Introduction to Traffic Variables (Props)

Hi Everybody, this is Doug. In this video, I want to talk about traffic variables and give you an introduction to them. And the first thing we want to talk about is how they are going to be referred to as dimensions in Adobe Analytics. Now in another video, we will also talk about conversion variables which are also dimensions. So we’ll talk about traffic variables, conversion variables and together, these are dimensions. So to show you here what I mean about the difference maybe between dimensions and metrics, let’s look at this web page showing us the weather for New York City. Now, you’ll see here that on the right hand side of this page, we have a bunch of numbers. We have the humidity, we have how much wind there is, we have how much precipitation there is planned on being there, we have high and low temperature. And these are the metrics. And so metrics are always numbers, they are the numbers that are telling us how our site is doing or in this case, how the weather is doing. Now, when you look at the dimensions or the variations that apply to these metrics, those are the dimensions. So in this case, the day of the week is the dimension. So in other words we’re saying, on which day did it get to 80 or is it going to get to 80 degrees et cetera. So, the which one is always a dimension, and the how many are the metrics. So let’s look at this actually in analytics data now on a site. In this report, in analysis workspace, we have the page names of the pages on our site. So those are the which ones and then we have the how manys. We have, this page had how many page views, how many visits or sessions and how many unique visitors. So in this case, once again the how many, those are the metrics, the numbers of the metrics. And in this case, the dimension is the Page. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit of an idea of what the dimension is, it’s always the which one. Now as I mentioned, there are traffic variables and there are conversion variables. And when we’re talking about traffic to our page, like how many pages visits and visitors, we often use the traffic variables to measure that. And the most commonly used traffic variable and the reason why I put this on this slide is because it is the Page Name. And so, we will capture the Page Name in a traffic variable. Now there are a few traffic variables that are already pre-named that we can use. And one of them is indeed Page Name that we’ve just been talking about. There is another one called Site Sections and there’s another one called Server. But these are really just pre-named traffic variables. And then you have available to you, a number of custom traffic variables that are referred to as Props. And you can think of them as properties of a page because you can see here, the traffic variables are used to track page by page site-traffic activity. They do not persist between pages, the scope of a traffic variable is one page. So I just like to think of it as a property of the page. Might think of it as metadata for a given page. So the most common use of the traffic variables are again, the Page Name or the Site Section which just means a grouping of pages. You might have different sections on your site, this section or that section. And that is probably the most common use. There are other ones here like as you can see in the second bullet, find most popular of a specific value. But we will also very commonly use what we call eVars or conversion variables for that. So traffic variables are going to be mostly used for Page Name and for Site Sections and then also for any of the values that we really need a lot of pathing on. So in other words, if you want to know how people move from page to page to page, that’s the obvious one, then we want to have a traffic variable, so that we can have a lot of pathing reports 'cause those are available to traffic reports. So in this case, yeah, we’re going to use a Page Name variable, which is again, a pre-named prop or a pre-named traffic variable to capture the Page Name. And we’ll probably also use a Site Section 'cause we want to see from this section, did they go to that section or the other section? So we might want some good pathing on some of the Site Sections of our site as well. So those are probably the two biggest reasons that we use props or traffic variables in general. You can see here when a page comes up, we can use the Site, maybe the Section which is analytics, as you can see here, a subsection which is the benefit of analytics and then a Page Name, which is often a concatenation of some of these other things to kind of give us some idea of where this page is on our site Anyway, that is our introduction to Props. You will probably use eVars or conversion variables more than you use traffic variables. But again, very important for Page Names and Site Sections. In another video as we move forward, as we decide the business requirements for our site and we start to map those out, we will use Props, Page Name, Sites Section, these kinds of things, to determine how we are going to view that data on our site. So stay tuned for that one.