Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
You have to enter the currency code in front of the
AMOUNT
variable, or it defaults to
Usd. But unlike the
AMOUNT
variable, the
_S_AMOUNTS
variable does not need to have the
currency code entered, since the currency is inherited from the
AMOUNT
variable. in the
previous example, a Usd currency results for the two units sold of product numbered
dM112899.
Tracking Products Viewed
i have been very focused on the nirvana of e-commerce actions, the sale, but i am sure
you agree with me that there are many steps and many actions before getting to this
point. You can track any number of steps and any number of activities with Yahoo!
Web analytics. The tool has a few hard-coded events, however, that come right out of
the box—one of them is the unique action value called
PRODUCT_VIEW
.
The product View variable provides you with the opportunity to expand your
merchandising knowledge to activities, very close to the top of the sales funnel. in this
way, you can see how often potential customers view your products, which products
are the most popular, and whether a positive connection exists between product cam-
paigns and product views.
remember that selling only provides you with successful customer behavior,
whereas events before the sale occurs can provide you with very powerful insights on
unsuccessful customer outcomes. The product view can be used in a number of ways,
and you will even see some use of it as a proxy for products added to cart or sales (if
they do not have volume enough to perform significant campaign analysis on that
parameter).
To enable this type of tracking, you apply the value
PRODUCT_VIEW
to the
ACTION
variable on all the pages where you display products:
Version 4
var ACTION='PRODUCT_VIEW';
var _S_SKU='DM112899';
90
Version 5
YWATracker.setAmount(“PRODUCT_VIEW“);
YWATracker.setSKU(“DM112899“);
The pages where this code is applied do not have to be unique and in fact rarely
are. products are displayed on product marketing pages, technical specification pages,
in search results, in recommendation boxes—and i am sure you have even more sugges-
tions. i recommend you enhance your document-naming and -grouping skills to create
opportunities to split different product views over the site.
Which leads to our next topic: forwarding to pages where we display multiple
products at the same time. a product search result is likely to do this, as shown in
Figure 4.3.
