Concepts and Terminology

Basic Adobe Online Marketing Suite concepts and terminology you need to know

The table of contents for this tutorial

What is the Adobe Online Marketing Suite?
What is SiteCatalyst?
What is Genesis?
What is the Developer Sandbox?
What are the Enterprise and Partner APIs?
How often can you make API calls?
How is SiteCatalyst data collected?
How is data stored?
What are the available SiteCatalyst variables and events?
What are segment definitions?

What is the Adobe Online Marketing Suite?

The Adobe Online Marketing Suite provides a set of products to measure, optimize and automate your marketing processes. These products can be integrated with other systems and services programmatically by using the products’ APIs. The Developer Connection provides a place to find documentation and discuss these APIs. The Developer Sandbox provides a fully-operational testing environment for Adobe SiteCatalyst, DataWarehouse, Genesis, and all associated APIs. Dev Center provides an administrative functionality for the Sandbox as well as the means for 3rd-party developers to create integrated products which can be distributed to Online Marketing Suite customers through the Genesis infrastructure and interface.

Related resources


What is SiteCatalyst?

Adobe SiteCatalyst is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that collects web site visitor’s online analytics data like page views and visits. It provides both a data processing and reporting platform.

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What is Genesis?

Adobe Genesis automates the integration between the Adobe Online Marketing Suite products and over 60 partner applications that extend the Suite with functionality like advertising, email, social media, rich media/video and more.

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What is the Developer Sandbox?

The Developer Sandbox is a fully-operational Online Marketing Suite environment available to developers who intend to build integrated products. Developer can capture live data from tagged web properties or applications and leverage the sample data which flows into the system regularly, mimicking standard web traffic on an eCommerce site.

What are the Enterprise and Partner APIs?

Adobe provides two APIs for the Adobe Online Marketing Suite:

  • The Enterprise API provides Customers with programmatic access to collect, import, export and run reports on their data.
  • The Partner API provides Genesis Partners with a way to integrate their application’s data into the Adobe Online Marketing Suite so that Suite Customers can optimize their businesses using more valuable integrated data through a simple wizard-driven process.

Figure 1. An overview of the APIs

An overview of the Enterprise API

Using the Enterprise API, you can add data to the Adobe Online Marketing Suite (DATA IN) and run reports on this data (DATA OUT).

Figure 2. An overview of the Enterprise API articles covered in this series

There are two ways to collect data through your web properties and applications:>


There are also two ways to import data through the backend:

  • In batches using the Data Sources API (Read article)
  • By importing and assigning data attributes to reports using The SAINT API (Read article)

There are two types of reports:

  • Standard reports created using the Reporting API which typically provide aggregate data. (Article coming soon)
  • Filtered, or segmented, rules-based reports using the Data Warehouse API, providing granular data often used for automating marketing processes. (Article coming soon)

The other APIs available in the Enterprise API are outside the scope of this series. See the API documentation for more information.

An overview of the Partner API

The Partner API is designed to integrate third-party partner data into the Adobe Online Marketing Suite. Customers can purchase these partner applications and integrate the data into their report suite using the Genesis Integration Wizard.

This figure shows the two sides of the Genesis Partner integration:

  • Genesis Partners use the Partner API and Developer Connection web site to (1) Configure the product, thus creating the Integration Wizard and to (2) process the integration by managing data and running reports.
  • Online Marketing Suite Customers use the Integration Wizard to map the partner data to their own Adobe Online Marketing Suite data collection.
Figure 3. An overview of the Partner API articles covered in this series

You can learn more about Genesis product integration in the provided articles and tutorials of this series:

Coming soon.

Related resources

Coming soon.

How often can you make API calls?

In order to prevent excessive strain on system resources, Adobe implements a token system to monitor access to the Enterprise and Partner APIs. Each request to an API method consumes one or more tokens from the allowance you have based on your Online Marketing Suite contract. Most methods consume only one token.

You can see your token allowance and usage in the Token Usage table at the bottom of the Manage Web services page (Admin Console > Company > Web Services).

Figure 4. An example of a Token Usage table

How is SiteCatalyst data collected?

There are two ways to collect visitor data from your web site:

  • Client-side using SiteCatalyst JavaScript Tagging
  • Server-side using the Enterprise API’s Data Insertion API

With SiteCatalyst JavaScript Tagging, you embed SiteCatalyst-specific JavaScript code into your HTML page that sends the visitor data to the Adobe Data Collection Layer.

Figure 5. An overview of SiteCatalyst JavaScript Tagging for data collection

The Data Insertion API alternatively uses the server-side code to send tracking data directly to the Data Collection Layer.

Figure 6. An overview of the Data Insertion API for data collection

To learn more about SiteCatalyst JavaScript tagging, read the the Collect visitor analytics using SiteCatalyst JavaScript Tagging tutorial. To learn more about the Data Insertion API, read the Collect visitor analytics using the Data Insertion API article.

You can also import data directly to the Adobe Online Marketing Suite using other APIs in this series. To learn more about them, explore these articles:

How is data stored?

Adobe operates multiple data centers for collecting, processing and storing the data associated with your Online Marketing Suite.

Each customer’s data is stored based on their Login Company, which is the Company entity that they use to login to the Online Marketing Suite portal.

Figure 7. All data is stored based on Login Company

As visitor data is collected from the associated web properties, it is sent to the Data Collection Layer and stored in one or more report suites. If your contract includes Data Warehouse, the data is also copied to a single report suite table as shown in the Figure 9.

Figure 8. An overview of data stored for SiteCatalyst and Data Warehouse

An overview of report suites

A report suite defines a walled-off collection of associated reports. Usually you would define one report suite for one web site, but there are cases where you might have multiple report suites for one web site or one report suite for multiple web sites. You should work with your Adobe representative to design the right report suite configuration for your business.

An overview of Data Warehouse

The Data Warehouse stores raw data in a single table but sorts it, based on type, into three conceptual containers: Visitors, Visits and Page Views. Data Warehouse reports are based on filters called segment rules or segment definitions. These rules define what data to include or exclude for each report and can have very specific criteria.

You can further refine Data Warehouse reports by declaring metrics, to add additional columns of data, or breakdowns, to group data. Read more about segment definitions, metrics and breakdowns.

Figure 9. Data Warehouse conceptualizes data into 3 categories that can be further filtered using segment rules (segment definitions), metrics and breakdowns.

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What are the available SiteCatalyst variables and events?

SiteCatalyst provides two types of variables:

  1. Traffic variables
  2. Conversion variables

SiteCatalyst also provides events to track visitor actions.

An overview of traffic variables

Traffic variables are non-persistent variables which count the number of times each value is sent to SiteCatalyst. SiteCatalyst provides some built-in, pre-defined traffic variables like pageName, channel, and server. These variables are counters. For instance, pageName counts the number of times a user has visited the page with this name.

You can also define up to 75 of your own custom traffic variables, called property or prop variables. Examples of prop variables are Page Type (“article”, “category”, etc.), Site Section (“sports”, “business”, etc.) and Geo Country (“Spain”, “Singapore”, etc.).

Measurements associated with a traffic variable, called traffic metrics, include page views, visits, and visitors.

Each traffic variable used for tracking data creates a report that can be viewed in SiteCatalyst.

An overview of events

Events are completed visitor actions on your web site and SiteCatalyst provides some built-in, pre-defined events and the ability to create your own custom events. By default, events are counters that you increment, but you can also use currency and numeric values as an event type.

The pre-defined events are most often associated with e-commerce sites and are prodView, scView, scOpen, scAdd, scRemove, scCheckout, and purchase.

SiteCatalyst provides you with 100 custom events that are named event1 through event100. Examples of custom events might be login, registration, and signup.

An overview of conversion variables

Sometimes you want persistent variables that are tied to events. These variables are called conversion variables.

For a custom event, like login, you might want to use a custom conversion variable, also called an eVar, that keeps persistent information about whether the visitor is logged in or out of the site. The resulting SiteCatalyst report could tell you the number of purchases made when visitors are logged in or out of of the site.

SiteCatalyst provides you with up to 75 custom eVar variables.

The products conversion variable is used in conjunction with an event to pass product information like product name, category, price, etc. Unlike eVars, this variable is not persistent and can hold multiple values.

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What are segment definitions, breakdowns and metrics?

When creating reports, you will encounter the terms segment definitions, breakdowns and metrics. This section defines these terms.

An overview of segment definitions

Segment definitions are most often used with Data Warehouse reports. As you learned in the section An overview of Data Warehouse, Data Warehouse stores raw data in a single table but allows you to access the data in three conceptual containers: Visitors, Visits and Page Views (see figure 10). You include or exclude data in your reports using segment rules or segment definitions. A typical segment definition comprises a conceptual container and a rule that filters the data in that container.

Figure 10. Data Warehouse data filtered using segments definitions

You can create and run segment definitions using the Data Warehouse API or the Adobe Online Marketing Suite UI in the Segment Definition Builder (see Figure 11).

Figure 11. The Segment Definition Builder UI

An overview of metrics

You can add data points to your report (see Figure 12) using a metric list. A metric is a number that represents a count or a ratio for something you want to measure. Examples of metrics are: revenue of a product, number of visits and number of page views.

You can define multiple metrics while creating a segment and they are represented as additional data columns in your report.

Figure 12. Add data columns to a Data Warehouse report using metrics

An overview of breakdowns

Reports can be further refined by using breakdowns, also known as dimensions, which are a way to group data, for instance by age, gender, browser height, campaigns, days since last visit, etc. Figure 13 shows a report breakdown by gender.

Figure 13. Data Warehouse data with a breakdown applied

Data Warehouse provides predefined breakdown variables or you can define your own variables from custom eVars or props variables.

Related resources
  • How do I use the Data Warehouse Segment Builder… - https://omniture-help.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10124
  • SiteCatalyst User Guide (see Chapter 8) - http://microsite.omniture.com/t2/pdf/en/SiteCatalyst_User_Guide.pdf
  • Data Warehouse - https://omniture-help.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/587
  • Web Analytics: Metrics, Dimensions, and Reports - http://blogs.omniture.com/2010/06/17/metrics-and-dimensions-and-reports-oh-my/