Configuring Zip and Postal Code Settings in Adobe Analytics

Hey everybody, this is Doug. In this video, I wanna show you how to configure zip and postal code analysis in Adobe Analytics. Now you can see that I have that here in my project and I’m looking at some zip codes and some metrics here. Albeit, a very few metrics in my demo data. But you might think that this automatic and you’d be half right. Well, almost half-right. And so, I wanna go over this and make sure that you understand how to configure it to best suit your needs. Now, if I go up here to the documentation you can see that there are actually two ways, two ways to get this report populated. Now, one, the automatic way, I’ll go to number two here, is automatic zip population based on geo-segmentation automatically coming in because of the IP address et cetera. However, there is a secondary way and that is by populating s.zip so this is a pre-named variable that you can use to populate the zip code and we’ll have these two methods working together. So, we’ll want to configure that so that, it uses the right one at the right time et cetera, et cetera. So, the way we do that is to go into the admin console in Analytics, let me just click on that right up here. So, I’ve got to admin and report suites, so, you will have to have privileges to do this. And I’ve selected the report suite and I could multi-select if I want. And then, I go to edit settings, I can mouse over that and mouse over general and this is in the general account settings. So, select that and when that loads you’ll see it right down here at the bottom, zip option. Let me scroll a little bit, well, there we go. The default setting is, actually, this top one. You can see there’s four different options here for you. The default setting is to always use s.zip. And never use geo zip so, if you want geo you’re gonna have to actually enable it, okay. And so, that’s why it’s automatic but not automatic automatic.

So, you gotta come in here and you’ve got to change this if you want geo to work at all. Now, there might be cases where you do want to use s.zip and never geo zip if you’re looking for something very specific for a zip or postal code. And I created a rule here in the launch as an example of where that might be the case. So, for example if you wanted to always capture a shipping zip code. Maybe you are a retail site and you like to capture the shipping zip code and so, you can see here that I’ve, I’ve got a rule that says you know when it’s DOM ready or at the bottom of the page, basically and when you have a shop subdomain, cancel, then, go ahead and set the shipping zip code and send in the beacon. And so, if you only wanna send in in this case the shipping zip code then maybe you don’t want to use the automatic geo zip code because you might be shipping it somewhere else other than where the buyer is. And so, in this case you might want to set it so that it does not put in the automatic zip code. I’ll go back.

Now, that might be pretty rare. What I think you’ll use more often, even, the most often out of all of these because you can see that you have different options to only use geo zip or always use geo zip but if it’s null which is probably almost never to use s.zip et cetera. But the one that I think that you’ll use the most is this one right here. To use the geo zip when s.zip is not passed. So, basically use the IP address zip code, you know the geo zip code but if I am manually sending in s.zip then I want you to override the geo zip with that zip that I am sending in. So, that’s the one that I think you’ll use the most. And in that case, you’ll be able to get that zip code on pages where you’re not sending in the zip code. So, if people are just moving around site or maybe they are doing a registration or something like that, or signing up for a newsletter, where they might not place a zip code in there then, you can still gather the zip through geo automatically and be able to see that success on your site based on zip code. So, this is the one that I think that you’ll probably, use the most. Again, it’s not the default so you’ll have to come in and set this in order to get this to work in this fashion. And by the way, as far as like shipping zip code then, maybe you can just place that into an E-VAR and so that way you’d have the geo zip code or maybe even a billing zip code which would again, maybe tell you about the user that’s on your site. And you could bring that in to override the geo zip code if you wanted to. But if you’re not sending in s.zip then it will still populate using the automatic geo information so. Anyway, I hope that’s helpful and good luck.