Traffic Variables (sProps) [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Like any soft­ware prod­uct you use, there are a few key ele­ments that you need to under­stand to be suc­cess­ful.  In work­ing with clients I have found that many do not have a good under­stand­ing of the three fun­da­men­tal build­ing blocks of Site­Cat­a­lyst: sProps, eVars and Suc­cess Events.  When I was an Omni­ture client, I will admit that I had much more impor­tant things to do with my time than to learn about Omniture’s vari­able types and their capa­bil­i­ties.  How­ever, over time, I came to under­stand that these vari­ables are the foun­da­tion of all Site­Cat­a­lyst report­ing, so if I wanted to use Omni­ture reports to mea­sure my web­site suc­cess and/or jus­tify my re-design the­o­ries, I had bet­ter suck it up and learn about these three vari­able types.  I hope you will do the same.  In this post I will review sProps and will cover the other two types in my next posts.

Traf­fic Vari­ables
Traf­fic vari­ables (known to old-timers as sProps) help to track page-by-page site traf­fic activ­ity.  Site Traf­fic is nor­mally mea­sured via Page Views, Vis­its or Unique Vis­i­tors.  The pri­mary pur­pose of sProps is to allow you to break­down Page Views, Vis­its and Unique Vis­i­tors into mean­ing­ful buck­ets.  While Site­Cat­a­lyst pro­vides reports to see total Page Views, Vis­its and Unique Vis­i­tors for your site, most web analy­sis needs to take place at a much more gran­u­lar level.  With­out sProps, you would not be able to see such things as which pages are the most pop­u­lar or what per­cent­age of pages were viewed in the USA vs. Canada, etc….  The fol­low­ing is an exam­ple of the most com­monly used sProp report, the Most Pop­u­lar Pages report:

Not Per­sis­tent
An impor­tant thing to know about sProps is that they are not per­sis­tent.  This means that they do not retain their value from one page to the next, a con­cept that often con­fuses Omni­ture cus­tomers.  I find that the eas­i­est way to under­stand sProps is to think of the most com­monly used sProp: Page Name.  Let’s assume a vis­i­tor to your site starts their visit on the Home Page and the value “Home Page” is passed into the Page Name sProp.  From the Home Page, the vis­i­tor clicks on a link and is taken to the “Con­tact Us” page.  You would cer­tainly not want the value of “Home Page” to per­sist and be passed into the Page Name sProp on this next page or it would look like the Home Page had two Page Views instead of each page hav­ing one Page View.

Pathing
Another impor­tant thing to know about sProps is that they are used for Pathing. Pathing is the abil­ity to view the order in which val­ues are passed to a par­tic­u­lar Site­Cat­a­lyst sProp for a spe­cific Visit.  For exam­ple, let’s say that each page on your site has a page­name and the val­ues passed to the Page­name sProp are Page A, Page B, and Page C respec­tively.  If Pathing is enabled for that sProp, Site­Cat­a­lyst would record the order in which the val­ues were passed and allow you to view reports that show the per­cent­age for which all site users went from Page A to Page B, etc…  I will def­i­nitely be talk­ing more about Pathing in a future post.

Did You Know?
The fol­low­ing addi­tional items related to sProps are worth noting:

1. Vis­its, Daily Unique Vis­i­tors, Weekly Unique Vis­i­tors, Monthly Unique Vis­i­tors and Quar­terly Unique Vis­i­tors can be enabled for any sProp (for an addi­tional fee)
2. Site­Cat­a­lyst pro­vides sev­eral “out-of-the-box” pre-defined sProps includ­ing: Page­name, Site Section, Server, Browser, Coun­try, etc…  These are sim­i­lar to all other (cus­tom) sProps with the excep­tion being the Page­name sProp which is some­what spe­cial in that it cap­tures the page URL if no value is passed to it.
3. Any two sProps can be “cor­re­lated” or bro­ken down by each other
4. Pathing can be enabled for any sProp
5. Any sProp can be “clas­si­fied” using SAINT

Real-World Exam­ple
In every post I will attempt to pro­vide a real-world exam­ple of the topic at hand.  Let’s say that we are work­ing for Greco Inc., an Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst cus­tomer that owns sev­eral dif­fer­ent types of web properties.  One of Greco Inc.‘s web prop­er­ties has a trans­la­tion util­ity which allows each page of the site to be viewed in either Eng­lish or Spanish.  The CMO is work­ing on a mar­ket­ing cam­paign tar­get­ing His­panic cus­tomers and, as such, would like to get a feel for the per­cent­age of all site Page Views viewed in Span­ish.  To accom­plish this, the client would pass the lan­guage that the cur­rent page is being viewed in to a cus­tom sProp.  For best results, this sProp should be pop­u­lated on every page so that the total Page Views in this report matches (or is close to) the over­all num­ber of Page Views for the same time­frame.  Doing this might pro­duce a report that looks like this:

Thus, by using a cus­tom sProp, Greco Inc. now has a new way to break­down Page Views and can answer the spe­cific busi­ness ques­tion at hand.

Have a ques­tion about any­thing related to 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 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!)