Unified Sources – The DB VISTA solution that makes other VISTA solutions cower in fear

Unified Sources is one of Engineering Services most popular VISTA solutions, it is also one of most complex rules we develop. As you can imagine with the popularity and complexity we receive a lot of questions, some I hope to clarify here.

What is Unified Sources?
Simply put it is a combination of the campaigns report and referrers report, giving you a single report with all your paid campaigns and non-paid campaigns. The other feature is it grabs the keyword and places it into another eVar for simple keyword reporting.

How is Unified Sources Valuable?
Value is unique to each business and their needs, but let me highlight a couple benefits of the rule.

• Event credit is applied to all traffic sources based on the same rules that apply to campaigns. This allows you to more accurately measure how well each traffic source or campaign ultimately results in conversion.
• The keyword placed into an eVar by Unified Sources is the actual keyword searched for by the visitor. If you are using broad match for your Paid Search and capturing the broad search terms into another eVar (via SearchCenter or otherwise) you can break down the keyword you paid for by the actual keywords that the visitor searched for. Keywords that are performing especially well or poorly can be discovered and your paid search efforts modified accordingly.
• Natural Search terms can be classified for simplified SEO reporting and analysis.

Requirements for Unified Sources VISTA Rule:
This rule requires little to no work for you. If you are already populating the s.campaign variable or another eVar with your tracking codes then you are all set. The only thing we need from you is to know which eVar you are placing the tracking codes in, whether we should use that eVar or a separate eVar for the main Unified Sources report, which eVar you would like us to place the keywords into and finally we need a list of internal domains.

Internal domains list – The confusing part of the rule:
This is usually the most difficult part to understand when requesting a rule but it really is simple.

If you have one main site and all report suites are based on traffic from the one main site then all you want to do is provide a single list of internal URL domains and you are done.

If you have multiple sites and you want to see how traffic goes from one site to another (ie. consider traffic from one of your other sites as “external” traffic) then you want to provide us with a list of internal URL domains for each of the report suites you plan to put the rule on.

If you need to be able to change the list of internal URL domains for your report suites on a regular basis then we can build another DB table into the Unified Sources VISTA rule that will allow you to upload a new list of internal domains whenever you want. This does add cost but it will save money if you have to alter your list of internal domains more than twice.

The icing on the cake:
As you can imagine, a single list of all your tracking codes, organic search sites and referring domains will become quite bulky. Once the rule is in place you may want to classify the Unified Sources eVar in ways relevant to your business to take full advantage of one of the most useful solutions Engineering Services has to offer.

If you already have Unified Sources VISTA solutions, how do you use it?

If you don’t then feel free to send me an e-mail ( paurigemma (at) omniture.com) with questions. Or contact your Account Manager and they will help you get started.