VISTA [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

When using Omni­ture Site­Cat­a­lyst, seg­men­ta­tion is one of the most impor­tant func­tions.  As such, there are sev­eral tools at your dis­posal to seg­ment your vis­i­tors in Site­Cat­a­lyst.  In pre­vi­ous posts, I dis­cussed sev­eral meth­ods of seg­ment­ing vis­i­tors includ­ing Traf­fic Vari­ables, Con­ver­sion Vari­ables, Data Ware­house and ASI.  Each of these pro­vides a dif­fer­ent level of vis­i­tor seg­men­ta­tion which can be aligned to your needs.  In this post, I will dis­cuss another way that you can seg­ment vis­i­tors using a tool named VISTA (“Vis­i­tor Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, Seg­men­ta­tion & Trans­for­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture”).  While VISTA can be a com­plex topic, I will do my best to pro­vide the basics here, so you can under­stand what it is and how it can be used.

Under­stand­ing VISTA
When I first became an Omni­ture client, it took me a while to fully under­stand VISTA because it can be used to do so many things.  The way I like to explain VISTA is that it is a way that you can apply a rule or logic to your Site­Cat­a­lyst data after it is col­lected, but before it is stored in Omniture’s data tables.  For exam­ple, let’s say that you would like to send all web­site traf­fic com­ing from within your com­pany to an “inter­nal” report suite so that it is not lumped together with cus­tomers and prospects hit­ting your web­site.  If you know the range of IP addresses that your com­pany uses, you could use a VISTA rule to look for those IP addresses and if a hit comes from an IP address in that range, send it to a sep­a­rate Site­Cat­a­lyst report suite (com­monly known as IP exclu­sion).  This is a good exam­ple to under­stand how VISTA works: 1) You work with Omni­ture to iden­tify the def­i­n­i­tion for the VISTA rule and 2) Once it is turned on, the VISTA rule scans every hit com­ing in and uses the VISTA rule def­i­n­i­tion to take some sort of action.  In this case the action is to move the split data into two dif­fer­ent report suites, but there are many more things you can have a VISTA rule do for you.  Here are just a few exam­ples of VISTA usage:

• Add vis­i­tors to a Seg­ment on the fly based upon data found in sProps, eVars or querys­tring para­me­ters.  For exam­ple, if your web­site has a form in which vis­i­tors are required to enter Birth Year, State and Gen­der, you can write an detailed VISTA rule that will eval­u­ate the responses and assign the vis­i­tor into a seg­ment by pass­ing a seg­ment name (i.e. “Middle-Aged Mid­west­ern Women”) to an eVar or sProp on-the-fly
• Pass a value stored in one Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­able to other Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­ables.  For exam­ple, if you cap­ture the Cam­paign Track­ing Code in s.campaigns, but later want to also pass it to a few other Con­ver­sion Vari­ables that have dif­fer­ent allo­ca­tions or expi­ra­tions, you can use a VISTA rule to pass the same value to all vari­ables instead of hav­ing to do addi­tional tag­ging or JavaScript modification
• Pass data found in GeoSeg­men­ta­tion or Tech­nol­ogy reports to cus­tom vari­ables so it can be clas­si­fied using SAINT Clas­si­fi­ca­tions
• Set Suc­cess Events based upon a URL or a querys­tring parameter
• Pass encrypted val­ues into Site­Cat­a­lyst vari­ables (i.e. cus­tomer ID, rev­enue) and use VISTA to decrypt the val­ues back to the orig­i­nal val­ues to ensure secure data transfer
• Pre­vent other “copy­cat” web­sites that may copy your web­site from send­ing traf­fic to your Site­Cat­a­lyst report suite
• Look for poten­tially fraud­u­lent orders (i.e. Rev­enue> $XX,000) and move them to a sep­a­rate report suite so Site­Cat­a­lyst data is not tainted
• Send traf­fic from “bots” or inter­nal mon­i­tor­ing tools (i.e. Gomez) to a sep­a­rate report suite

Impor­tant Things To Know About VISTA
The fol­low­ing are some impor­tant things to know about VISTA:

1. VISTA rules have access to and can act upon any data point that is avail­able on the page includ­ing IP address, refer­ring URL, querys­tring para­me­ters, sProps, eVars, Suc­cess Events, etc…
2. Data Ware­house and ASI reports can be con­fig­ured so that they run on pre– or post-VISTA rule execution
3. Omniture’s engi­neer­ing ser­vices team has cre­ated a mech­a­nism which allows clients to update their own VISTA rules (via FTP) after they have been deployed
4. While VISTA rules can be used to auto­mate cer­tain types of Site­Cat­a­lyst tag­ging, this is not rec­om­mended as a long-term solu­tion since changes in your site could have adverse affects on pre­de­fined VISTA rules

Real-World Exam­ple
In this week’s real-world exam­ple, I will describe an actual VISTA rule that one of my clients used to seg­re­gate their web­site traffic.  In this case, the client had pretty accu­rate infor­ma­tion about whether the cur­rent site vis­i­tor was a Prospect or a Cus­tomer and they wanted to use this to send data to dif­fer­ent data sets.  They also wanted to focus on a par­tic­u­lar geog­ra­phy such that all United States traf­fic was sep­a­rated from non-United States traf­fic.  Finally, they wanted exclude their own traf­fic and that of their ad agency from exter­nal web­site traf­fic (phew!).  So in all, they had three key ele­ments they wanted to use to deter­mine where Site­Cat­a­lyst data went.  To accom­plish this, we designed a VISTA rule that used the fol­low­ing logic:

If traf­fic comes from an inter­nal IP address, send data to “inter­nal” report suite; else
→  if sProp1=“Prospect” and Country=“USA”, send data to “prospect_us” report suite; else
→→  if sProp1=“Prospect” and Country<>“USA”, send data to “prospect_intl” report suite; else
→→→  if sProp1=“Customer” and Country=“USA”, send data to “customer_us” report suite; else
→→→→  send data to “customer_intl”

As you can see, VISTA rules can become quite com­plex.  The good news is that all you have to do is iden­tify the rules that you might want to apply to your data and Omni­ture can help with the rest.

In my next post, I will build upon the con­cept of VISTA by explor­ing its coun­ter­part — DB VISTA.

 

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.

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