Omniture Metric Definitions

When working with Omniture data on a daily basis it is much easier to say “Your site had ten thousand unique visitors who visited your site 15 thousand times and consumed 400 thousand page views,” than to explain what that means in layman’s terms.

Unique Visitor or UVs: A cookie based method of counting users that come to your site.

If you are using the latest version of Omniture and are looking at a specific time frame, Omniture will automatically count the UV stats for that time. For instance, if you are looking at the past months’ worth of data by day – Omniture will automatically show you Daily Unique Visitors. If you change that view to see UVs by week, Omniture will show you Weekly Unique Visitors.  Because cookies are used, the system is not able to differentiate one user that may come from multiple devices because they will have two unique cookie IDs. If a user clears their cookies, this will also assign them a new ID the next time they visit your site so that person will again show as an additional UV.

Page Views or PVs: A count of pages viewed by a UV.

Most of the time one page load = one page view. If a user navigates to a second page then that = their second page view. This counting methodology does not take into consideration long form pages (think: Buzzfeed articles). If Buzzfeed was set up with Omniture, they would be able to set their ‘page view’ at the increment that makes the most sense to their set up. For instance – setting a page view after viewing a gif in a list of 27 gifs would equal 27 page views instead of just one.

Visit: To Omniture (and not necessarily to other analytical platforms) a visit is a 30 minute period of time that a user is on the site.

If a user navigates to a site, looks at three pages then leaves and navigates back within 30 minutes – that is still counted as one visit. If a user navigates back to the site from the same device after 30 minutes, that is their second visit (but still only one UV). Within a visit, a user may rack up 100 page views (if so, great job keeping that user on your site!) but their visit count would still be 1.

Segmentations:

You are able to create segments within the Omniture interface by clicking on the ‘segments’ tab and then clicking ‘add’.

You can then drag and drop different components to build a segment using and/or statements along with multiple metrics.

Here’s an example:

If you would like to see all visits to the site that carried a Google Tracking code, you would click show ‘visit’ where the Tracking Code equals (or contains) Google. You can also include or exclude any of these parameters, meaning you could SHOW users where their visit = Google or you can HIDE all users where their visit = Google. 

Once your segment is set up to capture your inclusions and exclusions – you can apply that segment to any report that you would like to pull. If you would like to see orders where the Google tracking code is present, apply your segment to an orders report.

Creating segments can give you depth to reports that you may not have had before and give you access to hundreds of new ways to break down your data. Welcome to the next 14 hours of your day!