Page View Success Event

Those who are familiar with Omniture SiteCatalyst come to learn that there is a big difference between Traffic Variables (sProps) and Conversion Variables (Events & eVars). This separation can get in the way of many analyses unless you have access to Omniture Discover. In this post I will describe one of the methods you can use to blur the lines between Traffic and Conversion variables by describing the use of the Page View Success Event.

Why a Page View Event?
In my experience as an Omniture Consultant, I found that most non-Media clients did not utilize a Page View Success Event. However, there are great reasons why all Omniture clients can benefit from a Page View Success Event. So what exactly is a Page View Success Event? It is basically nothing more than setting a Success Event on every page of your site (kind of obvious huh?)! Setting a Page View Success Event is very easy and can be done with minimal updates to your JavaScript file. Once set, you will have a Page Views metric in your list of Success Events and this metric should, for the most part, be the same as the Page View metric you would see in the Traffic reports area.

OK. So now you have the same metric you already had. Doesn’t sound very exciting does it? Despite its simplicity, it actually can be very beneficial. Here are a few examples of what you can now do with this newly created Page View Event:

Basic Visitor Engagement
Let’s say that you are running a bunch of marketing campaigns and in addition to seeing how many purchases or leads each campaign generates, you also want to see how many pages on your site those arriving from each Campaign viewed. Sounds easy right? But how would you do this? In the Traffic report area, there is no easy way to do this without using DataWarehouse, ASI or the Get&Persist Plug-in. However, now that you have a Page View Success Event, you can open up your Campaigns report and in addition to your other site Success Metrics, you can add Page Views to see the number of Page Views visitors viewed on your site. Having this metric is a [very] rudimentary way to view Visitor Engagement for Campaigns.

If you use the Unified Sources Vista Rule (or the JavaScript version known as the Channel Manager) to roll-up your traffic sources, you can use the Page View Event to see which Marketing Channel leads to the highest Number of Page Views on your site:

In addition, you can see how different Campaign Tracking Codes performed against each other with respect to Page Views by opening the same report at the Tracking Code level. For example, you can use this concept to see how many Page Views a particular Google Paid Search Keyword leads to on your site by finding that particular keyword in the Tracking Code report:

Internal Campaign Page Views
So earlier I mentioned that most Media clients set a Page View Event by default. The reason they do this is that for most Media clients, Page Views represent how they make money! They usually get paid for every Page View (through online advertising) so Page Views is one of their most important success metrics. However, even if you aren’t a Media client you can use the same concept on your site. Though you may not sell advertising on your site, you are most likely showing display ads for web promotions or to drive people to other areas of your site. If you set an Internal Campaign code each time someone clicks on one of your on site promotions, you can use the Page View Event to see how many Page Views on your site each internal display ad leads to.

Basic Success Event Efficiency
Every once in a while, a client will ask me to do some analysis on how many Page Views it takes for visitors to complete website Success Events. I have seen many clients try to answer this question by opening the Calculated Metric window and trying to create a metric that divides a particular Success Event by Page Views only to be puzzled why Page Views is not an option in the metric selector! Why isn’t Page Views there? Because Page Views is a Traffic metric and your Success Events are conversion metrics and you can’t mix those in SiteCatalyst. However, if you have a Page View Success Event, you can easily create a Calculated Metric to see this. Simply divide any existing Success Event metric by the Page View Success Event and you will be able to see a trended ratio that compares the two. I call this Success Event Efficiency (at a high level, how many pages do visitors need to see for each Success Event) and it can provide an alternative view of how your site is performing.

Internal Search Term Influence
Ever wonder how many pages on your site people view after searching on a particular term using your site’s internal search? How about seeing this for each internal search term? While this sounds easy, it isn’t with an out-of-the-box implementation. But if you have a Page View Success Event and are already storing internal search terms in an eVar, all you have to do is open the Internal Search Term eVar report and add the Page Views Success Event to the report. This metric will show you how many pages were viewed on your site after each internal search term was passed to the eVar.

Sort by Page Views and you can see which internal search term led to the most site Page Views (keep in mind that the length of time you select to to expire the internal search term eVar will impact how many page views are shown, but most people expire this at the end of the Visit). Another thing I have done is divide the number of Pages Viewed by the number of Internal Searches [Success Event] to see how many pages visitors tend to view after searching on each specific term (see 3rd column above).

Final Thoughts
As you can see, adding a Page View Success Event has many different uses and I have only touched upon a few here. I encourage you to consider if you have a use for this for your SiteCatalyst implementation. If you decide to do this, I would recommend the following:

1. Be sure to name the Success Event appropriately so you don’t confuse it with the Traffic Page View metric. I tend to name the Page View Success Event as “Page Views (Event).”
2. Keep in mind that when you set other Success Events you need to have both in the s.events string separated by a comma (i.e. s.events=event1,event10). You want to be sure you don’t lose your key website Success Events when you implement this!
3. Keep in mind that setting multiple Success Events can have an impact on latency so be sure to talk to your Account Manager if your site has a lot of traffic.
4. It is not recommended that you set a Page View event when using Custom Links.