Omniture SiteCatalyst alerts, the how and why?

September 19, 2008 by Ravi.Pathak
Filed under: Omniture, Web Analytics Tutorials 

Following up from the previous post on 7 habits of omniture highly effective omniture sitecatalyst user, this post focusses on sitecatalyst alerts and how it can be used effectively. 

Alerts and Targets are most under used functionalities of sitecatalyst. Alerts are those intimations that you get if there is unexpected (you can define what is unexpected) change in your critical metrics.

While Targets are those metrics that you can set as goals for different metric for your website. They can also be used in combination at the end of the month to determine whether a PPC guy has achieved his/her goal against the targets ? and Obviously Alerts can have you notify that.

Alert Configuration window

How to set up sitecatalyst Alerts? 

Setting up alerts is a one time effort, here are three simple steps to achieve it 

  1. Run the report you want to set an alert to
  2. Click on the alert icon in the toolbar
  3. Enter a friendly name, frequency, criteria (rule)  and where you want it delivered (email, mobile) 

So what are the purposes and why you might want to use the alerts functionality ?

1.) When your sites often change ? and your omniture tags also changes often ? you might want to ensure that tagging for your key business metrics remains as expected.

2.) If you are doing lot of SEO activity  you key business metrics changes gradually , if you would like to track them at Granular level, alerts is a great tool.

3.) There are times when you might be doing analysis and still few changes small and unpredictable , might have been pushing your few metrics to the north. You definitely want to claim credit for it. Wouldn’t you ?

4.) Suppose you are executing an A/B testing experiment and One version might be doing very poor. Set alert for every version and be informed.

Trust me, if you use alerts and something happens to your site (God forbid) , You would be the rockstar to know it earlier !

Omniture allows these alerts to be sent to your wireless device as well as text message. 

Few more tips on omniture alerts

  • Use several email accounts to send alerts by comma separated. Most people who even use alerts don’t know this.
  • Create a standard deviation of your metrics for a given period and set alerts based on your metrics movement above and below std deviation.
  • Categorize your alerts in by types :
    • Health check alerts which gives you daily change updates on your metrics
    • Analysis requirement alerts : this gives you opportunities to dig deeper in to areas where change was substantial
  • Always create following alerts 
    • Revenue
    • Visits
    • Conversion
    • Referrers Alert

However there’s not set rules, the above is just an example. To keep it simple just have alerts for all your KPI’s. 

Another way of using Omniture alert! :-)  

Let’s assume your running a marketing campaign ( let’s say it’s a viral marketing campaign) and it takes off! it takes off big time and you get unexpected visitors say 10 times more, ok is your server ready to take that load? here’s where alerts can help too.. in conjuction with your IT team (set a treshhold limit)  set a alert to notify you if the pageviews/visits increase after a certain level in that way your close to alteast avoid a 404 for your visitors and appropriately balance the load on your servers 

Podium is yours now ! Do you have innovative use of alerts functionality of omniture ? have you ever been able to find something interesting happening on site ?

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