SiteCatalyst Dashboards [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

As a web analyst, you can do the best requirements gathering, site tagging and report suite set-up, but if no one at your organization looks at the data you are producing, all of your effort is wasted. For this reason, Omniture does its best to enable you to share the information stored in SiteCatalyst with as many people as possible in as many forms as possible. In the Omniture ExcelClient post, we saw how you can push SiteCatalyst data to Microsoft Excel, but there are many other ways to share SiteCatalyst data. SiteCatalyst data can be sent out via e-mail, viewed on the iPhone/Android mobile devices, shared through Internet Widgets and displayed within SiteCatalyst in Dashboards. In this post, I will cover the basics of SiteCatalyst Dashboards since these are used the most often and also what is leveraged to view reports on mobile phones and in Internet Widgets.

**Understanding SiteCatalyst Dashboards
**Hopefully, the concept of Dashboards is not new to most of you and there is a common understanding that Dashboards are collections of reports or reportlets (mini reports) meant to communicate data to a specific target audience. Most Omniture clients have several dashboards segmented by target audience so that they are sharing different data with different stakeholders throughout the organization. Determining what data each person should have access to and how often will depend upon the person and your organization.

**Creating SiteCatalyst Dashboards
**Creating a SiteCatalyst Dashboard is relatively straightforward. To begin, you simply open a report that you would like to add to a Dashboard and click the “Add to Dashboard” icon:

In the resulting “Add Reportlet” window, the first thing you do is give the reportlet a name and then choose the Dashboard to which you would like to add the report. If this is a new Dashboard, enter a name in the blank text box.

The next step is to select the date range. Click the Calendar icon to bring up the data selection screen and select a start and end date. Notice that you can choose whether the dates are fixed or rolling. One handy thing I do is to make the start date fixed and then make the end date rolling so each day I get another day’s worth of data.

Next, choose the content you want to appear in the reportlet. Start by choosing the size (Small, Medium or Large). If you have more than one metric showing in a report, I suggest you use Medium or Large. Then choose if you want to show the graph, the details table or both. If you choose to include the details table, select how many rows of the table you want to show in the dashboard. Keep in mind that users viewing the Dashboard online will be able to click a link to see the full report. When you have completed all of these steps, click the “Save” button and you will be taken to the Dashboard where you can see the added reportlet:

**Sharing Dashboards
**Once you have created a SiteCatalyst Dashboard, you have the ability to share it with other users in your organization. To share a Dashboard, click on the “Dashboards” link from within My Account as shown here:

From within the subsequent window, check the boxes next to the Dashboards that you would like to share as shown here:

Once this is done, other SiteCatalyst users can enter the same screen using the instructions above and then check the boxes in the “On Menu” column to have these dashboards appear in their Dashboard menu:

**Important Things To Know About SiteCatalyst Dashboards
**The following are some important things to know about SiteCatalyst Dashboards:

  1. You can create an unlimited number of SiteCatalyst Dashboards
  2. You can re-size Dashboard reportlets once they are on the Dashboard by clicking on the edit icon
  3. Dashboards can be scheduled to be delivered on a regular basis
  4. You can use ” Publishing Lists” (to be covered in a future post) to have the same Dashboard deliver data from different SiteCatalyst Report Suites to different people
  5. Many of the settings for Dashboard reportlets cannot be changed once the report is added to the Dashboard such as graph type, numbers vs. percentages, trended vs. ranked, metrics displayed, metric sort order, A/B comparison, correlation filters, search filters. Therefore, be sure you like the settings you have prior to adding the report to the Dashboard.

**Real-World Example
**In this week’s real-world example, since this post is a bit more on the “how to” side, instead of giving an in-depth case study, I thought I would simply give you a glimpse into part of the SiteCatalyst Dashboard I use to view activity related to this blog.

Clicking on the image below will show an excerpt from a quick SiteCatalyst Dashboard I created to view the following:

  1. Blog Post Views per Day
  2. Day of the Week in which Blog Post Views took place
  3. Hour of the Day in which Blog Post Views took place
  4. The names of my Blog Posts and the number of Views for each in the selected time frame
  5. The “Daypart” in which Blog Post views took place (which I created by using a SAINT Classification)

(Click the image below to see a larger view of the SiteCatalyst Dashboard in a new window)

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst? Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how? Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share? If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at _<insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com_> and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry – I won’t use your name or company name!). If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

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