Tips & Tricks: Employing events for in-depth reporting and analysis

Date Sent: July 9th, 2020

Hi there,

This is the third and final email in my Events Series. To recap, we’ve discussed interesting events you should consider implementing to learn more about your customer’s journey and using those events to create segmented experiences. Now we’ll wrap up with ways to utilize events in reporting and analysis to better understand how campaigns are affecting your site performance.

Using events for measuring campaign impact

Choosing the main metric for a campaign is not always clear cut, because typically more than one KPI is impacted. For example, let's say you are testing an “add-to-cart” button color of green vs. blue, with the primary metric set to Add-to-Cart. The report below shows that the Green Variation is winning with a significant uplift in “add-to-cart.” However, if you add in the secondary metric of Revenue, you’ll see that Revenue/User for the Green Variation is actually lower.

So, how do you troubleshoot this?

Create an event and use it as a metric for measuring the impact of the campaign. Any event that is fired and attributed to a user that falls into the campaign can be added to the report. In this case, the user experience is being impacted by something that is occurring between “add-to-cart” and the purchase. By having custom metrics and events across the funnel, you can break down the checkout process and pinpoint the problematic spot.

To keep with our example, let say that once a user completes an “add-to-cart,” they are redirected to a page with options to subscribe. Actually, if we include a subscription event for users who decide to purchase a subscription model, we can add this event to the report. And now we can see from the report that the number of subscribers increased but were calculated separately, which is why purchase revenue appears to have decreased even though subscription revenue has increased.

Calculating the impact of an event

There are two ways to calculate the impact of an event:

• The trigger itself - a user triggering the event (performs an action to fire the event). This is usually reported in units. For example, “add-to-cart” in our campaign was fired for the Green Variation 157,795 times.
• The monetary impact - how much the event is worth, or how many total dollars were added to the cart. In this example, if all of our items are priced at $2, we would see a total of $315,590.

Question of the Week: Visit our Community to share a time when you expected to receive a personalized experience, but instead received something generic, impacting your loyalty to the brand.

If you’ve missed any of our other Tips & Tricks emails, check them all out here.

Best,
Ashley

Ashley Berman
Sr. Customer Education Manager