Configuring Traffic Variables (props)

Hey everybody, it’s Doug, how you doin? In this video, I just want to take a couple of minutes to show you some tips on configuring traffic variables. Now, when we talk about traffic variables, we’re often talking about the page variable, or site section variable, or props. So here I am in the Analytics Admin Console, and I’ve gone to Admin Report suites and then chosen my Report Suite. And I can choose multiple reports suites and do this for several report suites all at once if I want to. Then I go to Edit Settings, I can just mouse over that, and then Traffic and Traffic Variables.

Now, what you’ll see is not in here, what you won’t see in here is pages and site sections because those already have a name, and they’re already enabled, et cetera, et cetera. They already have pathing enabled, so we don’t really need to configure those in here. So these are really, specifically, for those props or what in the olden days we called Custom Insight variables, but, again, they’re traffic variables or, you know, prop one, prop two, et cetera, as we have here in these different numbers over here. Now you can also see that I have one through five and then number 10. So if I have decided to put something in, you know, these first five and then number 10, but not six through nine, you know, then I can do that. I can enable any of them that I want to. If I click Add New, it’ll kind of give me the next one here, you can see six, or I can just click on Show All and that will give me all of them, and then I can actually just, you know, enable the ones that I want to. Also, if I’m not going to be using, say, one through five, then I can disable those so they’re not cloggin up the interface, you know, and confusing people and those kinds of things. In any case, let’s say that I do want to do this and I’m going to say that I have a search functionality on my site where you can search any number of states. Maybe you have some databases and you can choose which states you’re going to search. And, so, I’m going to use prop one here, let’s say I’m going to do that, and I’m going to say States Searched.

And, so, you know, you’re going to change something so that’ll mark itself right there. It’s already enabled so I don’t need to, you know, mark that one 'cause I’m not going to change it, but you do anytime you need to change something you need, you can mark that. And then I can put a description, but I’m not, you know, going to worry about that right now. And, then, if you want to, you can use List Support, and this can become a List prop. And, so, when I do that, you’ll see and enable that, it’s going to want a Value Delimiter here as well. Well, what does that mean? List props are really for very specific situations where you do actually have a list and you want it to show up in your report the right way. So, for example, if on my site I have these different visitors coming to my site and the first person selected, you know, Washington and searched there, and the next person searched California, the third person searched Washington and Oregon, and the fourth person, Washington, and Oregon, and Utah, and the fifth person, Utah and Idaho. So they can select any of these different states, of course, whatever states I have available there. And what we probably don’t want to see in the report is exactly like this, right, that they searched these different combinations. Now I put probably because, you know, you actually might want to see what they searched together like that, the different ones that they searched together, but, at the end of the day, you probably want to know which one is the most searched, right, which one is the most popular for this search. And, so, in that case, we want to say, well, as we look through this, we can kind of see that maybe, you know, Washington has three, the other ones have their numbers there, but if I have, of course, thousands, or millions, or whatever, of people doing this then I can’t eyeball that, obviously, so we want it to show up with is actually to go through that and say, yeah, okay, Washington was three times, and Oregon was twice, and Utah there’s twice, and California and Idaho were once each. And then we want it to be able to go through and do that. And that’s what a List prop does. It says, okay, you’re going to give me a list, and give me that delimiter, and I have this comma here, and so I’ll be able to, you know, as Adobe Analytics, switch that out to show you how many times each one showed up. And so that’s what I want to do right there. So if you have a list type situation where you want it to show up like this, then when we do the actual configuration over here, we want to enable List Support, and then give a Value Delimiter, in this case, of that comma, so I’ll put a comma right there. Now I will take a second to say here that with all the stuff that we can do, like pathing on eVars, and, of course, eVars are tied together with Events to give you the different conversion metrics, and stuff like that, that props are not as often used. So you might not really need to use these props in here, but one of the reasons why we do use props are what we just went through because of List Support. Now, there is an opportunity to use List Vars, which is like a List eVar, but you only have three of those. So if you have some situations where you need more than three List Vars, and you really need to just tie them to traffic metrics, like how many times somebody selected something, then you can actually put that here in a prop and use this List Support and use a List prop for that. So that’s another good reason to use a prop, and there might be other ones that you want to use as well, but, in any case, just wanted to show you how to set up these traffic variables. And then you can have a Participation Metrics, if you want to, to see how often a value participated in a visit. And then, of course, Pathing Reports if you want to be able to move between values. So, anyway, pretty straightforward. I just wanted to give you a couple of tips on setting up the props, good luck. -