Success Event Pathing [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

This week, I was working with a client and mentioned an idea that I have implemented at a few clients which I call Success Event Pathing. This is just a concept that I thought up and is by no means a proven “best practice,” but I thought I would describe it here and see what you all think about it. Please review the concept and add a comment below stating if you like it or hate it…

**What is Success Event Pathing?
**As described in the Success Event post, Omniture customers set SiteCatalyst Success Events when visitors perform an action on a website (or within a widget). We use these Success Events to measure how well our online property is performing against predefined business goals. However, for those who are designers or information architects of an online property, sometimes we are less concerned with how often something happens as we are in when it happens. For example, if the goal of our website is to get visitors to view videos and read blogs, in hopes that they will submit a lead generation form, it would be interesting to understand the order in which visitors perform these actions. The order these events take place may impact the way we design navigation or think about the various levels of the website. We may have questions such as:

  1. What is the first Success Event visitors tend to take?
  2. What is the most common order that all visitors perform our website Success Events?
  3. What is the success event most often performed directly before our primary “money” Success Event?

Below is an example that will show you what Success Event Pathing looks like when implemented. Let’s imagine that you have Success Events for Blog Post Views, Video Views, Product Views, Newsletter Sign-ups and Lead Generation Form Submissions. Once implemented, you would like to see pathing reports showing the pathing order as shown here:

Determining the order in which Success Events take place using page-level pathing can be very difficult since the same Success Event can take place on many different pages (i.e. Product Views) and many pages don’t have any Success Events. Therefore, my concept is to provide Success Event Pathing which is a pathing report that only contains entries representing your website’s define Success Events so you can see, at a 20,000 foot level, how visitors perform these actions. Make sense?

Implementing Success Event Pathing
So how do you implement this idea? Well the first step is to make sure you have properly tagged all of your site Success Events. Once this is done, you have to pass the name of the Success Event to a Traffic Variable (sProp) on the page in which it occurs. There are a few ways to do this:

Regardless of how you set it, the ultimate goal is to simply add a value (name) to the custom sProp for each Success Event that makes sense to you and your users when the Success Event takes place. Once completed, speak to your Account Manager or ClientCare and have pathing enabled for that sProp and you will be able to see reports like the one above. As is always the case with pathing, keep in mind that the reports are for Visits only (not across multiple visits). If you need to see this information across visits, please speak to your Account Manager who can put you in touch with our advanced solutions team. Finally, if the same Success Event takes place on more than one page and you have a need to differentiate between them, you could concatenate the pagename and the Success Event into the sProp (or a second sProp).

That’s it. Useful? Worthless? Please let me know what you think?

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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