Join us January 15th for an AMA with Champion Achaia Walton, who will be talking about her article on Event-Based Reporting and Measuring Content Groups!
The Referring Domains report and Original Referring Domains report allow us to add metrics. We should also be able to add metrics to the Referrers and Referrer Type reports.
I agree. Often the referring type report is much more useful especially now that there is this new type "social media". Having other metrics like events on this report would really make a difference in time spent for reporting / analysis. Today I have to select all the domains for a specific referrer type manually and add up the events in excel. Would be great if you could implement that. Thanks.
Where's Bounce Rate? Where are my events? Where is pageviews?
I agree with Claudia - the addition of the "Social Networks" category in this report makes it actually useful. Now I can quickly see: "How many Visitors came to my site from all my social efforts?" However, without the metrics above that's the only question I can answer. The very next question asked is: "How much revenue / how many KPI's did my social efforts drive?"
Well to answer those questions I now have to switch to the much less organized "Referring Domains" report and combine facebook, twitter, google plus, tumblr, digg, etc. Yet I can't even get Bounce Rate there!
It is very useful to get all page views and visits attributed back to their 'external' referrer types, i.e. social networks,search engines, direct and other referrals. However this doesn's seem to be availabe in either SiteCatalyst 14 or Data Warehouse. The former has only 'instances' in the referrer type report which doesn't help if we want to know the 'quality' of the visitors each source has brought in. No. of instances does tell part of the story but page views/visit by source is more useful. While in Data Warehouse, we get 'inside your site' by pulling referrer type in, which has loads of traffic under it that has lost the original referrer type. By excluding 'insider your site' in the visitor container, this amount of traffic is just removed instead of getting allocated somewhere else which doesn't make any difference. Our Company hasn't got SiteCatalyst 15 yet so I am not sure whether that version can do what we want. It is very easy to get page views and visits breakdown by referrer type from Google Analytics free version so I am very disappointed this is not available in SiteCatalyst. I have been told Discover can do that but as I consider this analysis as a very basic one, it doesn't feel good to know our company needs to pay for another product to get that.
In general I consider SiteCatalyst as a very powerful tool, but more thoughs might need to be given to what customers want to know, rather than just what you want to teach your customers to know about. I trust SiteCatalyst stats more that Google Analytics' but GA does beat Omniture sometimes in the ease of use and the ability to break traffic down.
The Referrer Type report should include Page Views and Visits. In SiteCatalyst 15, we can submit a Data Warehouse request to get the Referrer Type broken down by Page Views and Visits. But in the interface, all that is available is Unique Visitors or Instances. Having all 3 key metrics available by referrer type would allow for better analysis of how each type is affecting all traffic on the site, not just the number of visitors.
Visitors may not be changing much but if PVs or Vs suddenly do, there's no easy way to tell without looking at the individual domains. This makes it difficult to set alerts for all of our key metrics because we would have to do it for each domain, which is virtually impossible given the potential number of domains that can be referrers. Being able to report UVs/Vs/PVs by sepcific domain but only UVs by the rolled-up type is a little inconsistent, and leaves more questions than answers in most cases. It's valuable to know that your generic social referrers just spiked in PVs, even though UVs and Vs are staying consistent day to day - your social traffic is suddenly much more engaged with your site. Then you can dive into the specific domains that caused it, what pages were they viewing more, how long they were staying, etc based off of that one notification.
Seems easy enough given the fact that the DW can easily generate this report, so the link is there on the back end, just not available within the SC interface. Please include this in the next maintenance upgrade! (If it were available in the interface, it should be available in Excel Client/ReportBuilder also)
I agree, I want to be able to add metrics (CUSTOM EVENTS) to the "referrer type" report. I'd also add the suggestion that "search engines" should be broken into two buckets: paid search and natural search.
