Configuring List Variables

Hey everybody, it’s Doug. In this video, I want to show you how to configure list variables sometimes just called list vars. I’m also going to show you kind of what they give us in the reports so that you’ll know whether you want to use them or not. So here I am in the analytics admin console, and I’m in the Report Suite section. So I’ve gone to admin and then report suites to get to this point. And then I can select one or more Reports Suites to configure the list variables. Once I’ve got those Reports Suites selected, I can just mouse over edit settings. I can go to Conversion and then down to List Variables.

Now, as it mentions here, it says, list variables allow you to capture multiple values in a single report, basically in a single eVar, which is kind of what this is a list eVar on a single hit and then allocate conversion and other success metrics to each of the values. So I’m going to show you basically how this works and what we want to see and what we don’t want to see. So let me kind of switch over here to Excel and give you an example. Now, if I have on my site, a place where people can search for different databases on a given state, for example, you can see here. And so, you know, people can say, well, let me see what you’ve got for Washington. Let me see what you’ve got for California, et cetera. And they can multi-select on that list. And then maybe what you want to know is not only which ones they select, 'cause I could probably just do that through a list prop. But I also want to know, you know, when people search on, you know, Washington, for example, how likely are they to actually then purchase something or maybe it’s purchased that database. So like an eVar I’m relating a value to a conversion metric. I’m saying, you know, when they have the selected value, how often does that result in a download or a purchase or some other kind of conversion event on my site? Now you might say, “Hey, can’t I just use a regular eVar for that?” Those are also tied to the events. Yes but what you’re going to get in an eVar is right here. Okay. So it’s probably what we don’t want, which is like, you know, the first person says, “You know, they’ve selected Washington.” The next person selects California. The third person selects Washington and Oregon. Fourth person selects three different states. Fifth person, you know, two different states. And so we probably don’t want this in the report, these combinations. You know, I put probably there because you might want to know which ones are purchased together. And so, you know, you might want to do this, but look, if you had 50 states there and you had any combination of all 50 states, it’s going to be hard to really digest that data and really make anything of it. And so what we really probably want is to know how many times somebody selected these given states. So you can see here what we probably want is, you know, Washington was selected three times and Oregon was selected twice and Utah was selected twice and California ones, Idaho ones. So we want to see this kind of a thing show up. And so that requires more than an eVar. that requires a list variable so that it can actually take a list of items and break it out to individual values from that list and again, maybe this is purchases, you know, or downloads or whatever it is. This conversion event that we are associating to this list. In any case, that’s why we use a list Var and again, if you’re just going to do something that’s more like counting, you know how many times people selected it and you are out of list variables. Let me jump back. You only get three. So if you’ve got more use cases and not enough list variables available to you, if there are different use cases there that just need to count something, then you can use a list prop. And so you can go select a prop and you can set it to be a list prop and you actually get any number of lists props up to the total number of props. In other words, any prop can actually be listed as a list prop, but not so with eVars, right? These are the list of ours that you have available. So let’s say we do want to do that. And we want list number one, and we’re going to say state searched and purchased.

And then we want to, of course, enable that. And our Value Delimiter is going to be a comma. So that’s good but you know, you can see here that you can change that delimiter if you want. Now, when do you want it to expire? In other words, if I start adding those together, how long do you want me to add it together? Well, if I do it… If I never expire and I searched for… Let me to go back. If I do this on visit one, and I do this on visits two then it’s going to add those all together, even though they might be on different days, et cetera. So in this case, I’m going to go ahead and say, I want to expire that on the visit, but you can see here that you have a lot of different options. And so you can expire that not only, you know, time-based on a visit or on an individual hit or even, you know, obviously never on these different time-based ones but even on different events, you can say when this happens and kind of refresh it, wipe it clean. So for us, we’re going to say visit. Now with allocation, do you want each item to get full credit for that conversion event? Or do you want to split it up? So linear is, you know, if there are three things and you had one order, then each one gets a third of the order if you choose linear. If you choose full, then each item gets, you know, full credit for that. So I’m going to leave that one like that, and then you can use a description and then you can choose, you know, the max values that you want to be able to be placed in that variable, you know, only let 10 things in or whatever. You can have up to 250 as you can see here. Anyway, that’s how you set up list variables. Pretty easy as far as the configuration. I think the hardest part is just kind of understanding if you need a list variable, or if you can use a regular eVar for that or if you can even just use a list prop for that. Hope that helps and have a great day. -