Adam Greco's blog at Web Analytics Demystified - Latest Comments

Re: Slack Demystified

craig_from_Orem — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 18:50:09 -0000

Adam, you stinker, that was the longest blog post ever! But I read it all the way through because each next thing you said was cooler than the one before. I've never used any of these tools, so my mind's a little blown, but I'm going to start at the top and work my way down!

Re: Product Cross-Sell [SiteCatalyst]

Adam Greco — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 15:37:09 -0000

I would not add a Product View (since you don't want to inflate your Product View count), but you could certainly set a custom success event when they click and call it something like "Cross-Sell Clicks" to compare it to Cart Additions and Purchases (by product).

Re: Product Cross-Sell [SiteCatalyst]

Neil Moree — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 14:47:07 -0000

Can we add a product view each time a cross sell is shown, so that we can compare it to cart adds and then purchases?

Re: When to Use Variables vs SAINT in Adobe Analytics

Craig Scribner — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 14:18:55 -0000

Great Post Adam! I talk about SAINT all the time to people (obviously), but you have a great knack for laying out both the what and the why in very accessible terms. If I avoid plagiarizing your work in the future, I'm sure it will only be by the very narrowest of ethical margins! :)

Re: Uber Success Events [SiteCatalyst]

sanmeet — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 02:37:48 -0000

Hey Adam, great post again. The effectiveness yet simplicity of this idea is truly amazing.
Ps - I was one of the guys attending your seminar from India, when you conducted it at eClerx's. Thank you very much for your contribution in the Analytics community.

Re: Tracking Product Returns

Adam Greco — Sat, 02 Aug 2014 11:03:26 -0000

Adobe has traditionally discouraged using negative numbers in Data Sources. You would have to check with ClientCare to see if that has changed...

Re: Tracking Product Returns

ramsay — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 13:25:52 -0000

Is it possible to data source negative revenue to reduce inflated revenue in SiteCatalyst? For example - revenue on 1/1/14 is $100,000 in SiteCatalyst, but it is supposed to be $10,000. Can I data source "-$90,000"?

Re: SiteCatalyst Unannounced Features

Jon Narong — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 12:33:00 -0000

Wow I had not noticed the Weekday/Weekend filtering change. Was just about to implement something to get at this type of reporting but looks like this might solve the issue. Thanks as usual!

Re: Product Cart Addition Sequence

Jan Exner — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 01:08:42 -0000

Another thought: you wrote "so the exit rate below is the combination of single carts + abandons per visit".

If you are passing "order" into the prop, then the "Exits" are actually abandons, no? The report essentially tells you what the last product into the basket was for those baskets that did not convert.

I guess an analysis of baskets that did NOT end in "Order" is a good idea.

Oh, and if you have a prop that does not "reset" at Order, you could check whether people who just bought something were contemplating adding stuff. Not sure how common that behaviour is, though.

Re: Product Cart Addition Sequence

Adam Greco — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 10:15:38 -0000

Jan - I was thinking that you could see this report by Product Category in Discover (Ad Hoc Analysis) through existing SAINT Classifications, but I will add a note about this and the idea of a second sProp...

Re: Product Cart Addition Sequence

Jan Exner — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 05:32:23 -0000

Great concept. I'm also surprised noone has asked that before!

One idea from my end: for retailers who sell millions of products it might make sense to add a second prop and do the same thing, but on a product category level rather than the individual product.

Re: Product Cart Addition Sequence

Adam Greco — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 12:29:45 -0000

I agree. Many people sunder-utilize Pathing and it is one of the easiest features you can use to get value from SiteCatalyst...Many other web analytics products only let you do pathing on pages or sections, which is limiting...

Re: Product Cart Addition Sequence

jstansbury — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 12:23:15 -0000

Nice article. Interestingly, I think pathing is more valuable for values other than the page. Pathing on onsite search terms (stored in both a prop and evar) has given us some very useful and actionable insights. That instrumentation, combined with the number of search results returned for the onsite search term--bada bing, bada boom.

Re: Internal Search Term Click-Through & Exit Rates

Adam Greco — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 14:02:53 -0000

Eric - You can serialize using "Event ID" serialization in which your developers use the search phrase (or part of it if they can be long) and some sort of session ID. That way, if a user searches for the same term in the same visit, it will be ignored, but if they search for a different term in the same session, it will be counted. Just remember that the serialization string needs to be 20 characters of less...

Re: Product Cart Addition Sequence

Jon Narong — Wed, 09 Jul 2014 13:59:47 -0000

Great use of pathing!

Re: Traffic Correlation Hack

eSumit — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 03:13:24 -0000

Interesting Post!

Re: Tracking Navigation

Russ — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 18:35:34 -0000

Thanks Adam! I was wondering about the "What percent of website visits is navigation used?" question. When we divide Navigation Clicks by Visits, does SiteCatalyst use only one event triggered per visit or every event triggered for the visit? I could imagine if many visitors clicked around and racked up a ton of Navigation Click events each session,the report could be skewed somewhat.

Re: Internal Search Term Click-Through & Exit Rates

Eric Knee — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 14:55:33 -0000

Adam you mention this in the article..."It is also critically important that you only set this Search Results Clicks Success Event once per search term!"

How do you do this with an event for a search result? I thought of using event serialization but there is nothing unique about the search term itself so if another user comes to the site and searches the same term the event would not increment. I'm sure its something stupidly simple but I'm at a loss for how this would be done.

Re: Linking Authenticated Visitors Across Devices [Adobe SiteCatalyst]

Hedi Lassoued — Thu, 12 Jun 2014 12:30:56 -0000

HI Adam,

Thank you for this post. I think linking authenticated visitors is a must on or Big Data era!

My question here is, when a visitor is authenticated the visitorID would be equal to the user name (for example), for the both report suites? and if yes, this will not confuse the DEFAULT visitorID for the main report suite?

Thank you

Re: Currencies & Exchange Rates [Adobe SiteCatalyst]

Jenny Elliott — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 17:25:51 -0000

Perfect - I'm working with multiple domains and multiple currencies within each domain, so I initially didn't read the one suite section close enough which clearly applies. Thanks!

Re: Currencies & Exchange Rates [Adobe SiteCatalyst]

Adam Greco — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 16:00:57 -0000

Jenny - In my post, I mentioned that the only way I know of to solve your dilemma is to use a Numeric success event to create a currency agnostic number and add the currency translation in Excel. I guess you could use a numeric classification in some cases, but I find those limiting since currencies change values daily...I suggest you re-read my post for the one suite section...

Re: Currencies & Exchange Rates [Adobe SiteCatalyst]

Jenny Elliott — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 15:52:59 -0000

Hi Adam - what if a single domain accepts multiple currencies? I'm stumped trying to understand how I'd be able to simultaneously know how much I've made from people using GBP as well as EUR separately, as well as the domain as a whole.

As I see it the options are:
a) create one report suite for each currency. Downside is a disjointed view of the visitor journey as it is potentially broken across different report suites which I'm not in favor of.

b) create one report suite for the domain, accept different currencies but the rev will be translated via an exchange rate, reported in the report suite under the "master currency" that the report suite is set to, and then I set an event and eVar to capture whether the order was EUR or GBP originally. This would allow me to segment by currency type, but wouldn't the standard revenue numbers be off?

My impression is that when you're accepting multiple currencies across within a single domain, the revenue number reported is always going to have a caveat around it.

Re: Onsite Search Term Exit Rates [Adobe SiteCatalyst]

Jon Narong — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 17:32:39 -0000

This is a great solution for a very commonly asked question and yet another thing I scratch my head and wonder why Adobe doesn't have something like this out of the box.

Re: Merchandising eVars [SiteCatalyst]

Adam Greco — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 13:26:26 -0000

I have never used Merchandising binging on an eVar, but I believe it would bind if the products variable is set and an eVar receives an instance on the same page. I can't think of many good use cases for this except one in which you have no success event on a page in which you want to bind, but you do have a different eVar being set on the same page...

Re: Merchandising eVars [SiteCatalyst]

Rockey Nebhwani — Mon, 03 Feb 2014 19:24:43 -0000

Hi Adam,

We are on SiteCatalyst 15 and when we set up a merchandising eVar with conversion variable syntax, in merchandising binding event box, we see list of all custom events and custom eVars.

What is the purpose of custom eVars in this box and how do you use eVars as a binding event? I can't find any relevant documentation on this. I appreciate if you are able to share your thoughts on this.

Thanks,
Rockey