There are two ways in which you can set up filtering out bots:

• The first is leveraging the IAB rule type.  This rule type includes all of the ABCe and IAB recognized international spiders and bots.
• The second method allows you to set up custom bot rules based upon the data that you are seeing within the bots report (if this bot doesn’t appear in the definitive list).  You have the ability to set up the rule based upon the IP address, the user agent string or the IP range.

To set up the rules, please do the following:

1. Log into SiteCatalyst
2. Click on the Admin button
3. Navigate to Report Suites
4. Locate the reporting suite you wish to add this to
5. Then click on Edit Settings -> General -> Bot Rules
6. Once in, you can either leverage the IAB or custom rule types

Please Note:

• Once you set up the bot rule, you will only be able to see the data that is removed within the bots and bot pages report in SiteCatalyst.
• These rules can be applied to both version 14 and 15 of SiteCatalyst.

1. Log into Omniture SocialAnalytics
2. Locate the reports pane
3. Once located, click on the settings
4. Locate and click on the social properties tab.  Here you will see that social properties are specifically the areas that you have control over on your social media site
5. Click on the add property button
6. On the property info view, fill in the Name, Type and Identifier.  For this example, the Name would be something to the effect of My Facebook Professional Page and the Type would be a Facebook page.  The Identifier is the secret key that you need to verify that you are the owner of the Facebook page.
7. Once this is all entered, click on save and then click on authorize to give permission to Omniture to collect the Facebook Insights data from Facebook and bring it into Omniture

That’s it! With that in place, you will be all set up and ready to track Facebook pages within SocialAnalytics.

Please Note:

• Data collected from Facebook has a 2 day lag so please keep this in mind when looking at your data within SocialAnalytics.

The four note options are: dynamic title, image, text and wrapping text:

• Wrapping text is exactly what it says – insight will wrap the text within a text box to make it easier to digest vs. Having one long string of text. This has two predefined formatting conditions that make this different than text notes. First, it provides an area to add in a title for these specific notes. Second, it wraps the words
• Image notes provide end users with the ability to add images to work spaces. This can be handy if a campaign dropped and we wanted to see the creative within the work space to really understand how that creative performed
• Text notes provide end users the option to add free form text without any predefined conditions
• Dynamic title is a filter that doesn’t display the normal red area around the selection to show one was made. It instead lets you select an element from a dimension and filter the work space by the element you wanted

To truly analyze a segment, you will need to understand the difference between each.  Lets look at an example to better illustrate this point.  Lets say you wanted to look at the path loyalty members are taking on your site. To properly see this information, you wouldnt look at a pathing report of the loyalty membership status because that report would only show how end users changed status (i.e. how they went from un-authenticated to say “gold” member).  There really wouldn’t be anything of value to be gleamed from that insight.

The best approach would be page pathing per loyalty membership status.  All you need to do is create a segment that  includes visitors who are loyalty members (or conversely a segment where visitors are not members) and apply it.

That’s it! Now that you know the difference between each, you can make the best informed decision for which one to select to answer the business question you have in front of you.

The property selection tag leverages the cmCreateShopAction5Tag to capture the property, room nights and price per room night.  The below is an explanation of the tag:

• Property ID – This is a required field that should capture the ID of the individual property that is selected by end users
• Property Name – This is a required field that should capture the name of the individual property that is selected by end users
• Room Nights (Quantity) – This is a required field that should capture the number of room nights selected by the end user
• Price Per Room Night (Unit Price) – This is a required field that should capture the price for one room night for the selected property.  Please note that this value should not include any currency symbols and should be a decimal number (so if its $119 a night, pass the value as 119.00)
• Property Brand ID – This is an optional but valuable field that can capture the brand ID to which this property belongs. Please note that this value should match with a category ID that is set up within the CDF file

// Single item selected
cmCreateShopAction5Tag(“abc123″, “Hotel Mars”, “5″,”2314.67″,”Bulwinkle”);
cmDisplayShop5s();

// Multiple items selected – You will need a separate call to cmCreateShopAction5Tag for each cart addition / item selected
cmCreateShopAction5Tag(“abc123″, “Hotel Mars”, “5″,”2314.67″,”Bulwinkle”);
cmCreateShopAction5Tag(“abc753″, “Hotel Venus”, “2″,”265.43″,”Solar System”);
cmDisplayShop5s();

That’s it! With this in place, you will be able to track hotel’s added to the “cart” or selected.

When looking at the various types of segments, you need to first decide on what type of data you are looking to get out of it before picking the right one.  Here is a good rule of thumb:

• If you are looking to see a single sessions worth of data from a particular end user, you should select a visit segment
• If you, in turn, are looking to see multiple sessions worth of data from a particular end user, you should select a visitor segment
• However, if you are only interested in seeing data for a particular page or a selection of pages during a particular visit, you should select a page view segment

So lets take an example to help drive this home better.  Lets say you were looking to answer the following question: “Was a MAC computer purchased for atleast $2000″? Taking the rule of thumb into account, this is the type of question that each segment would be able to answer:

• Visit with a $2000 MAC computer purchased – In this segment, all of the pages for the visit are returned because the criterion was met successfully since the purchase occurred within the same session
• Visitor with a $2000 MAC computer purchased – In this segment, all of the session data is returned for the end user.  That means that all of the page views for this visitor (across their multiple sessions) are returned because one page of one visit there was a purchase of a $2000 MAC computer
• Page views with a $2000 MAC computer purchased – In this segment, the only thing that is returned is the thank you page (or order confirmation page) where the purchase took place.  As you can see, this isnt a valuable segment in this instance.  This segment is really useful when you have multiple pages with the same value

Please Note:

Always keep in mind the way Discover works.  Discover first finds if and where the criteria are met for the segment then it fills the appropriate container.

• Participation – This can be considered an allocation that shares the value across all recorded values.  When a success occurs on the site, this method takes the value recorded and applies it fully to each and every value that has been recorded previous to the success occurring
• Recent – This applies all the credit to the most recent value
• Conversion (standard) – This is the out of the box metrics that include orders, revenue, units, checkouts and carts that occur
• Linear Allocation – This is similar to participation but differs as it applies credit evenly to each touch-point

What are Spaces, Groups and Channels?

• A Space is any application, website, or platform instance that you want to track (e.g., Facebook page, website, your BlackBerry app, etc.).
• Groups are custom “playlists” or folders for Spaces and Profiles (e.g., all of your Facebook wall pages from multiple Facebook sites).
• Channels are the “container” that spaces are automatically assigned to. The channel views are like filters that let you view all of the spaces of a particular type.

Before we dive into how Discover reports on uniques, lets look at how SiteCatalyst tackles it.  In SiteCatalyst, you need to select the timeframe in which you want to see the unique visitors reported upon.  You have the option from choosing from hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly unique visitors.  In Discover, since the raw data is used for all reporting, all time frames can be used for viewing the unique visitors report.  Lets look at an example:

If you are looking at a 15 day period that you would like to analyze and you are looking to see the unique visitors that came to your site during the time period, all you would need to do is run the unique visitors report in Discover for those 15 days.  The total at the bottom will let you know how many different people came to the site during the specified period (which is what we were looking to learn).

Please note: 

• Any number that is displayed for unique visitors in Discover is the true number of uniques for that given time period.  Discover does not sum the uniques together but rather de-dupes the numbers to provide an accurate view of what has occurred.

From the outside looking in, one could think that filters and segments perform the same basic functionality. However, there are a few key differences that you should be aware of prior to selecting the best option for your setup:

• Segments allow you to filter data you are viewing within a report.  With a segment, it is applied at the profile level so you won’t need to create a separate profile to house an advanced segment (not that you can’t do that but its not required).  Segments change the reports view of data at the visit level and do not interfere with the original data so you won’t have to worry about applying the segment to the overall profile.  Not only that but within Google Analytics, you have the ability to test your segment prior to saving it to see if it returns data or not (which is very handy).
• Filters, on the other hand, are applied at the profile level as information is coming into the specified account.  Filters change the reports view of data at the page view level which is important to understand.  An example of this is when you want to exclude traffic to a specific subdomain, you are removing any and all page views for those subdomain pages.  If an end user visits the subdomain that was excluded but also visits other pages on the site during their session, then their visit will still be counted as well as the views of pages to the other pages/sections. This is the reason that the visit and pageview number using segments is lower than your filter method.

Now that you have an understanding of the differences between both, it should aid you in selecting the right one for your current situation.