{"id":163,"date":"2016-05-27T20:15:13","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T20:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.digitaldatatactics.com\/?p=163"},"modified":"2019-10-15T18:35:36","modified_gmt":"2019-10-15T18:35:36","slug":"how-to-approach-product-finding-methods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.digitaldatatactics.com\/index.php\/2016\/05\/27\/how-to-approach-product-finding-methods\/","title":{"rendered":"How to approach Product Finding Methods"},"content":{"rendered":"

Product Finding Method (PFM) is a valuable custom report used by online retailers to tie Cart Adds and eventual Revenue to how users found the product. Unfortunately, these reports are often poorly configured or misunderstood. It is one of the best use cases for using the Merchandising setting on an eVar, but Merchandising, as a concept, is one of the more complicated topics in implementation.<\/p>\n

Primer on Merchandising<\/h3>\n

In order to tie that PFM value to an individual\u00a0product, and not the overall visit or visitor, we need to use Merchandising. And since we may not know the eventual product at the time that we know the finding method (for instance, if a user is using internal search, at the time we know they are searching, we don’t know what product they’ll eventually land on), we need to use Conversion Syntax- meaning we set it like a typical eVar (instead of in the products string) but have to configure at what point that eVar should be tied (or “bound”) to a product. Take the following user experience into consideration, where eVar5 is used for Product Finding Methods:<\/p>\n

\"PFMflow\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the above, if I did NOT use Merchandising, my report might look like this, where External\u00a0Campaign<\/em>\u00a0gets credit for everything up until it gets overwritten by Internal Search<\/em>– at which point Internal Search<\/em> gets credit for everything, including the entire Purchase event.<\/p>\n

\"PFMnoMerchReport\"<\/a>If I DO use Merchandising, the External Campaign\u00a0<\/em>gets credit for whatever happens to the product it was bound to- in this case, the Blue Wug. Then Internal Search<\/em> gets bound to the Red Wug, and gets credit for whatever happens to the Red Wug product:<\/p>\n

\"PFMwMerchReport\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We have to be very careful with the binding events (the event that tells Adobe to take whatever value we currently have floating around for that eVar and stick it to the current product), though- merchandising eVars won’t get credit for anything that happens if they are not bound to any product, or if that product isn’t currently present. For instance, in the example above, if you pulled in Internal Searches as a metric in that report, you’d see no PFMs were getting credit for the Internal Search event- even though eVar5 is set on the same page as our search event<\/strong>. That’s because that “Internal Search” value for eVar5 is waiting until a “binding event” to attach it to a product<\/strong> before it will get credit for any metrics, and the “External Campaign” value for eVar5 only gets visibility into things that happen to the product it’s bound to (Blue Wug). No products on the Internal Search page means Conversion-Syntax Merchandising eVars get no credit for the Search event.<\/p>\n

How to Plan Your Product Finding Methods<\/h3>\n

To design your PFM solution, start by thinking of the different ways a client can add an item to their cart.\u00a0We’ll call these “add to cart location” and give that its own eVar. Typical scenarios are:<\/span><\/p>\n