Calculated Metrics [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

In this post, I will review SiteCatalyst Calculated Metrics to be sure that all of you out there know about them and how they can be used.

**What Are Calculated Metrics?
**Calculated Metrics are SiteCatalyst metrics that are derived from existing metrics within your report suite. Using common operators such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, you can create new metrics from existing metrics for use in your analyses. Personally, I would say that 80% of my Calculated Metrics are ratios using division as I divide two existing metrics to create a third metric. There are several ways to create Calculated Metrics, but the most common way is to create them is through the “Add Metrics” link within a report. Once you click this link, you can select the Metric Type drop-down box and choose “Calculated” to see a list of all existing Calculated Metrics:

From the next screen you choose the “Create New Metric” button and you will see the screen below (you can also create new metrics by clicking on the colorful icon next to the drop-down box). In this screen, you can give the Calculated Metric a name, choose its type and specify the formula to be used. In this case, I want to see how many Blog Post Views take place per Visit as a percentage:

Once you save this, you will be taken to the previous screen where you will now see the newly created Calculated Metric in the list.

One important thing to note is that from this screen, you can choose to make a Calculated Metric “Global” such that it appears to all SiteCatalyst users. This is a powerful way to standardize your organization on common metric definitions.

**Using Calculated Metrics
**Once you have created a new Calculated Metric, there are several things you can do with it. To begin with, you can add it to a report as a metric as you would any other metric. For example, if I have a Blog Author eVar report, I can add the newly created Blog Post Views/Visit metric:

As you can see here, since we had data for the two components of the Calculated Metric, SiteCatalyst can easily provide the ratio for each of the eVar report elements.

The next thing you can do with Calculated Metrics is to view the overall metric itself without breaking it down by a Traffic Variable or Conversion Variable. This type of report is identical to what you would see when looking at the raw data of a SiteCatalyst Success Events. You open this report by clicking on the “My Calc Metrics” area in the SiteCatalyst toolbar and selecting the metric you want to review. The resulting report will show you the Calculated Metric data in a similar format to a Success Event Metric:

Calculated Metrics can be also used in ExcelClient data blocks, though many times I find it easier to calculate these formulas in Excel.

Finally, in addition to creating/editing Calculated Metrics from within the Add Metrics window, you can also modify them from within the Admin Console as shown here:

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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