Omniture SiteCatalyst Advanced Implementation – Day Two

With the foundation set during day one of the Omniture implementation class, we turned to more hands on activities and working through the code. Here are a few points that stood out for me.

• What’s the difference between and evar and an event? Evar = who or what triggered an event; events = how many times. So, an evar would indicate what made someone sign up for your newsletter, with the successful registration counted by your event variable.
• Don’t use “categories”; leave blank (or, technically, use a semi-colon); once a relationship is set, you can never turn back; use classifications instead to show categories
• No commas in product names; that’s the delimiter for the next product if you’re putting multiple items in a product variable
• Use purchase ID to dedupe events on final purchase page; otherwise, you could inflate totals if someone reloads or later returns to that page. For example, you complete a purchase at home; the next day at work you go back to that page to print out the receipt for reimbursement–the page and visitor count has increased even though the purchase is final
• Call Omniture to turn on cross-category merchandising — that’s when you have products that fall into multiple areas; for example, you might sell a children’s Bible under Gifts, Kids and Bibles; this lets you set which area of your site gets credit for the sale of an item that appears in multiple lcoations.
• Internal campaigns — another case where you must call mniture to turn on this feature so thatit gets a separate line item in the commerce/conversion report
• For A/B testing, use an evar to check conversion effectiveness; for example, evar4=”Home Page Design 1″ or “home Page Design 2″; since this isn’t multivariate testing, you’ll need to test but one item at a time
• To track Flash, use ActionSource
• Get QueryParam can support multiple campaign indicators — you can choose CID and PID and SRC, etc.
• If you want to track the success of your forms, call Omniture to turn on Form Analysis Plugin; it is not set by default