Basically what this will do is it will check to see in what position the mobile visitor is viewing the site in, whether they are viewing the site in a portrait or a landscape view when the page loads, and capture that value into a SiteCatalyst variable.

To implement this plug-in you first need to take this code, and add it to your s_code file near the rest of your plug-ins.

function screenOrientation(){switch(window.orientation){case 0:case 180:return("Portrait");break;case 90:case -90:return("Landscape");}window.scroll(0,0)}

Next in the do_plugins section of the s_code file, add the call to the plug-in to what ever SiteCatalyst variable you want this data captured in. In the example here you can see I am capturing it in s.prop1

s.prop1=screenOrientation();

Thats all it takes. Once the code is implemented, if the device does not have an orientation value the variable will not capture anything, but if the visitor is on a mobile device with an orientation value, the value of Landscape or Portrait will be captured on each page load. You will end up with a report that looks something like this:



To make it easier to access the report I also moved it into the Mobile report menu by using the customize menus option in the admin console of SiteCatalyst.

enjoy!

Enjoy.

var s_account="dead"

To implement the bot detection code you will want to change that line to include the function call. It should look like this:

var s_account=botCheck("dead")

Pretty simple so far, right? We just added the function call and included our report suite id in it. Next we have a block of code that needs to be added to the plug-ins section of the s_code file:

function botCheck(b){var c=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase(),a="";a+=c.indexOf("google web preview")!=-1?"":b;return a};

And that’s all there is to it. So how does it work you ask? What it does is it removes your report suite id if it is the Google Web Preview bot that is accessing the page. The SiteCatalyst code will still fire off, but it will not include the report suite id so it will be discarded by SiteCatalyst and it will not affect your metrics.

Want to see it in action? I thought you’d never ask! Check out the page http://webanalyticsland.com/test.php. On this page I have a basic SiteCatalyst implementation, one line of code that displays your user agent, and then I print the results of the SiteCatalyst debugger right to the screen. Opening this page in a standard Firefox browser we can see that the SiteCatalyst code has fired off properly, it has displayed the correct user agent and the report suite id is contained within the image request string.

So far so good. Using the User Agent switcher plug-in for Firefox, we can switch out user agent to the one that we found in the SiteCatalyst report to mimic the Google Web Preview bot.

We can now see that when we use that bot’s user agent string, the report suite id is missing from the image request call. Any action that happens now will not be recorded in my report suite, and when SiteCatalyst receives this request it will be discarded. I’ve had this running for a few days now and have not found any issues, but since this is a pretty new chunk of code be sure to test it out before using it on your production site.

Enjoy!

Errors
I request a ton of reports. I’ve been requesting them for some time now, so I am pretty in tune with how long they will take to come back to me. So I request my report, and wait the amount of time I feel it should take, check my inbox and nada. Hmmmmm. Lets log into the Data Warehouse request manager and take a look at what’s going on.

Houston we have a problem. Looks like there was en error with the report. Wouldn’t it have been nice to get an email sent to me letting me know there was an error? I had to log into the tool and find out myself that there was a problem. Well now that I’m here, lets click on the report name and see if we can find out a little more info on what went wrong.

Ok from here we can see that the report was “Not Delivered”. I figured that much out when it didn’t show up. Maybe clicking on that link will tell why it was not delivered.

Well that’s just not very helpful at all. Did I enter some incorrect FTP information? Was there no information to return? Did someone trip over the cord and unplug the server? We will never know.

So now what? I obviously wanted that report, so I am forced to go and request it again. If I didn’t want it, I wouldn’t have requested it in the first place. How about being a little proactive and automatically re-requesting the report for me? A simple email stating that there was an error but my report is being processed again would have save me a bunch of time. Or even if it said that there was an error because of mistakes I made in the request would have been extremely helpful.

Priority
There are a handful of reports that I have scheduled that have top priority. I need to make sure these reports are ran before anything else that is scheduled at the same time. For this, I turn to the priority settings.

Seems pretty simple, just click the arrows and my report moves up or down. The problem lies in where you have 60+ scheduled reports and moving one to the top of the list now turns into an hour of clicking arrows. How can this be improved? If this was a little more like the system used on Netflix, it would have been handled in a few seconds.

Another gripe I have with the priority arrows is that anyone can go in there and fiddle with them. After spending an hour moving my mission critical reports to the top of the list, any other person with access can go in there and just push my reports back to the bottom of the list. The priority arrows should be an admin feature only.

Scheduling
There are times when I have a lot of reports that I need all at one time. I just scheduled 24 reports last week that come daily all at the same time. I usually try to space out the reports as much as possible when I can, but the smallest granularity that is offered to me is just hourly.

If I could schedule reports on a quarter hour, or even half hour granularity, it may ease a little bit of the load on the Data Warehouse servers and I may get my reports delivered a little quicker.

Metric Additions
As business requirements change, so do the metrics delivered in reports. I have some complex reports scheduled and it would be great if i could open up the report and add a metric instead of canceling the report and starting from scratch.

If someone comes along and asks if we can add 2 more events to this report, I should be able to just click some kind of “edit metrics” button, add in what I need and be all set. Too bad it isn’t that easy.

The Data Warehouse is a very powerful tool that does work extremely well. Most casual users may never even notice these items, but as you get more advanced in using the tool, as your business requirements change over time, you too may feel the need for these enhancements.

What this plugin does is sets an event on each time a visitor clicks through to your site. Nothing exciting yet. But then when the visitor makes it one page past that landing page, it sets a second event. Now you can see which ad group, landing page or campaign engaged the visitor a little more than the rest. You will end up with a report that looks a little something like this:

This example is pretty high level, but using individual tracking codes for your keywords this report can really give you a good look at your paid search campaigns.

First thing you need to do is to set one variable, I have it right after the s.usePlugins=true call.

/* CTQ variables */
var i=1;

Next you will need to use two events. A call to the plugin needs to be added right after your campaign tracking code:

	if(!s.campaign)
		s.campaign=s.getQueryParam('cid',':');
		s.campaign=s.getValOnce(s.campaign,'s_campaign',0);
		s.clickThruQuality('cid','event1','event2');

In the call to the plugin you need to add in which tracking code you are looking to track, and the two events you want to use. Name one event Click Through and the other Click Past. Then add the actual plugin code into the plugins section of the s_code.js file:

/*
 * Plugin: clickThruQuality 0.8
 */
s.clickThruQuality=new Function("scp","tcth_ev","cp_ev","cff_ev","cf_th", ""
+"if(i<=1){var ev=(s.events?s.events+',':'');if(s.getQueryParam(scp)){s.events=ev+"
+"tcth_ev;if(s.c_r('cf')){var tct=parseInt(s.c_r('cf'))+1;s.c_w('cf',tct"
+",0);if(tct==cf_th&&cff_ev){s.events=s.events+','+cff_ev;};}else{s.c_w('cf',1,0"
+");}}else{if(s.c_r('cf')>=1){s.c_w('cf',0,0);s.events=ev+cp_ev;}}i++;}");

Enjoy!

Not using the s.server variable yet? Get on it!

The majority of the sites I work on are classified advertising sites. They are quite simple in nature, at it’s core consisting of a home page with search functionality, search results pages, and listing pages. Now there are actually much more pages than these, but this is the real bread and butter of the site. One neat item I like to track is the number of results returned when someone does a search.

Taking a look here at eBay, I do a search for Apple iPhone and it shows me how many results were returned for that search.

Now I like to grab that number and record it into a s.prop in SiteCatalyst. Ok so now you end up with a report full of numbers. How is this useful to me? Let’s open SiteCatalyst and take a look at this new Results Returned report and take a look at what we have.

Look what this tells us. For the time period selected, we had just under 195k times where someone did a search on the site and got nothing. The marketers did what needed to do to drive traffic to the site, only for these people to not get what they wanted. Now let’s take it a step further. What were these people looking for? That’s where Data Correlations come into play. If you are capturing all the other elements of that visitors search on your site, you are now able to break down that 0 Results Returned, and find out where they were searching and for what item. You know the exact make, model, city, state and whatever else about what gave this visitor nothing from your site.

You now have pinpointed where you have a demand with no supply. Once you know this you can help work to tailor your site to give your users what they want, and what they expect out of your site, and generate that revenue you are missing out on by having a visitor leave your site not being able to find what they want.