New Keystone Blog Post- Omniture Campaign Best Practices
Head on over to the Keystone Community Blog for my latest post, with Tips and Tricks for Campaign Tracking in Omniture:
The standard Omniture Campaign reporting offering, based solely on a query string/tracking code pair, is pretty solid: campaign reports and all the possible classifications, paid/natural search detection and reporting, and marketing channel reporting, managed from right there in the SiteCatalyst admin console. But over time we’ve found some tips and tricks that can maximize the value of your campaign tracking efforts.
- Custom Campaign Click-throughs
- Granular, Classified Tracking Codes with a Marketing Channel prefix
- Campaign Landing Page Pathing
- Campaign Cross-Visit Participation
Head over and take a look!
Things you must know before using “prodView”
This short-and-sweet post will answer the following questions, all of which have come up to me in the last month:
- Why are my Product Views in SiteCatalyst inflated?
- How do I see Product Views in a conversion funnel?
- Why did our Solution Design Document have both the "prodView" event AND a custom "Product View" event?
There's one answer to all three questions: prodView does not behave like other events. prodView acts for the product variable almost like "instances" does for eVars. This can confuse people who don't know what they are looking at:
For one, it will not show up in non-product reports. If you want to see it in a conversion funnel, maybe broken down by campaigns, you won't be able to.
Second, s.events="prodView" doesn't have to appear anywhere in your code for the prodView event to be set. Anytime that s.products is set without a corresponding event, prodView will be set automatically. Which means the number of product views could potentially be inflated without ever being set. If you are using the products variable on your site, it's possible you have data in your prodviews report without you ever even setting it. This also makes debugging it a bit tricky.
My recommendation? Use a custom event for product views. If you want to still take advantage of some of the out-of-the-box reports in SiteCatalyst that come from the prodView event, then you can set it along with your custom event (s.events="prodView,event5") and get the best of both worlds- just be aware that you will then have two reports that may not match each other perfectly and may confuse some of your SiteCatalyst users (documentation is your friend; take advantage of the SiteCatalyst feature of writing notes for reports that need clarification).
Omniture Summit 2011
I had the opportunity to attend Omniture's Summit conference in Salt Lake last week. My thoughts:
I'm extremely excited about SiteCatalyst 15. Easily segmenting (especially in dashboards), better video reporting, not needing full subrelations/correlations.... all wonderful things that could have prevented countless headaches for me in the last 6 years. I'm thrilled about the social analytics tool and eager to dig into it.
I wish every client I ever had had gone to the session on Maintaining An Implementation/Analytics Governance, where we learned about ways to nourish an implementation so it can thrive rather than die and waste space and resources.
Your implementation is a seedling, nourish it constantly or it will die!
I came away with a list of things I really want to blog about, with governance at the top of it (and transactionID only slightly lower, based on how often it came up). These posts will follow.
If you were there, you may have seen me in the front row raising both hands telling Brett Error how much I would love:
- to be able to break down eVars at least three levels instead of two
- to have better documentation around genesis integrations
- to improve the excel client/make it available on a mac
I got to meet lots of great, smart people: Michele Hinojosa (the lady behind the jojoba phenomenon), Rudi Shumpert (who's wordpress plugin I recently deployed with much glee), Matt Gellis of Keystone Solutions, and Aaron Fossum of Pentad Analytics. And I got to see many old friends and colleagues, including my two "analytics mentors", Adam Greco (my team lead for 2 years at omniture) and Ben Gaines (who got me into analytics to begin with).
For Summit 2012: here's hoping I don't have a wretched cold and can introduce myself to people without them wincing and edging away, hoping they don't catch what I have. I will not be traveling with a 3-month-old baby again next year, and I will not be an independent consultant again next year so hopefully I won't be paying the conference fee out-of-pocket.
BUT, it was worth every penny and even worth 5 days of traveling alone with a baby. Especially this baby:
Jennifer Kunz
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