When I started working on analytics five years ago, I was always struggling to get end to end picture on how we go about it right from requirements till reporting. I am trying to do my best to provide all the information in one page which will help analytics enthusiasts to understand the whole lifecycle.

Terminology

1. Traffic Dimension ( non persistent, collected on page view ), can’t tie to conversion ( like events), 75 available, 9 predefined for out of box reporting.

• Conversion Dimensions
  • Events (final goal/count, 1000 ) like Adding a Product in Cart/revenue/checkout 
  • 
  • Evars (conversion metric, 250): (persistent) Did a particular thing/action caused a person to add product /checkout/payment in cart? (campaign, or flashing a banner)
    • 

• visit, unique visitor, session, hit ( Basic Traffic Metrics OOTB)
  • Lets consider a scenarioUser opens website, go from Page A to Page B, close the browser.Open browser again, go from Page A to Page B and close.
  • Hits:
    • Total hits will be 4 ( its same as page view)
    • Page A hit will be 2
    • Page B hit will be 2
  • Visits/Session:
    • Total visit/session will be 2
  • Visitor or Unique Visitor:
    • Visitor will be 1 as its based on Ip address, profile id etc.

Steps to plan and implement analytics

1. Start blank SDR ( Solution Design Reference document as (refer SDR excel in this folder) with columns
   1. https://experienceleague.adobe.com/?lang=en#dashboard/learning
   1. Gather all the requirement in plain English( Journey and As business Owner I would like to column only) (see KBR and corresponding KPI). This will be your BRD.

• Create Site Content Hierarchy to determine pageName and channel and additionally categories

• Create Variable Mapping (evar, prop, events) that will be required in analytics based on KBR
  • In the BRD sheet, Just think about the variable , evar, events that we might need to achieve the requirement. For example, in order to track pages, we need props pageName (OOTB), evar1 as we might wanna know which page leads to add cart event and event ( page view event) we can tie like which action lead to pageview event.

Some guidelines we can follow

• Events are specific events that you want a visitor to do – when they perform an action you want, the number goes up by one. Examples would include submitting an order, subscribing to a newsletter, or submitting a survey response.
  1. Once BRD is populated with evar, props etc, next is to map the variables in variable mapping sheet, Columns in variable mapping sheet
     1. Id ( evar1, evar2, event1, event2)Variable type ( evar, props, events)Name ( what is the name in adobe analytics config to show what this evar1 is used for)Scope(hit, visit, visitor)Data element Name in LaunchRule NameData source like
        1. Data Layer: Resstatetree.loyalityidSome time, it would be click on confirm button, in condition you can write the logic and then in analytic set variables, you can update the value of evar and event (start event and finish event for a form )

• Once SDR is built, you can configure analytics for evar, props and events

• AdminàReport Suitesà Create New
  • Generally, create one report suite for each domain and each website (need, Base URL etc)

• Refer “Configure Adobe Analytics”
  • Traffic variables ( usually we do evars not traffic variables)

1. Evars and events same way.(evar1, evar2 etc)
2. Configure Paid search detection, internal URL Filters(not showing on report) and Bot Rules
3. Classifications
   • Create classification (like campaign) and then set classification rule to send specific data to this classification
   • When you create classification rule, you select for which variable( say s.campaign, or evar20) you want to create classification and then you set rule like if evar20 has this pattern , put it in X classification as well.use regular expression
4. Marketing channel Rule
   • If query string parameter pid=1234, channel is Email
   • If pid=xxx , channel is paid search
5. Configure Adobe analytics for adobe launch
   • Core Extension: Provides default event, condition and data element types available in adobe launch
   • Adobe Analytics: set report suite to send data, understand console logs
   • The Experience Cloud ID Service (Identity Service) : provides a universal device-specific persistent ID that identifies your visitors across all the solutions in the Experience Cloud.
6. Create Data element to get Data Layer attribute value maaped to data element which can be used in Rules ( OOPS)
7. Create Adobe analytics initialization rule, where you can have conditions like ( only these domains) and action as set variables

• You can track anything using _satellite.track(‘abc’) to check this at any stage of funnel, you can get s.eVar55 value as s is tracking variable for analytics, can be changed in global setting.
  • _satellite Object: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-platform/tags/client-side/satellite-object.html?lang=en
    • _satellite.track(‘contact_submit’, { name: ‘John Doe’ });
      • .track fire the rule using direct call event type, where identifier is contract_submit, you can  check event happened or not and then perform some action ( one trust cookie)
    • _satellite.getVar(‘product’)
      • Checks dataelement value, if not present then check if custom java script variable has been set using _satellite.setVar(‘product’, “Naveen”) has been set
    • _satellite.logger.error(‘No product ID found.’); can be used to log messages on console
    • _satellite.cookie.set(‘product’, ‘Circuit Pro’, { expires: 7 });

• Create rules to set variables and events for specific requirement
  • Example check the event, can be java script variable , can be selector, can be event set using _satellite.track

• Check the condition
  • Can be path or can be variable, can be domain
    • Set Analytics variable using extension Adobe Analytics, Set Variables
    
    • Send Beacon and clear variables.

Please reach out to contact@propicent.com, if you need help with template or have any queries.