Omniture SiteCatalyst Tips : Correlations : The Commerce360 Blog

While SiteCatalyst offers a wealth of reports and a lot of data, it isn’t unusual to wish you could access relationships between certain data elements that are for some reason not provided.

For example, if you can see a list of referrers (or referring domains), and a list of popular pages, isn’t it natural to want to know which page each of the referrers was pointing too? Or since you can see the list of search engines that sent you traffic and a list of keywords that produced visitors, wouldn’t you want to see which keywords were generated by each search engine? And if you’re paying the surcharge to get geosegmentation so you can find out which states or zip codes your visitors are coming from, wouldn’t you want to know which pages or keywords the visitors from any particular area where using?

I’d admit that I wanted all of these and more, but didn’t know how to get them.

Version 13 of SiteCatalyst introduced the Admin Tab and buried in there is the ability to turn on 2-item data correlations – which provides the solution to all of the wishes listed above and more. Using this feature you can define connections between any two data traffic elements, and then look at either element within or sub-sorted by the other.

When enabled, you get that little grey, yellow and green overlapping circles icon shown at above, which produces a fly-out menu of your correlation options. Choose one and you get a report listing just the correlated data for the item you've chosen. A 'Correlation Filter' option also appears in the yellow bar area above data reports with active correlations. This enables you to define multiple correlation filters simultaneously to view data - show me all pages where engine = google and statue = CA, for example.

I should note that when I say it’s buried in there, I am referring to the fact that everything is buried in there – could there possibly be a more convoluted set of tabs, menus, pop-ups, pull-downs, panes, and buttons twisted into one interface? But that’s a topic for another post…

To define a correlation go into the Admin tab, click the Select and Edit Report Suite link, choose the report suite(s) you want to modify, click the Edit Settings menu, the Traffic command and then Data Correlations sub-command. Now use the pull down menus to set the 2 correlation items and click the Add button. It doesn’t matter which goes on the right or left – it’s a bi-directional correlation. Your choices are submitted to Omniture (OMTR) and the correlations are approved and turned on in about 1 business day. The correlations are not retroactive - you can only see the relationships for data captured after the correlations are established.

You can correlate a single item more than once – for example we correlate Page Name to referrer, referring domain, and Geo Region (State). I should point out that Omniture does offer 5-item and 20-item correlations. So if you want to see Page Name, Referrer, Search Engine, Keyword, and one of your traffic variables each by any other then you’re probably better off getting those turned on as a 5-item correlation rather than individually building a long list of 2-item correlations. But 5-item and 20-item correlations require a call to your support rep and probably an extra fee (depending on your contract). In fact, there is likely also a limit to the number of free 2-item correlations you have access to depending on your contract.

If you aren’t using them, give correlations a try. After just a few weeks of playing around, here’s a list of the one’s we’re creating the most often:

Page Name and Referrer
Page Name and Referring Domain
Page Name and Search Engine
Page Name and Keyword (we should be doing these four bullets as a 5-item correlation as mentioned above)
Search Engine by Keyword
Search Engine by Geo Region (state) (if Geosegmentation is turned on)
Page Name by Geo Region (state) (if Geosegmentation is turned on)

I’d love to hear other correlations people are using, or tips/examples or comments about correlations.