Configuring Variables in the Admin Console

Transcript

Hey everybody, it’s Dag. In this video I want to show you how to take what you have created in an SDR or a solution design reference document and then configure the variables in the Admin console of Analytics in the UI. A very important step. So once you have figured out your BRD, let me go down here and we can see that we have our requirements and we’re going to track pages and site sections, search terms and some shopping cart stuff and even a credit card application. We’ve taken this and we’ve mapped it to our solution design, kind of built a blueprint of where we’re going to get the data from things like the data layer, this digital data layer, or in some cases a query string parameter or those kinds of things, or maybe even clicking on a certain button, et cetera. We’re going to take those actions or those values, push them into the different variables, and once you’ve got this all done, and I’ve just kind of hidden some rows so that I don’t have to see blank rows, then we can take this and we can configure the variables in the Admin console in Analytics so that the configuration is correct so that they act correctly and so that the reports are named correctly, et cetera. Okay. So let’s even just start with the events. Okay, so we’ll start right here with the events. We’ve got four custom events that we’re going to use. And then we’ve got some predefined events here that are based on the pre-named retail events up here. You can see so. We’re going to do all of these events. Now, let’s jump over to the interface. Okay, and I’ve gone to Admin, Report Suites here in Analytics. So once I log into Analytics, assuming I have admin rights or I get an admin to do this or I get rights granted to me, I’ll go into Admin, Report Suites, and this gives me a list of my reports suites. Now the report suites that I’ve created right up under the create a reports suite here is this TMD, that’s my company, Tech Marketing Demos, TMD, Geo Clothiers dev. So that’s my Geometrics Clothiers development report suite, and that’s the one I’m going to change everything in and I’m going to set it all up before I create my staging or my production report suite so that when I create those I can just make a copy of the settings in this dev report suite and set those up very easily saving time and energy. So I’m going to do everything in the dev and then we’re going to be ready to go and we’ll create the other ones. So I’ve created this dev reports suite here for Geometrics Clothiers and now I’m going to go up and mouse over Edit Settings and I’m going to go to Conversion and Success Events. These are my conversion events, success events, custom events, so that’s all the same thing. So I’m going to click on that and when that comes up you’ll see that I do have some custom success events here, and then I have some standard events over here and it has just guessed on some of the things that I might want in my events up here. So I’m going to be replacing those names 'cause I’m not using those and I’m going to then leave the names of the standard events like revenue orders, units, carts, checkouts, those kinds of things. So, let’s jump back over and let’s start at the top and see what we’re using. We are only using a prod view, an add to cart, a checkout, and then there’s purchase event, which actually results in three metrics, the number of orders, how many items or units were purchased and the revenue associated with that. So really we’re not going to use the other ones, we’re just going to use prod view, cart add, checkout and purchase. So if I come back over here, I’m really only going to need this purchase revenue orders units, I’m going to use cart add and I’m going to use checkouts. So for something like cart removals, if I don’t really need it then I can just say hidden everywhere, right? I’m not going to use it. And anyway, so I can just, you know, hide the ones I’m not going to use. I’m not going to use SC open, and I’m not going to use a cart view, anyway.

So you get the idea, you can hide the things you’re not going to use. Now with our custom events, if I jump back over, remember that we’re going to have a page view event search, I start my credit card app and I complete my credit card app. So we’re going to do that in one, two, three and four. And they just guessed that I wanted my page view event four and I don’t, I actually wanted it up here. So I’m going to do page view event, and I’m going to set number two, which is a search, event three, it’s a start, and event four is my complete and that’s it. And I’m not going to use five and six, so I can disable those, you know, and turn their visibility off, et cetera. I’m not going to worry about that right now, but again, I am going to worry about these. So the next thing on these is to decide what are they? Are they counters? If I clicked to down on this, you’ll see my options. Are they counters, are they currency, are they numeric? Now numeric means I’m going to use something, you know like 1.5 but it’s not currency, but I am going to use decimal places and for the page view event and for the search, one search at a time and for starting an app and for completing an app, these are all really just kind of one at a time things. So I’m going to choose counter and actually it doesn’t matter if I leave no sub-relations, that’s an old thing. So you can just kind of leave those the way they are if you’re going to use the regular counter-activity, don’t worry about no sub relations again that is an old thing that doesn’t do anything now. So we can leave those and we’ve named those and those will be named correctly now. And we can go down and we can set up our eVars.

So in this case we need to save what we’ve done. Save See the confirmation of what we’ve done and then go back up and now we’re going to go to conversion variables. So we were in success events, now we’re going to go to the variables and at anytime if you want to make sure that you’re in the right report suite, you can always go over here to selected report suites and hit expand. And you can see, yep, we’re in our Clothiers dev so I can collapse that again. And now we can see that they have set up for me a couple of default things and that’s not exactly what I need. Of course, so again, we’ll change those, but what we need for example in eVar1 if we go back is our page name. And then in eVar2 our site section, let’s do those, so I’m going to expand eVar1 and it is enabled yes. And we want the name to be the page name.

It’s going to be a text string, yes. And the allocation is who gets a credit? The most recent value or the first value or linear. Well, page is just going to be page by page. So it’s always going to be the most recent and then you can also decide when to expire. Now since it’s page by page, it would be super easy to just set this as a page or a hit level, right? We could do a page view or a hit level. Anyway, the point is though that I’m going to leave it on visit because if I have other like clicks that don’t load a new page and I want to see what page they attribute to, then I want that to retain in my eVar. So I’m going to leave it on visit. And I’m done with that one right now so I can either collapse it, that’s easiest thing to do. And then I’ll go in and it did save it right now, but I am going to have to hit save in a minute. So we’ll come back and hit save. So number two we want as site sections, right? Site section. So enabled, yes.

Site section. Again, text string, same as the other most recent allocation. Expiration on the visit. That’s good. And our last one, if I collapsed that is search terms.

So we’ll go back here and we are going to expand that, enabled, and we’re going to name it search term or search terms if you want, and we’ll leave that as a text string. And again, when do you want that to expire? Well let’s save that just for the visit. If I searched on something last visit, it’s not really that applicable to what I’m looking for at this time. So, I’ll expire it after a visit. If I search for A and then I search for B and then I buy something, I think I want to attribute the purchase to the most recent thing I searched for. So I’m going to leave that on most recent. If you wanted to attribute that to everything you’ve searched for on the visit, then simply change that to linear. And so that’s your choice. I’m going to leave mine right now on most recent. And that’s all we need to do. So I’m going to hit save, yes of course, and I get my confirmation and in reality I could have deleted or disabled this custom eVar4 if I really wanted to clean that up and I probably would in real life. So, you might want to disable the ones that you’re not using so that they’re not just sitting out there confusing people in the interface. Now the last thing we need to do is really just kind of check on pages and site sections. If we were using additional props, that’s where we’d really need to go in and set things, but we’re not really. So let’s go on and look at it anyway so that you can at least know where that is if you’re going to set additional props. So we go back in and this time I’m going to go to traffic, traffic variables. And this is where we set up our traffic variables or our props. As you can see here, it’s also called custom insight. If you’re not using those, again, you can turn those off. So you can just set these to disabled and then you can save that if you want. In our implementation we’re not using any of those, but they are there for you in case you need those. So in any case, that is how you configure the UI based on your STR. And good luck.