I have a concept that I was hoping someone could try out...
Here is a use case. I write blog posts and would like to see how many reads a post gets divided by the # of days it has been out there. Unfortunately, there is no real great way to do this in SiteCatalyst. One option is to upload a data sources file each day which increments a # of days metric for each post. The other option I see is updating a numeric classification file each day. In either case, you would have a second metric which can be used in a calculated metric when viewing eVar values in a report.
Therefore, my question is this. Is there a way to do either of these options, but in a way where a script uploads the data sources file or numeric classification file each day, incrementing it as it goes?
Just curious...
If you don't have your blog tagged you can upload via Data Sources with two events, a read event and a day's still active event. From this you can create your calculated metric for a given time frame. For example:
Date, article, reads, day counter
May 1, happy pets, 209, 1
May 2, happy pets, 189, 1
May 3, happy pets, 321, 1
May 4, happy pets, 98, 1
May 5, happy pets, 298, 1
If you ran a report for the post "happy pets" for May 1 - 5, you will have a total of 1115 reads for 5 days. From this, you create the calculated metric you mentioned earlier, # of reads / days, to derive avg reads / day, which in this example would be 223 reads / day.
If you have the site tagged, you would send in an event for each read and for the day counter, you would want to serialize it with the current date to ensure it only gets counted once.
If you wanted to see how many days the post has been up in total, you can use classifications on the post and break the post down by the classification to see the total up time.
Hope that helps.
Nick