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Merging VOC Data With Site Data
By Gary Angel
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-04-16
In the first post on this topic, I promised to walk though the basic steps involved in integrating VOC data into your web analytics solution. I'm focusing on QuestionPro - a very inexpensive survey solution as an example case and showing how it can be effectively tied into Omniture. In this post, I'll discuss the basics of data integration - capturing the survey respondent's identity.
The fact that someone took a survey isn't really salient point about them. For real integration, you need to capture either their survey responses or their respondent id so you can match up the data later. Many survey integrations encourage you to take this 2nd strategy of capturing only the respondent id in the web analytics solution. If you do that, you'll end up sending them the web behavioral data (which seems like the tail wagging the dog in terms of data sizes) or you'll end up adding the data on the back-end to Omniture.
In most cases, I prefer to integrate the respondent data directly in real-time. I think it's easier and in many ways more functional.
But let's start with integrating just the respondent id.
For QuestionPro, the respondent id is available in a special variable that you can use. Here's an example of the tag on the QuestionPro Thank You page:
It places the special variable ${response_id} in the Omniture s.prop1 variable. QuestionPro just substitutes the true response id wherever you insert the "${response_id}" string. So you can set any variable you like with it - in this case, I've stuffed it into s.prop1.
With the respondent id in the web behavioral stream, you can pull a data feed on all survey respondents and match up to your survey data. You can look up the behavior of individual survey respondents and see how it fits with their responses. And you can integrate the survey data back into Omniture on a batch basis. So even though this is the most basic level of real integration, it does deliver some real value add. Not bad for 20 minutes of work.
I guess this is a really short section because that's pretty much all there is to say. This level of integration takes virtually no effort or time. But you don't really have the survey response data in the web analytics tool - you just have a key. You can do quite a bit more than this with just a little more effort. I'll take the integration up one level in my next post.
[Quick note of congratulations to the new WAA Board Members. It's an outstanding group - uniformly great picks.]
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About the Author:
Gary Angel is the author of the "SEMAngel blog - Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing practices and perspectives from a 10-year experienced guru.
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