28 Analytics Use Cases
Analytics Use Cases
Use cases, business cases, and reasons why you want to use Adobe Analytics.
Product Reporting and Breakdowns
Discover revenue-generating product insights.
Business Need
Because product reporting is critical to online retailers, Adobe Analytics provides the flexibility to view any report by product (and vice versa) without limits.
• Break down any report by product, and vice-versa.
• See metrics at the product level.
• Leverage Adobe's ultra-flexible product syntax and associate any currency amount with any number of products.
Available Products
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Breakdowns in Analytics Workspace
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Breakdowns in Reports & Analytics
•
Breakdowns in Ad Hoc Analysis
Almost every report viewed is related to products in one way or another. For example, if you are looking at onsite search terms, you can see how each term led to product purchases. Product reporting is also tied to external marketing campaigns, visit number, and so on.
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Adobe Analytics provides the ability to break down any report by product and vice versa. Instead of providing a limited set of products reports, Adobe Analytics provides a platform in which products reports can be broken down as needed. This allows analysts to be imaginative in how they find improvement opportunities.
Another important aspect of Product reporting is the ability to see metrics at the Product level. For example, a retailer may want to see shipping and taxes for each product. Or they may want to track the dollar amounts added to the shopping cart for each product.
Adobe Analytics has an advanced product syntax that is ultra-flexible and allows developers to associate any currency amounts with any number of products. For example, a visitor may purchase Product A for $50, pay $10 shipping and have a discount amount of $5 and purchase Product B for $25, pay $5 for shipping and have a discount amount of $2. All of this can be captured in the Products variable correctly and be reported upon by Product and by any
Product-related attribute.
Since product reporting is critical to online retailers, having the flexibility to view any report by product and vice versa is a requirement and providing limits on this ability only serves to decrease analytics opportunities.
Product Finding Methods
Understand how products are found, determine how customers prefer to interact along their journey.
You can determine how customers prefer to interact along their journey and remove friction for cart additions and purchasing. Developers can pass the most recent product finding method when it occurs. Adobe Analytics can bind the active product finding method to each product and retain this value through the purchase engagement.
Product Finding Methods Report
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For example, imagine that a website visitor arrives at the home page of a retail site and purchases three products using different
finding methods
:
Product Activity Product Finding Method
A Visitor clicks on a hero banner, finds Product A, and adds it to the shopping cart.
Home page promotion
B
C
Visitor performs an onsite search, finds Product B, and adds it to the shopping cart.
Onsite search
Visitor notices a cross-sell promotion for Product C, clicks on it, and adds Product C to the cart.
Cross sell
This ability to automatically and accurately merchandise by product finding method allows online retailers to put the right products in the right place at the right time, all based upon proven visitor behavior.
In addition to product category merchandising, retailers also want to understand the website method used to find products. These product finding methods may include browsing the menu, using onsite search, wish lists, cross-sell or clicking on promotional banners.
Product Category Merchandising
Properly merchandise the products you sell.
Business Need
Automatically and accurately merchandising by product category allows online retailers to place products in the correct product category and increase sales. You can do so without saddling developers with keeping track of each product category and product combination.
• Determine which
product category
(Products > Categories) was used to find each product.
• Maximize product placement and sales.
One of the key aspects of a retail website is its ability to properly merchandise the products it sells. While merchandising can take several forms, the primary use case is to determine which product category was used to find each product. In some cases, the same product can be found in multiple product categories and merchandisers want to see how often visitors found it in Category A vs. Category B, and so on. The ability to distinguish how each product was found is important since this information can be used to maximize product placement and ultimately sales.
While competitor products provide a facility to attach merchandising categories to products, it has to be done manually and re-tagged at each step of the conversion funnel. For example, if Product A were to be attached to Category A, this connection would have to be tagged and re-tagged at each point of the visitor journey. This requires additional development work and is prone to error. In addition, since visitors can find multiple products in the same session, it is incumbent upon developers to reconcile which product category goes with each product, including cases where a product is added to the cart multiple times.
Adobe Analytics provides the ability to automatically bind products to product categories (using a feature called
Product Merchandising
) and retain this connection throughout the visitor journey. This product category / product binding can occur at any time and is completely configurable by non-developers using the Adobe Analytics
Analytics Use Cases 31 administration console. If the same product is added to the cart multiple times, Adobe Analytics also provides a mechanism to attribute success to different product categories for each product instead of always assigning each product to the last known product category. In addition, Adobe Analytics can retain the merchandising binding across visits for the likely scenario in which a purchase happens in a subsequent visit.
The ability to automatically and accurately merchandise by product category allows online retailers to place products in the correct product category and increase sales, without saddling developers with the responsibility of keeping track of each product category and product combination.
