Introduction to conversion events

Hey everybody, this is Doug. In this video I want to give you and introduction to Conversion Events, or Custom Events, or Success Events, these are all the same thing in Adobe Analytics. And so, these Conversion Events, and that’s what I’ll use here; Conversion Events, they count the things you’re trying to get people to do on your site. So if you look at your site and you look at the kinds of things you’re trying to get them to do, whether it’s anything from this list I have here on the slide, these are the things that you’re going to code on your site as an Event, or a Conversion Event. We’ll always give you the number of times that this happened, or for a purchase it’ll give you other things like, revenue and how much they spent, and things like that, but it’s always numbers, right. Conversion Events always end up being metrics and they are the number, the “how many”. So, whether that’s how many times people viewed a product or added it to cart, check out etc., or purchased it, it can be a sign-up or a form completion on your site. Really, on any kind of a site, there’s usually some things that you are trying to get people to actually do and take an action on your site. It might be to register, or sign in, or sign up for something, or watch a video, or download a white paper, or something, or reserve something, or reserve a boat. That sounds good. And so, here’s an example. If you have a guy standing at the entrance of the stadium and he is clicking the clicker as people come in, the clicker or the number of people that are entering, the number of times he clicks that, that would be the Conversion Event, right? It is entering the stadium. Now, as we’ve talked about eVars on other videos, the Conversion variables, those are the variations, right, those are the variables. It’s the “which one”. So, it is which gate they came in, or info about the person like age, gender, height, etc. Any kind of variations like that, kind of “which one”, those are the eVars. But the Conversion Events are the numbers, the “how many times”. And here’s our example in the Analytics interface where we’re looking at a marketing channel report. We basically have the variable, or the variation, which is the marketing channel; Email, direct social campaigns, etc. But the numbers, are how many visits, how many orders, how much revenue. Those are the metrics. Those are the events. And then again, the dimension is the Conversion Variable. And even when you’re talking about the basic traffic metrics. Those really are events too, right? Because it is a person coming to the site, that’s a thing you want them to do. Or, they come for a visit, and you’re counting the visits, or they click on a page, you know, or they go to the next page. And so, even though you might not think of these as an Event or something you’re trying to get them to do, it is the same thing, it is a Metric based on the number of times that something happened. So again, some info here about Events in general. Key actions are conversions you’re trying to get them to do, and you want to record how many times that happens. It can be recorded as just counters, like I said, the clicker, or it can be recorded as a currency, or other numeric values, with decimals, etc. And again, they are very closely tied to Conversion variables in the reports. And you’ll find that when you are defining the Events you want to use on your site, if you have a process, like an application, then you typically want to put an Event at the beginning and an Event at the end; not just at the end. The end is the good part, right? Because that’s when you know they have completed a process, but it’s really good to put an Event at the beginning as well so you can say, you know, “ten people started and it looks like five people completed it”. And so you can get those calculated metrics as well and see the percentage of people that are completing the process when they start it, so. So, that’s always a great thing to do if you have a process like that. Or even, anywhere in between. If you can put an Event on every page, you could put one in the middle if you want so that you can gage the success of that process on your site as people go through that and you can see how far they get. So, those are all things that you can look at to code in a Conversion Event. So, it’s really again, all about the quantitative information. And on the right there, you can see that you can even have a Fallout report that shows, of all the people that come to your site, how many end up seeing a product, having a product view, and then after that, how many people add something to a cart and how many people order something. So, some great reports that can show you the success of these Events on your site. So, if you watched the video about Conversion variables, or eVars, then you’ll remember this funny little analogy about the guy here, as he’s changing clothes and things like that, but as these eVars are persistent, they are just really kind of waiting for an Event to happen so that they can get credit for something. Where you have in the Pants report, you have Shorts for a while and then you have Long Pants. So, if an Event happened on Page 3, then the credit for that Event, say it’s a sign-in, would be to Shorts, right? Because on Page 3, the value Shorts, has persisted from Page 1 in that eVar. And so, the Events are going to give credit to any eVars that have values associated with them. So, for example, at the end here, if we see on the page, after this sequence, you had a purchase, then the reports would show how the orders are allocated to the different values. So, you see in the Headwear report, you had two occurrences for a hat, or two pages where that was on there, you have four where there was no hat. The order is at the very end and so, even though on the order page, you didn’t set Headwear to “No Hat”, it gets credit for that because it persists. And you can see that’s the same thing here, along all these reports, typically the latest value will get the credit for the Event. Anyway, I hope this helps you understand Conversion Events and, happy coding.