SiteCatalyst Tip: Corporate Logins & Labels

As you use Adobe SiteCatalyst, you will begin creating a vast array of bookmarked reports, dashboards, calculated metrics and so on. The good news is that SiteCatalyst makes it easy for you to publicly share these report bookmarks and dashboards amongst your user base. However, the bad news is that SiteCatalyst makes it easy for you to publicly share these report bookmarks and dashboards amongst your user base! What do I mean by this? It is very easy for your list of shared bookmarks, dashboards, targets and other items to get out of control. Eventually, you may not know which reports you can trust and trust is a huge part of success when it comes to web analytics. Therefore, in this post, I will share some tips on how you can increase trust by putting on your corporate hat…

Using a Corporate Login

One of the easiest ways to make sense of shared SiteCatalyst items at your organization is through the use of what I call a corporate login. I recommend that you create a new SiteCatalyst login that is owned by an administrator and use that login when sharing items that are sanctioned by the company. For example, if I owned SiteCatalyst at Greco, Inc., I might create the following login ID:

Once this new user ID is created, when you have bookmarks, dashboards or targets that are “blessed” by the company, you can create and share them using this ID. For example, here is what users might see when they look at shared bookmarks:

As you can see, in this case, there is a shared bookmark by “Adam Greco” and a shared bookmark by “Greco Inc.” While based upon his supreme prowess with SiteCatalyst, you might assume that Adam Greco’s bookmark is credible, that might not always be the case! Adam may have shared this bookmark a few years ago and it might no longer be valid. But if your administrator shares the second bookmark above while logged in as “Greco Inc.,” it can be used as a way to show users that the “Onsite Search Trend” report is sanctioned at the corporate level.

The same can be done for shared Dashboards:

In this case, Adam and David both have shared dashboards out there, but it is clear that the Key KPI’s dashboard is owned by Greco, Inc. as a whole. You can also apply the same concept to SiteCatalyst Targets:

If you have a large organization, you could even make a case for never letting anyone share bookmarks, dashboards or targets and only having this done via a corporate login. One process I work with clients on, is to have end-users suggest to the web analytics team reports and dashboards that they feel would benefit the entire company. If the corporate web analytics team likes the report/dashboard, they can login with the corporate ID and share it publicly. While this creates a bit of a bottleneck, I have seen that sometimes large organizations using SiteCatalyst require a bit of process to avoid chaos from breaking out!

Using a “CORP” Label

Another related technique that I have used is adjusting the naming of SiteCatalyst elements to communicate that an item is sanctioned by corporate. In the examples above, you may have noticed that I added the phrase “(CORP)” to the name of a Dashboard and a Target. While this may seem like a minor thing, when you are looking at many dashboards, bookmarks or targets, seeing an indicator of which items are approved by the core web analytics team can be invaluable. This can be redundant if you are using a corporate login as described above, but it doesn’t hurt to over communicate.

This concept becomes even more important when it comes to Calculated Metrics. It is not currently possible to manage calculated metrics and the sharing of them in the same manner as you can for bookmarks, dashboards and targets. The sharing of calculated metrics takes place in the Administration Console so there is no way to see which calculated metrics are sanctioned by the company using my corporate login method described above.

To make matters worse, it is possible for end users to create their own calculated metrics and name them anything they want. This can create some real issues. Look at the following screenshot from the Add Metrics window in SiteCatalyst:

In this case, there are two identical calculated metrics and there is no way to determine which one is the corporate version and which is the version the current logged in user had created. If both formulas are identical then there should be no issues, but what if they are not? This can also be very confusing to your end users. However, the simple act of adding a more descriptive name to the corporate metric (like “CORP” at the end of the name) can create a view like this:

This makes things much more clear and is an easy workaround for a shortcoming in the SiteCatalyst product.

Final Thoughts

Using a corporate login and corporate labels is not a significant undertaking, but these tips can save you a lot of time and heartache in the long run if used correctly. You will be amazed at how quickly SiteCatalyst implementations can get out of hand and these techniques will hopefully help you control the madness! If you have similar techniques, feel free to leave them as comments here…