Transaction ID [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

In our last post on Data Sources, we dis­cussed how you can aug­ment your online data by inject­ing offline (or non-web online data) into your Site­Cat­a­lyst data set.  This post will build upon this topic by cov­er­ing one of the most pow­er­ful new fea­tures of Site­Cat­a­lyst, Trans­ac­tion ID.

What is Trans­ac­tion ID
So what is Trans­ac­tion ID?  Trans­ac­tion ID allows you to con­nect online and offline data by estab­lish­ing a “key” that can tie the online visit to the offline suc­cess.  For exam­ple, let’s say that you are a retailer and you sell three iPods to Joe Smith today.  How­ever, a week from now, what if Joe Smith returns two of the iPods.  All of your online num­bers will be inflated since they do not reflect prod­uct returns.  In addi­tion, you have a lot of online data about Joe includ­ing his Visit Num­ber, which Cam­paign Track­ing Code he came from, etc…  All of these reports are now sus­pect since they don’t include prod­uct returns.  So how do you fix this?  One way would be to use Data Sources like we dis­cussed in the last post, but you would have to man­u­ally iden­tify Joe’s Visit Num­ber, Cam­paign Track­ing Code, etc…  What a pain, espe­cially since Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst already has all of this infor­ma­tion right up until the point that Joe pur­chases the three iPods.  Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way for Site­Cat­a­lyst to store all of that data some­where so if we tell Site­Cat­a­lyst that Joe had a return, Site­Cat­a­lyst could, in effect, reverse out part or all of his trans­ac­tion in all of these reports?  Well, that is exactly what Trans­ac­tion ID can do!

How Does Trans­ac­tion ID Work?
So how does Trans­ac­tion ID work this kind of magic?  It’s not as hard as you would think.  Using the exam­ple above, when Joe com­pletes a pur­chase online, your devel­op­ers would pass a unique “Trans­ac­tion ID” (hence the name) to a spe­cial Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­able.  When that hap­pens, Site­Cat­a­lyst stores all known data for that Vis­i­tor in a sep­a­rate table and uses the Trans­ac­tion ID as the “key.”  Later, when there is offline data related to that same Trans­ac­tion ID uploaded (the prod­uct return in this example), all of the con­ver­sion data (i.e. Cam­paign Track­ing Code, Visit Num­ber, etc…) is asso­ci­ated with the newly uploaded met­rics.  This saves you the work of hav­ing to upload all of this sup­ple­men­tal data with the offline met­rics like you would using tra­di­tional Data Sources.

Please note, that the exam­ple here is one of many ways you can use Trans­ac­tion ID func­tion­al­ity.  Here are a few more examples:

• A vis­i­tor fills out a lead form on your web­site and later pur­chases a prod­uct by phone.  If you can con­nect the user’s online ses­sion and phone call together using an ID (i.e. e-mail address), you can see what online cam­paigns or refer­ral sources led to the phone call, which led to the sale.  This helps you jus­tify your invest­ment in online advertising.
• A vis­i­tor to a bank site com­pletes a loan appli­ca­tion online, but the bank needs a few weeks to deter­mine if it will give them the loan.  Using Trans­ac­tion ID, the bank can upload the results (Loans Approved or Loans Declined) and see what cam­paigns or refer­ral sources lead to Loan Approvals vs. Loan Declines in order to max­i­mize online adver­tis­ing budgets.
• A rental car com­pany wants to see which cam­paigns lead to online car reser­va­tions vs. which lead to actual car rentals (offline)
• A retailer wants to test a new joint affil­i­ate land­ing page so they ask vis­i­tors on that site to print off a dig­i­tal coupon and bring it to their brick and mor­tar store.  Using Trans­ac­tion ID, they can asso­ciate each sale made at the store with the online source.

As you can see, there are many ways to use this fea­ture, but the com­mon theme is tying together online and offline behavior.

Impor­tant Things To Know About Trans­ac­tion ID
So now that I have you all excited about Trans­ac­tion ID, here are some of the caveats:

1. Because Omni­ture has to store an extra table of data to make Trans­ac­tion ID work, there are some addi­tional fees involved.  Your Account Man­ager can dis­cuss this with you in more detail.
2. By default, all Trans­ac­tion ID data is stored for 90 days.  This means that you have up to 90 days from the time you set the Trans­ac­tion ID online to upload the related offline data.  This time­frame has been ade­quate for most of my clients and can be extended if needed for a surcharge.

Real-World Exam­ple
In this real-world exam­ple, we will look at a bank­ing sce­nario.  Let’s assume that a bank­ing sub­sidiary of Greco Inc. (First Bank USA) is mak­ing a major push for new credit card cus­tomers.  They are spend­ing lots of money on paid search and dis­play adver­tis­ing.  As a result, they are gen­er­at­ing tons of online leads, rep­re­sent­ing vis­i­tors fill­ing out credit card appli­ca­tions.  Below is a report that they see from within SiteCatalyst:

As you can see, the “Low­est Rates” cam­paign is per­form­ing the best and the “Switch to First Bank USA” cam­paign is the most expen­sive.  Based upon this infor­ma­tion, the online mar­ket­ing man­ager begins to spend more and more money on the “Low­est Rates” cam­paign and aban­dons the “Switch to First Bank USA” campaign.

How­ever, after a few weeks, the mar­ket­ing man­ager gets a report that their num­bers for new credit card cus­tomers have not increased as expected.  Given the high num­ber of new leads, this doesn’t make sense, so they decide to dig into things fur­ther.  Around this time, a mar­ket­ing intern hap­pens to read a cool blog about SiteCatalyst’s Trans­ac­tion ID func­tion­al­ity and con­vinces First Bank USA decides to pass the appli­ca­tion ID to the Trans­ac­tion ID vari­able and then upload the results of each credit card appli­ca­tion using the appli­ca­tion ID as the “key.”  After doing this, they looked at the same cam­paigns report, but included the newly cre­ated met­ric of “Approved Appli­ca­tions” and then cre­ated cal­cu­lated met­rics for “Approved/Completed Con­ver­sion %” and “Cost per Approved Application:”

Once they did this, they were able to see that the dif­fer­ent cam­paigns had vary­ing degrees of appli­ca­tion approval such that some cam­paigns gen­er­ated a lot of sub­mit­ted appli­ca­tions, but not appli­ca­tions that First Bank USA deemed to be credit-worthy.  In fact, when look­ing at the same cam­paigns as before, it was found that the “Low­est Rates” cam­paign that looked so promis­ing before, actu­ally had the worst Cost per Approved Appli­ca­tion and that “Switch to First Bank USA” cam­paign that they stopped invest­ing in, had the low­est Cost per Approved Appli­ca­tion!  By bas­ing their analy­sis on only the online piece of the con­ver­sion process, First Bank USA had wasted much of its online mar­ket­ing dol­lars on credit card leads that it didn’t want and stopped invest­ing in cam­paigns that led to wor­thy candidates.

Hope­fully this exam­ple shows you how impor­tant it is that you know about Trans­ac­tion ID and how it can impact your online analy­ses.  If you have other inven­tive ways you can think of to use this fea­ture, please leave them here as comments…

 

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