Sitecatalyst version 15

Finally sitecatalyst version 15 has been officially released after much anticipation.

I have'nt used it yet, though wanted to share what I 've heard about it.

There are quite a lot of resources in the web, going on about Adobe sitecatalyst v15.

So I prefer to keep this short, just giving a bird's eye view of what it is and what is not.

To start with, once you decide to migrate to sitecatalyst v15, there is no looking back.Because the migration cannot be rolled back. So do enough research and analysis before you decide.

Sitecatalyst15 is built on a completely new architecture. Though this back end change will not be visible to user, this change brings with it a lot of exciting and much awaited features.

The first thing that's great about sitecatalyst15 is the segmentation part.

• Yes, segmentation is now an out of the box feature in sitecatalyst and ASI is not required.In fact, once migrated to sitecatalyst 15, ASI will not be available to the users.
• Another beautiful thing is that all eVars can now be fully subrelated. How great is that!!
• And visits will include all visitors, regardless of whether they accept cookies or not.
• One could make use of Pageviews, Visits, and Unique Visitors metrics on all reports.
• Bounce rate is finally a standard metric.

These features have made sitecalyst15 to be much wanted.

But there are some things to be considered:

Sitecatalyst 15 does not support multi-suite tagging.The reason is that there will be no need for it, when segmentation is inbuilt.

And if your site is huge and you use multiple Omniture/Adobe solutions like search center, then you cannot migrate immediately.

Yes, many customers of sitecatalyst are enraged that though they have been sitecatalyst users for long , they cannot migrate immediately even if they want to.

Here is why from omniture - How to upgrade

Along with sitecatalyst 15, a new product from adobe is 'Adobe SocialAnalytics'

This is focused on complimenting sitecatalyst to help monitor social activity.

Well,that's it. These are what I think matter most regarding sitecatalyst 15.

I will update this post with more when I get to use sitecatalyst 15.

And if you have not yet read Adam's post on this topic, here's it :

Welcome to sitecatalystv15

Your comments are always welcome , especially if i have missed anything here, do point it out :)

Instances vs. Visits in Omniture

Instances and Visits in Omniture

Lot of people get confused between instances and visits in sitecatalyst . Actually they are two very different animals.

Instance is the count of the number of times a value was received in a conversion variable. Visit pertains to the session.

Lets look at it with an example. Say you are tracking the username in your website in a conversion variable (lets say evar1), then in the evar1 report the instances metric shows you the number of times evar1 received a specific value .
So evar1 report would have values like Guest,UserA,UserB,etc and the instances metric will give the number of times each user accessed a page.

Now that we got an idea of instance, lets look at visit. A visit always identifies the session. A visit lasts for 30 minutes.Visit is the interaction a user has with a website.Visit can comprise of multiple page views/requests.

Instances would increment each time a particular value was received in the conversion variable. On the contrary, the visit metric does not behave so. Even if a value was received multiple times in a session, the visit metric takes into account only one count since it all happened in the same session.

So if a user views 3 pages in the following order

Login->Home Page(evar1=guest)->ContentPage(evar1=UserA)->AnotherPage(evar1=UserA)->Signout Page(evar1=loggedout)->Home page(evar1=guest).

So for the same value (lets take 'Guest') , the instance and visit metric would be different:

eVar1 value	Instances	Visits *
Guest	2	1

*All of this would be counted as single visit if it had been done by the user within the 30 minute time frame. If it had been done by the user after a gap of 30 mins/more , or using two different browsers then more visits would be counted.

Lastly, since conversion variables are directly linked to success events, it makes more sense to use the visits metric with them. As instances and visits are different in sitecatalyst, they both have different scenarios of usage in analytics.