Transaction ID data sources

Transaction ID data sources allow you to not only view online and offline data side-by-side, but tie the data together. It requires the use of the transactionID variable in your Analytics implementation.

When you send an online hit that contains a transactionID value, Adobe takes a “snapshot” of all variables set or persisted at that time. If a matching transaction ID uploaded through Data Sources is found, the offline and online data is tied together.

For using transactions, the online hit with a transaction ID has to have been sent in and processed before any transaction data source data with that transaction ID is sent in. The online hit contains variables (eVars, etc.), but not events, that were on the online hit saved with the transaction ID information.

When a transaction data source hit is sent in, the transaction ID on the data source transaction hit looks up the vars, etc. (not events) that were associated with the original online hit with that transaction ID. It uses those vars on the data source transaction hit, if there was no value for a variable passed in on the data source transaction hit.

Example

If an online hit with transaction ID 1256 is passed in and on it evar1=blue, evar2=water and event1 are set, then transaction data for transaction ID 1256 is saved off with evar1=blue, evar2=water. No event values are saved as part of the transaction information.

Now let’s assume that a data source transaction hit is then passed through the system with transaction ID 1256 and evar1=yellow, evar3=mountain and event2 set. The system finds the saved transaction data and in the data source transaction hit sets evar2=water (since that is what was set on the original hit). It does not set evar1=blue (as it was on the original hit) because there was a value for evar1 (yellow) already set on the data source transaction hit. So the data source transaction hit results in having evar1=yellow, evar2=water (from the original online hit) and evar3=mountain. Those 3 eVar values have event2 set - the event from the data source transaction hit.

No values from the data source transaction hit get event1 set when the data source transaction hit is processed.

Overall workflow of Transaction ID data sources

Use the following generic workflow to start using Transaction ID data sources:

1. Create a data source (‘Generic’ category and ‘Generic Data Source (Transaction ID)’ type).
2. Follow the data source setup wizard to get an FTP location to upload data and download a data sources template file.
3. Update your implementation to include the transactionID variable.
4. Upload a data sources file to the FTP site with a .fin file.

Example upload file and implementation code

If you uploaded the following data sources file, and implemented the following code on your site, you would see data linked in reporting. The data sources file uses eVar1 and event1, while the online implementation uses eVar2 and event2. Since the transaction ID matches, you could see event2 data for eVar1, and event1 data for eVar2.

Example file

Download the template, update the values, then upload it to the data sources FTP location:

Example implementation code

For a more detailed explanation on transaction ID, see transactionID In the Implement user guide.

var s = s_gi("examplersid");
s.eVar2 = "Example eVar2 value";
s.events = "event2";
s.transactionID = "1234";
s.t();