Omniture Data Sources
Data Sources is one of the really powerful features in the Omniture product suite. With Data Sources you can do some amazingly cool stuff. Adam Greco has written a very nice introduction to Data Sources on the Omniture Blog.
So, Omniture Data Sources is pure joy and happiness ? Well not entirely, while it is an extremely powerful feature, it does on the downside also have the potential to make a real big mess in your data.
The Data Sources User Manual does warn you that you have to be very careful what you are doing, since the changes you make to your data are irreversible.
What a newbie Data Sources user doesn’t know is that there are several errors in the Data Sources User Manual, and several very important things are simply not mentioned.
Let me summarize a few:
In section 1.2 (Integration Data sources) the User Manual says :
“If no products are specified, the metrics and variables specified in the data source will be tied to any products on the page at the time of the transaction ID. If products are specified, only those products will be associated with variables and metrics supplied in the data sources file.”
This is wrong, if no products are specified no metrics at all will be tied to anything.
The User Manual does also say:
“The following methods may be used to record transaction IDs: JavaScript, ActionSource, Data Insertion API, Full Processing Data Source, Mobile tracking, Image beacon without JavaScript.”
This is correct, but Omniture has left out the fact that an Integration Data Source itself can create/record a transaction ID, meaning, if you create an Integration Data Source and upload data that doesn’t have any transaction ID’s they can tie to, these missing transaction ID’s will be created on the fly by the import process.
Depending on how You use the Data Sources features this can create some really hard to explain Sitecatalyst reports.
Lets take a look at an example.
You run an online loaning application.
Today it was visited by 10 people applying for a loan.
Tomorrow, using Omniture Data Sources you upload the results, it was a great day, all 10 loans were approved.
What you don’t know, is that due to some connectivity issues the Sitecatalyst tracking went wrong for one of the customers, the trackingdata from his confirmation page never arrived at the Omniture datacenter.
Because of the (undocumented) auto-recording of the missing transaction ID you now have a SiteCatalyst report showing 9 loans out of which 10 were approved…..
