Omniture SiteCatalyst Helpful Tip – Creating Additional Campaign Variables
Are you, like many who are running both internal (on-site) and external (off-site) campaigns in tandem and want to be able to easily see how each perform in relation to your key performance indicators? Well, within Omniture SiteCatalyst you can do one of two things to achieve this:
- Add a flag within the campaign tag that can easily identify an on-site vs. off-site campaign tag (i.e. prefix INTCMP vs EXTCMP). This helps save unused variables from having to be allocated to track one or more of these but has the drawback of potentially stepping on each other (simply due to the fact that if this is set to “last touchpoint” and someone clicked on a Google PPC ad then an on-site 728×90 banner, the banner would be given all the credit and you wouldn’t know that the PPC campaign initially drove the user to the site and helped them begin to think about converting on your site).
- Set up another eVar to function exactly as the s.campaign variable. This will allow you to easily see the breakout between on and off site campaigns. The drawback to this is if a user comes in on a external campaign and then clicks on an internal one, both variables will receive credit for the conversion (in essence double counting the conversion). The way around this is to leverage the crossVisitParticipation plugin which stacks the campaign values together so you can see the mix that lead to the conversion without having the double counting becoming an issue.
To set this up within Omniture SiteCatalyst, you will need to do the following:
- Log into Omniture SiteCatalyst
- Navigate to the Admin section
- Locate and go to the report suites
- Under the report suites, search for the report suite that you wish to set this up in
- Once found, click on edit settings -> conversion -> conversion variables
- Add a new eVar and then copy over the same settings that are in the campaign variable to the new eVar (i.e. allocation, expires after).
That’s it.
Now your variable (say eVar5) is set up to function like the s.campaign variable. If you want to take this a step further, you can go back to edit settings -> general -> customize menus and bring the new eVar (conversion variable) that’s allocated to on-site campaign tracking under the campaign folder so that end users can easily go to one spot for all campaign tracking stats.
Written by:
Dorian D. Regester
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