So, following a recent “back to basics” post, a reader requested that I write something describing how custom traffic props are actually useful. How about customer segmentation achieved through traffic props?

Custom traffic props are used for counting traffic-based activity, to gain insights into user behaviour across our sites. By default, custom traffic props only come enabled with the metric Page Views, which, by itself is, admittedly, not a lot of good. But, with a couple of minor customisations, you can get valuable insights from the props very quickly.

This post is actually about customer segmentation – in our case measuring student activity versus staff activity versus “anonymous” activity. In your case, it’ll probably be customers vs. non-customers. But, you don’t have to stop at the customer vs. non-customer segments either. There’s plenty of other customer segments that you can apply throughout the brand funnel, as they move from being just a browser to a high value loyal customer.

Read on to find out more about enabling customer segmentation.

One of the fundamental things you need to understand about Omniture SiteCatalyst is the difference between an s.prop and an eVar, and just what events are and when to set them. They are at the heart of the product and provide the ability to customise it to suit your business needs.

If you don’t understand the difference, you’re going to be in a world of pain, and left dazed and confused.

This is, understandably, the most confusing thing to new SiteCatalyst users, and they take a bit of getting used to, especially when you start to combine them all together, but once you understand them, you’ll be on your way to generating custom ones that can really provide insight. Hopefully this post will help out in some small way.

One of the big problems with single page microsites is that traditional measures, such as bounce rates, engagement time, scrolling etc, all go out the window because there is no “second page” activity by the user.

Take, for example, a recent press-release microsite that we did at Murdoch University. The press release is about snake bites and what owners can do to protect their pets. There’s a bunch of information on the page, including an infographic, downloadable files, images, and other stuff.

The problem is, as the user interacts with the page content, they don’t actually move from page to page – which represented quite a challenge in the way it’s measured.

Read on to find out how we got total visibility on interactions and engagement, including time on page, for a single page site.