ture pos­si­bly come up with a plug in that could do this (i’m not sure how easy/tough it is to trans­late a value from the cookie to a value that can be pop­u­lated in an sprop.)

    You could then use this report to path by all suc­cess events that hap­pened on the first vis, sec­ond vis, third, etc. You could also see whether cer­tain media held a greater propen­sity to lead a vis­i­tor down the “con­ver­sion path” dur­ing a return visit rather than their first or sec­ond visit.

    This works for media sites and news sites which don’t really have a clear pur­chase con­ver­sion. These sites usu­ally have vis­i­tors that gen­er­ate numer­ous return vis­its before putting enough trust on a site to fol­low it or give it any information.

    All the best! Keep the great ideas flow­ing!
    –Cindy Wang