Unified Sources — The DB VISTA solution that makes other VISTA solutions cower in fear

Analytics · By On · 12 Comments

Uni­fied Sources is one of Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices most pop­u­lar VISTA solu­tions, it is also one of most com­plex rules we develop.  As you can imag­ine with the pop­u­lar­ity and com­plex­ity we receive a lot of ques­tions, some I hope to clar­ify here.

What is Uni­fied Sources?
Sim­ply put it is a com­bi­na­tion of the cam­paigns report and refer­rers report, giv­ing you a sin­gle report with all your paid cam­paigns and non-paid cam­paigns.  The other fea­ture is it grabs the key­word and places it into another eVar for sim­ple key­word reporting.

Unified Sources Report

How is Uni­fied Sources Valu­able?
Value is unique to each busi­ness and their needs, but let me high­light a cou­ple ben­e­fits of the rule.

  • Event credit is applied to all traf­fic sources based on the same rules that apply to cam­paigns. This allows you to more accu­rately mea­sure how well each traf­fic source or cam­paign ulti­mately results in conversion.
  • The key­word placed into an eVar by Uni­fied Sources is the actual key­word searched for by the vis­i­tor. If you are using broad match for your Paid Search and cap­tur­ing the broad search terms into another eVar (via Search­Cen­ter or oth­er­wise) you can break down the key­word you paid for by the actual key­words that the vis­i­tor searched for. Key­words that are per­form­ing espe­cially well or poorly can be dis­cov­ered and your paid search efforts mod­i­fied accordingly.
  • Nat­ural Search terms can be clas­si­fied for sim­pli­fied SEO report­ing and analysis.

Require­ments for Uni­fied Sources VISTA Rule:
This rule requires lit­tle to no work for you.  If you are already pop­u­lat­ing the s.campaign vari­able or another eVar with your track­ing codes then you are all set. The only thing we need from you is to know which eVar you are plac­ing the track­ing codes in, whether we should use that eVar or a sep­a­rate eVar for the main Uni­fied Sources report, which eVar you would like us to place the key­words into and finally we need a list of inter­nal domains.

Inter­nal domains list — The con­fus­ing part of the rule:
This is usu­ally the most dif­fi­cult part to under­stand when request­ing a rule but it really is simple.

If you have one main site and all report suites are based on traf­fic from the one main site then all you want to do is pro­vide a sin­gle list of inter­nal URL domains and you are done.

If you have mul­ti­ple sites and you want to see how traf­fic goes from one site to another (ie. con­sider traf­fic from one of your other sites as “exter­nal” traf­fic) then you want to pro­vide us with a list of inter­nal URL domains for each of the report suites you plan to put the rule on.

If you need to be able to change the list of inter­nal URL domains for your report suites on a reg­u­lar basis then we can build another DB table into the Uni­fied Sources VISTA rule that will allow you to upload a new list of inter­nal domains when­ever you want.  This does add cost but it will save money if you have to alter your list of inter­nal domains more than twice.

The icing on the cake:
As you can imag­ine, a sin­gle list of all your track­ing codes, organic search sites and refer­ring domains will become quite bulky. Once the rule is in place you may want to clas­sify the Uni­fied Sources eVar in ways rel­e­vant to your busi­ness to take full advan­tage of one of the most use­ful solu­tions Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices has to offer.

If you already have Uni­fied Sources VISTA solu­tions, how do you use it?

If you don’t then feel free to send me an e-mail ( pau­rigemma (at) omni​ture​.com)  with ques­tions.  Or con­tact your Account Man­ager and they will help you get started.

  • http://longmarch.chinalytics.com Flo­rian Pihs

    Thanks Pearce for a bit more color Vista Rules. Do Vista Rules enable us to track “Sin­gle Page Vis­its” and “Entries” for each traf­fic source (Uni­fied or not)? If so, this solu­tion would enable Bounce Rate seg­men­ta­tion by traf­fic sources, some­thing I that I wanted to do with Site Cat­a­lyst for ages.

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      Thanks for your compliment.

      VISTA can only see the data that is passed in with the hit or what is in a DB table, which is why the Uni­fied Sources solu­tion is so amaz­ing because it does a lot of com­plex work with DB tables. With that in mind VISTA can not track Sin­gle Page Vis­its or Entries unless those val­ues are passed in with the hit. Also, VISTA only sees one hit at a time and can­not save any data into mem­ory for use in future hits.

      Now that I have you think­ing it is not pos­si­ble to get Bounce Rate for traf­fic sources, I am going to pull a com­plete 180 and say it can be done. The bounce rate based on traf­fic sources has a lot of depen­den­cies on evar allo­ca­tion and expi­ra­tion time and how events are set, so the solu­tion would need to be designed to your spe­cific setup. Omni­ture Con­sult­ing would be the team that would work with you to setup a plug-in and if need be they would work with Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices to alter the Uni­fied Sources VISTA solution.

  • http://www.newark.com Paul Zaras

    Pearce -

    Thanks for a thor­ough expla­na­tion of the Uni­fied Sources rule. I just have two questions.

    1) Does there need to be any addi­tional java script code added to my web pages to accom­mo­date the rule?

    2) Can I map the DB Vista rule to the eVar of my choice rather than to the s.campaign vari­able? I would need to keep the logic of s.campaign vari­able intact as my orga­ni­za­tion has finally come to an agree­ment on how to mea­sure exter­nal campaigns.

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      Paul,
      You are wel­come, and thanks for the comment.

      1) You don’t have to change a thing on your JavaScript, or on your pages. It is com­pletely Omni­ture server side logic.

      2) You can map the Uni­fied Sources DB VISTA solu­tion to any eVar of your choice. The only part you will need to pay atten­tion to is the dif­fer­ence in set­tings for the eVar, specif­i­cally sub­re­la­tions. Make sure you run it by your Account Man­ager when you ask them about the solution.

  • Heather Aeder

    How is Uni­fied Sources dif­fer­ent than the Chan­nel Man­ager PlugIn?

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      Heather
      The Chan­nel Man­ager Plu­gIn is basi­cally the same solu­tion just imple­mented dif­fer­ently. Each solu­tion has its pros and cons. For exam­ple, when Microsoft released Bing Omni­ture was able to update the data­base for all clients who have Uni­fied Sources, whereas the Chan­nel Man­ager Plu­gIn would need to be updated man­u­ally for each occur­rence of the plu­gin. On the other hand Uni­fied Sources can­not set cook­ies to per­sist val­ues. Also there are price dif­fer­ences. As you can see there are pros and cons to each solu­tion and the solu­tion that you choose should be depen­dent on your needs and being able to gain the max­i­mum value from your invest­ment. My rec­om­men­da­tion would be to get on a call with your Account Man­ager to see which solu­tion would be best for you.

      Flo­rian
      The argu­ment would not last long because we would both come to a quick agree­ment that bounce rate is a valu­able met­ric. I will send your com­ment to prod­uct man­age­ment to ensure your points are known.

  • http://longmarch.chinalytics.com Flo­rian Pihs

    Thanks Pearce again for the feed­back, although its a bit dis­heart­en­ing. It seems a lot of work (and extra cost) for what free tools do out of box.
    While we can cer­tainly argue about the value of track­ing bounce rate by traf­fic source (for exam­ple as opposed to defin­ing spe­cific inter­ac­tions as con­ver­sions and seg­ment­ing those), most of our brand adver­tis­ing clients find Bounce Rate an intu­itive KPI for their traf­fic sources.
    While cre­at­ing a cus­tom met­ric for my pages is pos­si­ble, the num­bers are not action­able if I can­not seg­ment them by key dri­vers (e.g. con­nec­tion speed, traf­fic source, creative.…).

  • Paul Zaras

    Pearce -

    I am con­fused by some­thing you wrote to Heather when you stated that ‘On the other hand Uni­fied Sources can­not set cook­ies to per­sist val­ues’ . I am under the per­cep­tion that the Uni­fied Sources rule is set to an eVar and an eVar can be con­fig­ured to expire after a visitor’s ses­sion. Am I cor­rect in assessment?

    Thanks
    Paul

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      Paul,
      I often find myself to be long winded some­times and it can cause con­fu­sion. So, sorry to con­fuse you but your under­stand­ing is correct.

  • Ursula Phoenix

    Is Uni­fied Sources Vista built into Site Cat­a­lyst? We have the chan­nel man­ager plug-in but is US Vista a seper­ate code plugin?

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/paurigemma Pearce Aurigemma

      Uni­fied Sources is a cus­tom addi­tion to Site Cat­a­lyst kind of like the chan­nel manger but you do not need to edit any of the code on your pages.

      If you have the chan­nel man­ager plug-in then you don’t need the Uni­fied Sources because they do basi­cally the same thing.

  • http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/home.do Roop Kumar

    We are cre­at­ing SAINT Clas­si­fi­ca­tions for upload­ing addi­tional data attrib­utes for the Key­words in the USDBV key­words evar. Would be inter­ested in some best-in-class exam­ples for the same.