Basic configuration of the Analytics extension in Experience Platform tags

Transcript

Hey everybody, this is Doug. In this video I’m going to talk about a really important concept when you’re building segments in Adobe Analytics, and that is the containers. So right here in the middle of the Segment Builder, you’re going to choose, as you start to build this segment, you’re going to choose either a hit container, a visit container, or a visitor container. And in some cases you’re going to nest them and choose different ones, so it’s really important that we understand what these are. They totally control what data is going to be included, or excluded really, in your segment. So I’ll get back to the include-exclude thing, don’t worry about that for a minute. But I want to talk about visitor, visit, hit. So I’m going to jump over to this PowerPoint real quick. So of course a visitor is a person coming to your site. So it is browser-based or cookie-based. So as of right now, just think of this as a person coming to your site. But again, really, it means a device. So this person can come to your site any number of times, right? They could come once yesterday, they could come once today, and in these different visits or sessions, they can go to different pages, they can click on different things, they can perform different actions, etc. So I just want to kind of point out here that we have a visitor went to your site once yesterday, once today, and in each of those visits they had three page views, and they maybe did some other stuff as well. Now in this yesterday visit, they came to the home page, they landed on the home page, and they went to a product page, and then they went back to the home page, and let’s say they left. And then in today’s visit, they didn’t go to the home page, they went to a landing page, maybe they clicked on a campaign or something, and they landed on this landing page, they went to that product page, and then they actually put it in their cart and went to the cart page. Anyway, I’m going to jump back to this a couple times as we look at what kind of data will be included in our segment. So let’s go back and create a super basic one. So I’m just going to create page and drag that in and say page equals, and I can even just do a drop down at that point and say home page. Now as we build out our segment, you’re going to see these numbers up here. So for the last 90 days in my report suite up here, I have these numbers, right? So I have 119,000 visitors, which were responsible for 147,000 sessions, and 167,000 page views of the home page. So right now we have include the hits, or a hit where the page equals home page. So I jump back and we have page equals home page here. These are hits. So page views are hits, clicks are hits, those are both included in that container, right? So either page views or custom links, for example. So in this case, we’re going to keep it simple with page views. And we’re looking for hits where the page name equals home page. And so we’re going to count this data just for this home page and this data for this home page. But we’re not going to count any other data because we have selected hit, right? So just hits where the page view equals home page. And so that is the scope of our data. Now we go back and you can see here that we’ve got 167,000 page views and 147,119. Okay. So that’s the numbers for here. Now, if I change this to a visit, what you’re going to see in these numbers up here is that the number of page views will increase. So watch that. I’m going to change this to visit. And the number of page views increased to 792,000. So increased a lot. Now the visits didn’t change because it’s still, you know, how many visits, it’s still a visit where they saw the home page. So whether they saw the home page once or 20 times during a visit, it’s still one visit where they saw a home page. So that didn’t change. And it’s the same people who saw the home page, but why did the page views go up so much when we change this to visit, isn’t it just a visit to the home page? No, a visit again, think of it as a session. So if I go back a visit where they saw the home page, so what happens is when you’re using these containers in the segment builder, it matches. This is how I like to think about it. It matches the segment definition and then fills the container. Okay. So if we match the segment definition with a page of equals homepage here, then it fills the container. And since we chose a visit container, it has all of these included. So it will include data in the segment for the product page as well, right? So all of the pages in the visits where they saw the home page. Now it’s not going to include any of these pages over here because, you know, there was no homepage in this visit. So it doesn’t include this visit, but it does include this visit and everything they did in this visit. So that’s now the scope of our segment is visits where they saw the home page and all the data from the visits where they saw the home page. Okay. Jump back and let’s go to visitor. Now, when I do this, by the way, you’re going to see that visits is going to go up and pages are going to go up. And you know, of course visitors are going to stay the same. So watch these two numbers, 147 and 792, they’ll go up, click, and sure enough, they went up like this because now I’m talking about a visitor container. I’m going to meet the criteria, fill the container. So I’m going to meet the criteria right here. And then it says fill the container, what container, the visitor container. So now it’s going to include all the data for this visitor, you know, in the time period. And you can see that last 90 days sneaking through there. So a person who saw the homepage, so this person saw the homepage. So they, you meet this criteria and then it jumps up to the container and says, fill the container with all the data. So it is all the pages from all the visits for that visitor who saw the homepage, right? So this visit, even though the homepage wasn’t in there, all these page views and all the other stuff they did in this visit will be included as well. So what you need to ask yourself when you’re choosing containers is, you know, what information do I really want to know? Do I want to know about the person? Do I want to know about the visit or do I want to know just about the pages? And to me, that’s the key question, right? So if I want to know just about the pages, I choose hit. And then I could even, instead of just, you know, pages with homepage, I could do things like just a site section, right? So if I have a big site with lots of different sites sections, you know, I have an entertainment section and I have a news section, for example, and I just want to know about what’s happening with the entertainment pages. So we could say, you know, hits where, you know, site section equals entertainment or something like that. And then I’ll just get information about those pages. Could even be something like logged in, right? So just the pages when a person is logged in. So it won’t include the pages when they weren’t logged in. It’ll just include the pages where they’re logged in. So that’s another maybe example of where you might use a hit container. Now, when you’re using a visit container, your question is answering, yeah, I want to know about those sessions. I want to know about those visits. For example, what do they do on a visit when they come in from a specific campaign? Are they, you know, registering? Are they buying something? What pages do they go to? You know, the land, not only landing page, but other stuff that they do during those visits. Okay. I don’t want to know everything about that personally. I just want to know about the visits where they did that, or maybe just the visits where they purchased or, you know, performed another conversion. What led up to it on that visit? So that’s a good example of where you might use a visit. Just think about, I just want to know about those sessions. But then if you choose visitor, of course, you want to know about the people. I want to know about the people, and I’ll use the same examples, in fact. I want to know about the people who responded to that campaign. So I want to know about all the stuff that those people do. I want to know not just about the visit where they came in from that campaign, but you know, what drives their other visits and what are they doing over the course of a longer time period. You know, so it could be that, or you know, even the purchase, I used that example as well. Not only in this case about the purchase visit, that session, but I want to know about people who buy stuff on my site. Then you choose a visitor container. And that could be other things, of course, like, you know, demographics or membership status or whatever. But I think you get the point. You really just got to think about, you know, am I am I wanting to know about the person in general and everything they do? Do I just want to know about the session, that visit when they came in and did a certain thing or just the visits where they came in from, you know, paid search or something like that? Or do you want to know very specifically about just these pages or just these hits? Even again, just these clicks, which is part of the hit container. And then lastly, you might want to, instead of include, you might want to exclude, right? So you can’t click on that, but what you can do is you can come over options and you say, no exclude instead of include. And you’ll see this kind of, you know, be marked here that now it’s an exclude. And, you know, maybe it’s like, I want to exclude, let’s say visits, you know, where they came in on a certain page equals, you know, landing page one or something. So I want everything except for something. So it’s hard to really choose everything except something if you’re only using includes. Right. Cause you’d have to include every, every thing. So this is great because you can say, you know, give me all the data except for this little piece of data. I don’t need that, you know, leave out, I want to do all the visits except for the ones where they bought stuff because I want to know all the other stuff about them. I don’t know, whatever it is, but this is very handy to be able to exclude that. In fact, you can also then build these together to say, include people who added something to the cart, but also exclude the people who actually bought something. Right. So you end up with just the people who put something in the cart and didn’t buy anyway. So once you understand these containers, it really will open your mind into really understanding how to create these segments. I hope that was helpful and good luck.