Customizing Report Metrics [Inside Omniture SiteCatalyst]

Every so often on Twitter, I see Omniture customers posting a variation of the same question:

The customer then goes on to say that every time they open up an eVar report, they always see metrics that mean nothing to them or the dreaded “No Data Match This Criteria…” message which scares their users into thinking all of their data has disappeared!  In this post, I will show you a trick to make sure the metrics you want will show up every time you open up your eVar reports (and it is not Default Metrics so keep reading!)

Default Behavior
By default, when you open an eVar report, SiteCatalyst shows the metrics selected in the “Default Metrics” area of the Admin Console.  In this post, I showed how you can change these “Default Metrics.”  However, even knowing how to set these default metrics will not always help you since those metrics are chosen for all eVar reports and often times you want to have different metrics by default for different eVar reports.  It is also important to understand that once you change metrics in any report using the “Add Metrics” button, those newly selected metrics will override the default metrics for that SiteCatalyst session.  Finally, for those that see the “No Data Match This Criteria…” message, keep in mind that this is SiteCatalyst’s way of telling you that the metrics currently added to the eVar report have no data.  Changing the metrics to ones that do have data will resolve this issue.  For bonus points, keep in mind that if there is data for the selected metrics, but no associated eVar values, you will see the “None” row instead of the message above.

Report Customization Trick
So understanding the preceding information, we can now move on to the trick to solve this riddle.  Our goal is to setup each eVar report with its own set of default metrics that will not be overridden by the default metrics or the metrics added to the preceding report.  As is usually the case, those who have kept up with this blog have already been educated on the tools needed to solve this riddle, but may not know how to combine them to accomplish this goal.  The two tools needed are Custom Reports and the Menu Customizer.  Here are the steps to customize metrics in Conversion reports:

1. Open a Conversion (eVar) report
2. Add/Remove the metrics that you would like all of your users to see when they open this eVar report (note that you can add more than the three normally allowed!)
3. Make any other setting changes you would like to the report (i.e. graph type)
4. Save the report as a Custom Report using the icon in the toolbar (see below) being sure to name the report as you would like it to appear in your menu structure (you can make it similar to the default eVar report name if you’d like)
5. Open the Admin Console and select the appropriate report suite(s) and navigate to the Menu Customization area
6. Hide visibility of the current eVar report in the menu structure
7. Drag the newly created custom report (found in the Custom Reports folder) to the eVar report area and next to the newly hidden eVar report and save the changes
8. Repeat steps 1-7 for any other eVar reports for which you’d like to customize the metrics

Traffic Reports
While most of the questions I have received are related to Conversion reports, you can follow the same process to customize which metrics appear in Traffic reports.  Keep in mind that traffic reports generally have fewer metrics to work with, but the process is identical.

Have a question about anything related to Omniture SiteCatalyst?  Is there something on your website that you would like to report on, but don’t know how?  Do you have any tips or best practices you want to share?  If so, please leave a comment here or send me an e-mail at insidesitecatalyst@omniture.com and I will do my best to answer it right here on the blog so everyone can learn! (Don’t worry - I won’t use your name or company name!).  If you are on Twitter, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/Omni_man.

• Adam Greco
• 6 responses
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