Analyzing Page Valuation via Omniture SiteCatalyst
Tracking page value can provide very powerful insight and actionable data in many verticals. These include acquisition, behavior on-site, and retention. Understanding this can help you focus your efforts on the pages that drive the highest cost per impression (CPM) while removing or not highlighting the ones that drive the lower CPMs.
This technique can also be leveraged to see various other key performance indicators including:
- page revenue by unique visitor
- page revenue by registration status
- page revenue by search terms (internal and external)
- page revenue by most popular time of day / day of week / weekend vs weekday
- page revenue by customer demographic data (age, location, gender, etc)
What you need:
- one (1) success event (s.event)
- s.products variable –> if not currently used otherwise another s.eVar variable will be needed
- one(1) to two (2) s.eVar variables –> to capture the site section and site sub-section
- DB Vista Rule
The first step in the process is to work with your account manager on creating a DB VISTA rule from Omniture’s engineering services team. The rule will allow you the ability to easily update and tweak CPM values without having to loop Omniture back into the process. It is also very easy to implement (as the DB VISTA rule requires no code changes). You will then need to supply to Omniture a lookup table that includes a CPM estimate by site section/site sub-section. CPM by page can also be provided but this information can be difficult for you to estimate and fluctuates hourly or daily. Its recommended to start with site section or sub-section estimates and then increase scale wherever appropriate or business dictates. The DB VISTA rule will then use the lookup table to populate a CPM on each page load based on the site section or sub-section that page resides in.
The next step is to pass the page name, section and/or sub-section to the allocated eVars. Omniture recommends using the s.products variable for this step. This is because s.products is automatically fully subrelated to all other conversion reports for additional analysis. However, if this is not feasible, allocate an unallocated eVar and turn on full subrelations for it via the admin console. An example of this is:
s.event=”event1″ //for page revenue (un-calculated)
s.products (or) s.eVar1 = “Home Page” //set to capture the page name on each and every page
s.eVar2=”Basketball” //site section
s.eVar3=”Mens” //site sub-section
Once this is in place, you can create a calculated metric for page revenue by taking page revenue un-calculated (event1) and dividing that by 1000. Now you can bring that new metric into your reports and see what the calculated page revenue is for the pages, site sections or subsections that you are looking at. Also correlate with other data points (time parting, visit number, new vs repeat, etc) for even further insight and analysis opportunities.
Written by:
Dorian D. Regester
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