Omniture SiteCatalyst: Classification

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June 14, 2006

I know that lots of readers don’t use SiteCatalyst, so I will write a minimal number of posts on the Advanced Omniture training I did (and I’ll space them out.) One reader did ask for some Golden Nuggets, so here they are:

Golden Nugget #1)

When you see an icon that looks like a broken egg, that indicates you’ve enabled traffic correlation. When you see an icon that looks like a

spyglass (the kind that every other WA solution uses to drill down), that indicates you’ve got a commerce correlation. Most traffic correlations have to be created, which may just require a phone call to LiveSupport – that’s how I got a correlation showing me exactly which terms visitors typed into the organic search to land on each page, page by page. (So I suppose they were correlating their standard organic search term report with their standard entry page report.) However, lots of commerce correlations are already there, you can just see them in the data — just look for the spyglass. (You are wondering why this is in the classifications post? Read on.)

Golden Nugget #2) Classifications always have to be children of a standard variable, like product, pages, etc. However, not all classifications inherit the correlation abilities of their parents. So if you take a paths variable like pages and create classifications (sample classifications for pages in a media site: arts and leisure pages, sports page, business page), you won’t be able to do the same kind of correlations that you might with pages. On the other hand, some variables (I believe they are product, customer loyalty and campaign) are “fully subrelated” — that means that they can always pass their relational genetics onto their children (classifications.)

So, for example, I might own a website for women’s sweatshirts, but all my products are just SKU numbers — not very helpful. So I could create classifications and group the sweatshirts by Type (hoodies and non-hoodies. Now I can pull up Products > Type and see all my commerce metrics for hoodies and non-hoodies.) Everything that I could normally correlate with products can be correlated here. For example, with Products, I can look at not just the Big Three Sales metrics — Revenue, Orders and Units — but I can also look at cart additions. Product views. Finding methods. (Some of those get pulled in by clicking on the spyglass icon, since that’s the way that correlation is signified in commerce.) The point is that all the children of products, customer loyalty and campaign can have the same correlations as their parents, but the same is not true of classifications belonging to other parent variables.

Golden Nugget #3) Omniture works hard to call things by names that are meaningless — but then, if you’re still reading, you know that already. WRT Classifications, they have a neat tool called SAINT — probably some kind of backronym. However, they should have called in the SC Excel uploader. It’s pretty easy, even for non-techies — you just create your classifications in Excel and use SAINT to upload them. (It’s useful for other uploads, but we won’t go there today.)

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

PS I am hoping that all the people who work with SC day in and day out will get on an make additions and corrections. For example, I was unable to find a Path or Traffic variable that had any preset correlations, i.e. correlations that I hadn’t created myself. So that addition would be really useful.