Hidden Gems – Money’s Too Tight To Mention

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Inspiration for this week's Hidden Gem hit me while listening to Simply Red's hit from the 1980's, Money's too tight to mention. It's the start of a new financial year for many and that means budgets are getting locked down so the last thing you want is to be whacked in the face with a whopping overage bill for your analytics software. This week I'll show you how to keep an eye on your server calls and avoid any nasty overage bills arriving in the post.

First let's have a quick recap on what server calls are all about. IBM Digital Analytics is a SaaS (Software as a Service) product which means instead of paying for user licences you pay for what you use. In this case what you use are tags on your website to track visitor behaviors and each time one of these tags is called we count it as a server call. These are sold in chunks of one million per month and customers can start at 1 MMSC (Monthly Million Server Calls).

To check what you're currently using go to Reports > Site Metrics > Top Line Metrics > Default View. Scroll to the bottom and click on the trend option shown here. In the trend view you will see a total number of server calls as well as a breakdown of each tag type.

I highly recommend setting up this trend view as a monthly scheduled email so you can keep an eye on what's happening each month with your server calls. IBM applies a smoothing over a 3-month period so as long as your average for the quarter is within your contracted server call volume there are no issues.

If you expect traffic to your site to grow and want to increase your volume just reach out to your account exec or contact our support team if you're not sure who your account exec is cm_support@us.ibm.com.

In my experience the number one cause of overages is using impression tracking. This type of tag automatically gets called if you are using Site Promotion parameters, Real Estate parameters or in the case of WebSphere Commerce customers, eSpots.

A classic example was a customer who wanted to track every link in their mega menu. Using Real Estate tags they could tell the click-through rate of every menu item across all pages on their site.Impression tags are charged at 0.1 server calls, but when you have 60 menu items all of a sudden that's six extra server calls every time someone views your homepage.This can make a dramatic difference to overall usage and potentially push you over contracted server calls. You can alwaysturn off impression taggingorselectively use impression tagging on certain pages.

That's it for this week's Hidden Gems but if there are any topics you'd like covered off just leave a comment and I'd be happy to oblige.

Thanks,

Aidan.

Further reading…

-IBM Digital Analytics Team

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