Monday 14 March 2011

Uniques exceeded in Sitecatalyst reports




Can you find your unique ?

There is a limit to everything aint there? Yeah..Its the case with Adobe (a.k.a Omniture) sitecatalyst as well.
There are limits to the variable sizes as well as reports.
Any report in sitecatalyst can only contain 500,000 unique values atmost(per variable per month).Which means that any variable which has more than 500,000 unique values would throw up something which you wouldnt want.Yes, the report will then show you "Uniques exceeded" element.

Okay,so gotcha..how do you resolve it? Well there is no specific solution to this, only workarounds..






* Cut down on the unique values
     Primarily anything more than 500,000 unique values is absurd , even in the reports..Whats the use of such  a huge number of values anyway.
     So cut down on the unique values.Group them up, make sure all values are in the same case- remember most variables are case sensitive so 'home page' and 'HomePage' are two different values,even this could drive the numbers up.

    * Double your variable
       Well but what if you really want to keep all those uniques?
       Then what you could do is probably use two variables in place of one to track the value.If your pageName values contain the "Uniques Exceeded" then track your pageName in two props or two evars (as need be)

For instance say you have on hand a huge multilingual site with so much content and the pagename for each page has to be unique. Then you could do it like if the page is in english then track the name in prop1 and if page is in french then track the name is prop2. This way you have all your unique pageNames.
But this has its pitfalls too..If you wanted to know the top pages on the site level (regardless of language) you'd have to use both the reports for prop1 as well as prop2

Though Sitecatalyst allows only 500,000 unique values , I have heard Discover doesn't do so and lists all unique values.

If you have used sitecatalyst for quite sometime , you would have by now faced this limitation.If so what did you do to resolve it?
Do you think there are better ways to resolve this ? Or should Omniture raise the limits? ..
You can either leave your comments here or email me..