How To Add Page Views And Visits To All SiteCatalyst eVars

Here is a simple way to add Page Views and Visits to all of your eVar reports (see the update below). While Client Care has the ability to turn on a few things, flip some switches here and there to add visits to some reports, I like having full control over it as much as possible myself (and I’m not really in the mood to wait on hold to get it done). To make this happen we are going to have to use 2 events and a pair of plug-ins. Hopefully you should have a couple of events available to use, and you can find the plug-in code on the SiteCatalyst Plugins page. Here’s how to do it.

First lets get Page Views. To do this we are going to use the Append List plug-in. The Append List (or apl) plug-in utility provides a simple mechanism to append a value to any delimited lists, with the option of a case sensitive or case-insensitive check to insure the value doesn’t already exist in the list. The apl plug-in is referenced by several standard plug-ins but can be used directly in a variety of situations. This is an Omniture supported plug-in and you can find more information about it by accessing the Knowledge Base.

s.apl(L,v,d,u)

L = source list, empty list is accepted
v = value to append
d = list delimiter
u (optional, defaults to 0) Unique value check. 0=no unique check, value is always appended. 1=case insensitive check, append only if value isn’t in list. 2=case sensitive check, append only if value isn’t in list.

What we are going to do is in the s_code.js file, set up this plug-in to fire off an event on every single page view of the site, exactly mimicking the standard Page View metric.

/* Set Page View Event */
s.events=s.apl(s.events,'event1',',',1);

Here is the plug-in code:

/*
* Plugin Utility: apl v1.1
*/
s.apl=new Function("L","v","d","u",""
+"var s=this,m=0;if(!L)L='';if(u){var i,n,a=s.split(L,d);for(i=0;i<a."
+"length;i++){n=a[i];m=m||(u==1?(n==v):(n.toLowerCase()==v.toLowerCas"
+"e()));}}if(!m)L=L?L+d+v:v;return L");

UPDATE: In my eagerness to share this with everyone I skipped the testing process I usually do. Upon testing I realized I a critical, basic error in my logic. By doing it this way, you are setting an event prior to any of the eVars, so they would not be associated with each other, and there for show up as “None” in your report. It is such a simple oversight that I am actually embarrassed that I missed. So now I throw it out to you, the Omniture community, how do you guys think we should try to figure this one out? Or is it even possible to do? Let me know what you think!

Just to be super clear, this will work if you want to add visits to some of your Traffic Sources reports. For example if you want visits from the original referring domains, this will work perfectly for that.

Now lets get Visits. I thought a lot about how to get this. One method you could use would be do the exact same thing we did to get the Page Views event. Set it up on a different event, then call up Omniture Client Care to have them set that event to only record once per visit. Again I wanted to try to avoid using Client Care. I also did not want to go that route since I want this to mimic the Visits metric as close as possible, so I want it to be cookie based. Here I decided to use the Get Visit Start plug-in.

What the Get Visit Start plug-in was designed to do is to determine first page of a visit. It returns 1 on the first plug-in call of the visit, otherwise returns nothing. It uses a 30 minute cookie if possible, otherwise reverts to a session cookie. Always returns nothing if 30 minute or session cookie can’t be set, so it functions very much like the standard Visit’s metric. What I have done is set the plug-in up to populate a variable, then use basic JavaScript to determine if there is a value to the variable that was just set, and if so fire off the Append List plug-in. The theory behind this is the Get Visit Start plug-in will only return a value one time per visit, on the first page view, and at that one and only time fire off a single event.

s.getVisitStart(c)

c=cookie name for tracking (“s_visit” is standard)

Here is how I have it set up. I made up a variable s.visEvent to hold the value of the Get Visit Start Plugin, then fire off event6 if it has a value.

/* Set Visit Event */
s.visEvent=s.getVisitStart("s_visit");
if (s.visEvent) s.events=s.apl(s.events,'event6',',',1);

Here is the plug-in code:

/*
 * Get Visit Start
 */
s.getVisitStart=new Function("c",""
+"var s=this,v=1,t=new Date;t.setTime(t.getTime()+1800000);if(s.c_r(c"
+")){v=0}if(!s.c_w(c,1,t)){s.c_w(c,1,0)}if(!s.c_r(c)){v=0}return v;");

Pretty simple. Typically I would have just used the Get Val Once plug-in when I want to get a value of a variable only once per visit, but it didn’t want to work well with the s.events variable.

Enjoy!

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