Web Analytics Central » Coremetrics

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – Creating User Groups

Dorian D. Regester — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 20:20:28 +0000

Creating User Groups within Coremetrics is a simple and easy process to do. Having user groups allows you to segment user access to reports they should see versus all the reports captured.Below are the necessary steps to setting this up within the Coremetrics interface:

From the Accounts page, click on the manage groups link.
Once there, click create new group.
Give the user group a friendly name and assign the groups accordingly.
Once completed, click the save button.
Now that the group is saved, you can begin assigning users to the newly created user group.

Please Note:

Permissions are set by group, rather than user.

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – Property View Tag

Dorian D. Regester — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 05:29:30 +0000

Are you a travel company looking to measure your property detail page views within Coremetrics but don’t know how to do it? This blog posting will discuss how to do this leveraging the cmCreatePropertyviewTag().The property view tag is needed to grab views to the property detailed page by end users. With this tag being passed to Coremetrics, you will not need to also pass a page view tag as this tag functions, implicitly, as a page view tag. Below is an example of the tag:cmCreatePropertyviewTag(“abc123″, “Hotel Eden”, “High-End Hotel”);Within the example above, “abc123″ is the Property ID, “Hotel Eden” is the Property Name, and “High-End Hotel” is the Category ID. Of the three parameters listed, the property ID and name are required fields while the category ID is optional.That’s it! With that tag in place you will be able to measure the page views to property detail pages.

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – API Part 1

Dorian D. Regester — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:55:15 +0000

As more and more web analytics providers open up their back end systems for customers to be able to pull information from, we as web analytics professionals have more data that is accessible to us. Within Coremetrics, there are two call types that are currently accepted (and which do not include any additional service fees).This blog posting will go over the supported methods and provide some insight into how to define a API call from a high level. The next postings in this series will go further in depth discussing the nuisances behind the Coremetrics API. The two calls supported are Top Line and Benchmarking.Top Line will report on your website’s top KPI at a summary level and can easily integrate with your data warehouse or own applications that could leverage the data. The next is Benchmark which takes data from the benchmarking solution within Coremetrics. If you are unfamiliar with this, this is where you site and its overall performance is compared to your competition as well as the overall vertical as a whole.For the top line request, at the very least, you need to include the client ID and token. The client ID is the ID that you use when logging into Coremetrics. The token value is the value needed to authenticate and make a call to the Coremetrics API. The minimal code is:https://api.coremetrics.com/apiwebapp/api/1.0/topline?client_id=99999999&token=abcdefg1234567890Please remember if you only send over the minimal amount of data, your request will be returned for the previous day’s visitor activity in a top line metric form. If you want to tweak the request to send over more data or change the date range, you will need to take advantage of the optional parameters available (which will be discussed in part 2).

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – Creating Calulated Metrics

Dorian D. Regester — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 23:27:56 +0000

Do you want to create calculated metrics within Coremetrics but don’t know how to? Creating calculated metrics is a quick and easy process that will be further explained below.The term calculated metrics is the combination of out of the box captured metrics to create a new metric. This metric can then be saved within the interface for later usage. Lets say for the sake of example that you want to create a metric of returning visitor percentage. To set this up within Coremetrics, you would need to do the following:

Within the edit metrics area, click the calculator button (or the create a calculated metric link)
Within the metric formula area, put the following: (Total Visitors – New Visitors) / Total Visitors
Then select the % or % w/graph notation option
Enter the name for the metric (Returning Visitor Percentage)
Click save and the report is created with your newly created metric

That is it. Once you put that in place, you will be able to leverage calculated metrics within Coremetrics.

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – Tracking Discount Codes

Dorian D. Regester — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 22:49:23 +0000

Coremetrics offers a special URL query string, called the site promotions parameter (cm_sp), that allows for almost all promotional on-site tracking. However, what is your user doesn’t trigger the promotion or discount via banner click but rather enters it into a text field within the cart or checkout funnel?This can be tracked via the cmCreateOrderTag() tag. The Order tag captures all order level detail on the order thank you (or completion) page. Below is an example of the tag populated with the promotional details:cmCreateOrderTag(“order123”, “999.99”, “9.99”, cust123”, “Bristol”, “CT”, “06614” , “123”, “USD”, “BOGO”, “499.99″, “bogo123″);Within the tag, at the end there are three optional fields to capture promotion name, code and discount amount. Above, the Promotion Name is BOGO (Buy One Get One), the discount amount is $499.99 and the code entered was bogo123.That’s it. Once you put that in place, you will be able to successful track the promotional codes, names and amounts that users enter in as well as the ones that they click on via Site Promotion tagged URLs.Please Note:

The values entered into the cmCreateOrderTag() must be in a pipe delimited list.
In order to use this tag, you must make all calls to cmCreateShopAction9Tag() prior to throwing it.

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – Non-Allowable Characters within CDF

Dorian D. Regester — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 04:13:11 +0000

Creating the Category Definition File (CDF) within Coremetrics requires you to be aware of the allowable and non-allowable characters. Knowing these could potentially remove any headaches that can arise in the future.

The first thing to know is that the CDF is a CSV or comma separated values file. What this means is that no commas or double quotes should be used within any value listed/captured within the columns. If any of your categories currently contain a comma and/or double quotes, you are highly recommended to replace it with an approved character or parse it if replacing isn’t possible. The characters below should not be used within the CDF:

` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) = + [] ; ’ ” , < . > ?Just keep those in mind when setting up and adding to your CDF.

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – Manual PageView Tag

Dorian D. Regester — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 18:11:12 +0000

Coremetrics, out of the box, via the cmCreatePageView() tag can track pages being viewed. However, what do you do when a page lives externally (i.e. outside of your domain) and you can not leverage this function?Well Coremetrics provides you with the Manual Pageview tag which allows you to capture the necessary values (i.e. page ID, category ID, referring URL, destination URL, and search term) accordingly. The below are the tag with the additional parameters that can be passed:cmCreateManualPageviewTag(pageID,categoryID,DestinationURL,ReferringURL,searchTerm)

pageID should capture the unique ID for the external page
category ID should capture the category for the external page
referring URL should capture the URL for the page on which the link to the external page is on
destination URL should capture the URL including any passed arguements (or parameters) for the given external page
search term should capture the search term being sent to the page (only use this if the external page is a search landing page)

Here is an example of passing the manual page view tag via an onClick event:Follow Us on FacebookPlease Note:Note that you must use single quotes in the tag and double quotes inside the cmCreateManualPageviewTag function.

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – Tracking Registrations

Dorian D. Regester — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 00:30:15 +0000

Continuing in the helpful tips for Coremetrics, I wanted to discuss how one can go about tagging registration pages. Unlike non-product pages that just call the cmCreatePageView tag, registration pages also leverage the cmCreateRegistrationTag().The registration tag is used to track any type of profile information that is being created or updated on your website (account set ups, account logins, email signups, etc). Here is the actual tag:cmCreateRegistrationTag(,,,,,, ,,Gender>,,,,,>,, etc.);The registration tag must be accompanied by a page view tag as the registration tag doesn’t capture a page view. So an example of the registration tag for an account login page would look similar to the below:That’s it. Once you have this in place you will be able to accurately track all registrations taking place on your site.Please note:

The information gathered in the registration tag is used to populate the following reports: Topline Summary, Segmentation and Key Segments.
The first parameter, Customer ID, is the only required field. All else are optional.
Within the registration tag, you have the ability to add up to 15 custom fields. The first ten fields can be used in the selection of the specific criteria within the Key Segments reports. The last five can be used in either the Segmentation Workbench Report or the Key Segments report.

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – Is My Landing Page Working?

Dorian D. Regester — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 00:33:22 +0000

Have you launched a landing page, tagged it with Coremetrics, but are wondering how you can determine whether its a success or failure? Here are a few pointers to look at when assessing how well the page is/has performed.The first step in assessing how well the page performed or not is to look at the Top Visited Pages report. To view the top pages, click on the Content Analysis menu and then click on Top Visited pages. You can then filter the results to only show your given page by using the search for page box to find your landing page. To take it another step and add even more value, you can look at the same report to determine how much of your visitor population interacted or engaged with your content. Seeing this can help you determine if you landing page is helpful in sending traffic further downstream.You can use metrics like page views per unique visitor (page views/unique visitors) to get a good understanding for how deep your visitors are going into your site. You can also look at average time spent on the page to see how much of your created content is being consumed.Other areas to look at are:

One page sessions – this is the number of visitors that have only seen one page prior to leaving your site (similar to Bounce Rate)
Events – a running count on the total number of successes captured by Coremetrics (i.e. email registrations, form submissions, clicks on social media links, etc
Events per session – to see how many events are triggered in a users session

Some key questions you should look to ask when assessing the landing page:

Did I receive the targeted amount of visitors I expected? If no, you might need to expand the advertising scope or the links that point to the landing page
Did I receive the targeted amount of success events? If no, did you make sure the call to actions that push users to the desired areas, are clearly labeled and not below the fold? Did you check to make sure the content on the page entices them to convert?

That’s the first step to look at with landing pages. In my next post, I will look at the second part of assessing landing page success – looking at the page via LiveView.

Coremetrics Helpful Tip – Tagging Order Confirmation Pages

Dorian D. Regester — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 18:42:08 +0000

Ensuring each page on your site is tagged accurately the first time out saves so much time and energy as opposed to later trying to fix the process and give stakeholders renewed confidence in the data. I’d like to look at the Order Confirmation page and show you the tag functions necessary to track.The order confirmation tags can also be used on an application or booking completion. The below are the tags that you will need to leverage:

cmCreatePageViewTag
cmCreateShopAction9Tag
cmCreateOrderTag or cmCreateRegistrationTag depending on the completion action your site is using
cmDisplayShop9s

A shop action 9 tag is used to pass to Coremetrics each product that is purchased. Or you can use a single shop 9 tag for financial or travel companies (for applications and booking completion pages). It never hurts to send a second registration tag with the parameter populated. Below is an example of a one item purchase on the order completion page:For example:That’s it. With those follow tags in place you will be able to successfully track orders and/or bookings that are taking place on your site. Please note that if you are passing more than one product (i.e. if the end user purchased more than one product or service), you will need to have a corresponding cmCreateShopAction9Tag for each. That will ensure Coremetrics knows and calculates on all products or services consumed.