Omniture SiteCatalyst “% Page Viewed” – do you think you have a problem?
by Jonathan Kay on Friday, 2nd September, 2011
I’ve recently been a little stumped with some data being returned by the Omniture SiteCatalyst “% Paged Viewed” plug-in, so here’s a summary of what I found out …
Tracking what % of a page your users were viewing
The original Omniture supported plug-in - here’s Ben Gaines’ blog - simply returned the total % of a page which a visitor viewed. This works by passing the % view data when the subsequent page tag has loaded.
Whilst the original code was useful, Adam Greco blogged about an enhanced version of the code (not supported by Omniture) which also provided data on what percentage of the page a visitor scrolled to view. Using this version of the plug-in you can therefore see the total % viewed, initial % viewed and know what % had to be scrolled in order to be viewed. This is great data to help understand your user journeys in more detail and hence aid optimisation.
0 is bad
However, I had noticed that one of the most popular values was “0”, and given that the plug-in should always provide two values <total % viewed>|<total scroll %> this seemed like an issue.
After posting a few questions on LinkedIn, Tim Elleston came up with the answer. A “0” is passed when the JavaScript starts to load but the visitor then navigates to a subsequent page before the load completes. So, the “0” could be useful in your analysis if it appears frequently.
Zero is good
On a related matter, Ben Gaines commented that there is a quirk with classifications in SiteCatalyst because you cannot upload a SAINT file with a key value of “0”. Andre Urban of Omniture, suggested the following code as a great workaround because you can classify against the word “zero”.
s.prop50=s.getPercentPageViewed();
s.prop50=(s.prop50==”0”)? “zero”:s.prop50;
(Obviously change prop50 to your appropriate number.)
So, after thinking I had an issue I now understand more about how the plug-in works and I have a neat workaround to classify by “0” and enhanced reporting for my clients.
One last comment. I have just found out that Omniture now has a version 1.4 of the plug-in which provides the same functionality as Adam’s code. It has to be provided by Omniture Consulting so it’s therefore (and regrettably) a chargeable extra. Wouldn’t it be great if plug-ins such as this were fully supported by Omniture!
"% Page Viewed" report examples