How to create Custom Path definitions and Filters for Website Sections in Omniture (SiteCatalyst)?

Question

I tried every possible way for me to understand to do this.

I have a site which accepts only registered users. When a user registers, we get his/her Department, Role, Name and Region. What I am hoping that when this user visits the site, the omniture shows all his credentials (name, role, department, region) along with generic variables like Page views, country, etc.

The report I mentioned in the previous paragraph is needed for the whole site + individual sections of the site. I have three sections in the site (Newsletter, Events and About). I am hoping to get individual reporting for all these three sections + global site reports.

Update 1

I am extremely indebted to Chris de Groot and Crayon Violent for their help. I have summarized my problem and thought may be I could be post an update. The problem set is actually smaller now:

The thing I have to achieve is:

• Get Normal Traffic Variables for the Newsletter Section of the site (Page Views, Vis­its and Unique Vis­i­tors in a mean­ing­ful way)
• See all registered users of my site who visited the Newsletter and categorize them based on their Role, Region

I have all the attributes of the user (Role, Department, Region etc) stored in the DB. Here is what I did up until now.

On the Newsletter Page, I used the following code:

    s.pageName= document.title.split(" | ") [0];

    s.server=""
    s.channel="Newsletter"
    s.pageType=""
    s.prop1="Newsletter Issue of December"

    /* Conversion Variables */

    s.eVar1="Newsletter Issue of December"
    s.eVar2="Name of the User"
    s.eVar3="Role of the User"
    s.eVar4="Region of the User"
    s.eVar5=""
    s.events = "event2";

My question is:

• Is this the right approach for the things I need
• How would I make sure that the Reports in SiteCatalyst are formatted/layouted in the way I want them.

Answer 1

The way I think of this is to start with the basics. You can then build many solid reports on top of that.

You need to think of what you want to track and what they are. If it is a number it is 95% of the time going to be a metric and thus you need to use events. For example "number of registrations". It you then want to breakdown that number you need dimensions. A dimension is an eVar.

So say you wanted to breakdown registrations by department, you define both variables in your Report Suite Manager (Success Events and Conversion Variables). Then in your web site tagging when a visitor arrives you immediately set the department eVar to the department name (it stays set across pages/visits etc, depending on how you configured it earlier in the Report Suite Manager) and after however many pages the user completes registration you set the event for registration.

e.g

s.eVar6 = "HR";  // set HR in the department Dimension

/** later **/

s.events = "event3";  // trigger the event for registration. 
                      // This increments the Metric and it is allocated to 
                      // eVar6 and any other currently active eVars.

When Adobe Analytics has done its processing you can cut this data many ways. You can for example view a "Custom Conversion" report by department(rows) and with the counts of registration(columns).

There is a lot to Analytics, it is an awesome tool, it takes years to fully learn, but if you nail the relationship between Metrics and Dimensions you will really be able to do a lot very quickly.

Data like this is in the right format to really allow many reports you want

Ps: The other kind of number in Analytics is an instance. They are really a count of how often an evar was set. If you want to also Path that data then you would use a prop variable (also known as a traffic variable). They are good for simple counts and path analysis.