Web Services API Series — SAINT API, Your New Best Friend

Wel­come to the sec­ond post in the Web Ser­vices API Series.  Here I will describe what you can do with the SAINT API and what to pay atten­tion to.   So stick with me and you will soon learn how you can take advan­tage of this tool that gives you the power to enhance your report­ing experience.

What is SAINT?

SAINT is the tool for upload­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tions of data. In other words, it is a method for you to upload meta­data to pro­vide more detailed infor­ma­tion about data in Site­Cat­a­lyst.  For exam­ple, you can clas­sify a prod­uct with the prod­ucts color, size, shape, weight, etc. with SAINT.

What is the SAINT API?

The SAINT API is an inter­face for you or devel­op­ers at your com­pany to inter­face with Omni­ture and build auto­matic clas­si­fi­ca­tions.  Let’s look at some examples.

Exam­ple 1:

Let’s say you want to clas­sify key­words into branded and un-branded or prod­uct and gen­eral, but you have over 10,000 paid and nat­ural search key­words.  Now that new intern might be kind of annoy­ing and you want to give him a task that will keep him busy for a long LONG time. If you do that, who will get you cof­fee in the morning?

Solu­tion 1:

We have a solu­tion for your cof­fee prob­lem.  Nat­u­rally, your key­words will have some pat­tern to them, such as your brand name, prod­uct name or branch name.  So you use these pat­terns to clas­sify your key­words pro­gram­mat­i­cally and then use the SAINT API to upload the data into Site­Cat­a­lyst.  It will take you less time to pro­gram it than it would to clas­sify half of the key­words and you can use the same pro­gram­ming logic over and over again.

Exam­ple 2:

You are import­ing data into Site­Cat­a­lyst such as offline data or data from another company.

Solu­tion 2:

When you are upload­ing data into Omni­ture, most of the time you don’t need to upload all the pos­si­ble data points into traf­fic vari­ables (s.props) and con­ver­sion vari­ables (eVars).  You can use the SAINT API to upload clas­si­fi­ca­tions on that data, which will save you vari­ables and allow you to change the data retroactively.

Exam­ple 3:

You are import­ing micro blog­ging **cough**cough**twitter**cough**cough** data into SiteCatalyst.

Solu­tion 3:

Ok… it is no secret, the Twit­ter inte­gra­tion uses the SAINT API but it is worth not­ing that with the Twit­ter inte­gra­tion you get tons of reports and you only ever data source in the Twit­ter ID.  Every­thing else is based off of classifications!

Ben­e­fits of the SAINT API

You will be able to know exactly when the clas­si­fi­ca­tions are uploaded so you can then pull the asso­ci­ated reports know­ing the clas­si­fi­ca­tions are done pro­cess­ing.  Also, you can upload clas­si­fi­ca­tions for more than one report suite in sin­gle request.

Things to know

• Omniture’s Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices Team can pro­vide con­sult­ing for the SAINT API and all other Omni­ture APIs.  If you would like a resource to help you get started to advance your cur­rent setup, then con­tact your account man­ager and they will point you in the right direction.
• You will need to set up one of your user accounts to have Web Ser­vices Access ( See Get­ting Started below).  My sug­ges­tion is to cre­ate a unique user for each appli­ca­tion; it makes it eas­ier to keep track of how many tokens an appli­ca­tion is using.

Get­ting Started

The SAINT API is a pro­gram­matic solu­tion, so you will need a devel­oper. First step is to set up your web ser­vices accounts. Go into Site­Cat­a­lyst then in the upper right hand cor­ner of the page go to Admin > Admin Con­sole.  Then click Man­age User Access, then Edit Groups, finally Web Ser­vice Access. Inside this inter­face you can add users to the Web Ser­vices Access group.  This will allow that user to pull reports from the report­ing API.  (Warn­ing: giv­ing some­one access to web ser­vices gives them the abil­ity to use all web ser­vices func­tions which includes admin­is­tra­tive functionality.)

Next step, get your Web Ser­vices API User­name and Shared Secret.   First, you want to go into Site­Cat­a­lyst then in the upper right hand cor­ner of the page go to Admin > Admin Con­sole.  Then in the menu on the left you go Admin Con­sole > Com­pany.  And finally you click Web Ser­vices.  This inter­face will dis­play the num­ber of tokens each user has used and how many tokens your com­pany has left.  This is also where you will get the user­name and shared secret you or your devel­oper will use to access the APIs.

Resources

devel​oper​.Omni​ture​.com — This is your one stop loca­tion for tons of infor­ma­tion related to Omniture’s APIs.   Here you will find exam­ple code and all the meth­ods that are offered.

Code Gallery — Part of devel​oper​.Omni​ture​.com.  Is a loca­tion for a ton of pre­built solu­tions that uti­lize Omniture’s APIs.

As always, post your com­ments or e-mail me at pau­rigemma (at) omni​ture​.com.  It is your com­ments and e-mails that keep me post­ing and give me ideas for future posts.  If you do decide to pur­chase an Engi­neer­ing Ser­vices solu­tion, make sure you men­tion the blog and you will get white glove treat­ment.

Related Posts:

• Web Ser­vices API Series — Report­ing API, You Have The Power