Classification Alerts

Recently, Omniture released its latest version of SiteCatalyst (version 14.7) in which there were a bunch of new features added. Below are a few links to other blog posts that describe some of these new features:

• New Dashboards
• Day of Week Trending, New User E-mails, Default Dashboards, Transfer of User Settings

However, one of my favorite new features was the addition of Alerts on Classifications. In the past, you could set Alerts on Success Events and on eVar and sProp values, but not on Classifications of those eVars and sProps. While this new feature doesn’t sound all that impressive, it can be quite powerful. In this post I will demonstrate how it can be used.

Example – Traffic Driver Type Classification
For the purposes of this post, let’s imagine that we have an eVar or Campaign variable that captures individual Traffic Drivers (Sources). These sources of traffic might be SEO keywords, Paid Search Keywords, E-mail links or clicks from Social Media sites. However, in this case, we don’t want to be notified every time there is a increase/decrease for a specific Traffic Driver, but rather, we would like to know if there has been a significant change to one of the higher level types (SEO, SEM, Social Media). Before this new version, doing that would be basically impossible, but this is easy now if you have used SAINT to classify your individual Traffic Drivers.

Let’s say that your boss wants to be alerted if there is a significant change in Social Media referrals to the website from one week to the next. To be alerted about this, you would simply open up the Classification version of the Traffic Driver report (we’ll call it Traffic Driver Type) and click the Alert icon. Doing this brings up the screen below which is basically the same as the Alert screen you may have used previously. Once here, you can give your Alert a name, choose the time frame, pick your metric and then select the specific item you want to be alerted about (in this case I have selected Social Media). Next, you set the type of Alert – in this case I have chosen a percent change of over 15% and then tell SiteCatalyst how you woudl like to be notified (e-mail or mobile device). That’s it!

Other Uses
There are an infinite number of ways you can use this powerful feature. Here are just a few that I can think of off the top of my head:

• Classify internal search terms into buckets and be alerted when a specific type of keywords hits a threshold or changes significantly
• Classify countries or cities into regions and be alerted when a metric related to a specific one changes
• Classify search engine keywords into Branded/Non-Branded and be alerted when each changes significantly
• Classify videos viewed on your website and be notified when a video type changes significantly
• If you are using the Omniture Twitter Integration, all of the Twitter data points are based upon Classifications so you can set an Alert when a particular person Tweets or if a specific Twitter keyword experiences a spike

These are just a few examples, and I am sure you will find many ones unique to your business that can prove beneficial.

Now, if only Omniture could combine this new feature with this future idea, then we will really be in business! In the meantime, if you think of some really interesting ones, feel free to leave a comment here…