Adobe Analytics//
Passing units and revenue unnecessarily in s.products in pages other than purchase page is not a best practice, and will not be reported in analytics report. Solely relying on scAdd to track units added to the cart is definitely misleading. One can add multiple products at once..so........Better to keep track of units added to shopping cart in a separate variable + one more variable to track the revenue; preferably in the product string would be great. This will allow you yo calculate lost revenue vs actual revenue and actual units sold vs added units.
"The Revenue and Unit parameters are only valid when used in combination with the Purchase Success Event. They will be ignored in all other cases." http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/products-variable-inside-omniture-sitecatalyst/
I posted to confirm on my understanding on Adobe forum - The great Adam chose to reply for it.
Reply from Adam - I am not sure what your specific question is here, but you can certainly track Units added to cart, add to cart revenue, checkout revenue, etc. You just can't do it using the Purchase event, but rather you need to use custom variables for this. The following old blog post of mine should explain most of what you need to know: http://adam.webanalyticsdemystified.com/2010/06/28/money-left-on-the-table/
My reply -
Dear Adam
I am fan of you, thank you very much for your reply.
In one of my recent Client site they have coded s.product string with units and revenue ( ;PROD26676;1;45.5 without custom variables / event incrementor) from product page till the final purchase page. On the final page the purchase event is triggered, and hence I believe we get the count of orders, revenue and units sold. Is coding units and products (;PROD26676;1;45.5) in pages other than purchase page send the the units and revenue data to analytics report that too without purchase event. I guess it won't. Please confirm on this.
Other clarification; if I add 10 quantities of the same product will scAdd track 10 units or 1 shopping cart addition as the image request fires only once. Please advise here.
So without a separate event incrementor is it not possible to track number of units (added to cart but not purchased) through scAdd in product pages (product detail page, check out) other than purchase page where purchase events tracks the actual purchase.
Best Regards
KamalChembath
Reply from Adam - Now I get your question. You are correct that you cannot use the first few slots of the purchase string when not coupled with the Purchase event.
To see # of Units added to cart and the Revenue added to cart, here is what you would put on the Cart Add page if you assume someone added 10 units worth $500:
s.events=scAdd
s.products=;[PRODUCT ID];;;eventA=10|eventB=500
If you also wanted to see how many units and how much $$$ was brought to the checkout step, you would repeat this. Let's say that the same user decided to remove 2 units and $100 by the time they reached the checkout step. The coding might look like this:
s.events=scCheckout
s.products=;[PRODUCT ID];;;eventX=8|eventY=400
Then you would set the Purchase event normally so you get Orders and Revenue and you would open the Products report and see 3 columns for each product:
Cart Add Revenue
Checkout Revenue
Revenue
Then you can create calculated metrics between them as you'd like...Just keep in mind that you's want to make success events A & X numeric events and events B & Y Currency events in the admin console...
Adam Greco
