Entry Page dimension and visualisation flow

Hi Alice and welcome to the world of Adobe Analytics.

So your question is pretty generic and a typical marketing attribution case so there are a few items to look at to get you where you want to go I ll break it down in a few steps.

1 setup tracking codes

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/dimensions/tracking-code.html?lang=en

These are comparable to Googles UTMs, in theory every camapign create should have its own tracking code that will allow you in a granular manner to track user behaviour across your website.

2 SAINT classifications

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/classifications/classifications-importer/c-working-with-saint.html?lang=en

These are basically data points in an interface you use to create very detailed sub breakdowns to allow many types of grouping, info and reporting strategies against your tracking IDS. Think of it again as instead of doing all sorts of extra UTM paramteres you can nicely tie them up under the 1 tracking ID

3 Segments 

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/segmentation/seg-overview.html?lang=en

This is Adobe tool to allow you to create all sorts of filter based grouping across things like pages, visitors, action, metrics just about anything really. Its a great means of allowing to to group parts of your reporting to suit many needs when reporting on Campaign.

ex segement 3 specific camapign IDs, Segement camapign IDs in a specific state, group just mobile users with a specific camapign ID.. I could go on and on, suffice to say experiment in segments and learn how they can work for you. 

In terms of tagging look at a key item pagename variable, and also look into potentially a data layer to help as this will be key in reporting to help you understand top pages , campaign attribution at a page level and site level. 

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/implementation/prepare/data-layer.html?lang=en

Its a long list but with some patience and research you ll get up to speed im sure. Good luck!

Hello and welcome to both Adobe Analytics and to this forum!

There's a a lot to unpack here...

First "Entry Page" (or "Entry X", you will notice you actually have a lot of these, one for each "Traffic Variable" or "Prop", plus for reserved dimensions that have Prop characteristics like "Page"), is basically a Visit-based value, that takes the first value captured in the connected dimension within a visit.

Example:

Visit 1

• Page View 1 - Home Page
  • Page = "home"
  • Entry Page = "home"
  • Prop1 = "aggregation page"
  • Entry Prop1 = "aggregation page"
• Page View 2 - Product Page
  • Page = "product x"
  • Entry Page = "home"
  • Prop1 = "product page"
  • Entry Prop1 = "aggregation page"
• Page View 3 - Cart Page
  • Page = "cart"
  • Entry Page = "home"
  • Prop1 = "shopping cart"
  • Entry Prop1 = "aggregation page"

Visit 2

• Page View 1 - Cart Page
  • Page = "cart"
  • Entry Page = "cart"
  • Prop1 = "shopping cart"
  • Entry Prop1 = "shopping cart"
• Page View 2 - Purchase Success
  • Page = "success"
  • Entry Page = "cart"
  • Prop1 = "success page"
  • Entry Prop1 = "shopping cart"

If you have 2 variants of values ("product item 1" and "product-item-1") then this means that either your site has recently changed its naming conventions (so you are seeing old and new naming within the same reporting period) or you have inconsistent naming in your site(s). This is something you probably want to investigate, having variations like this is going to make pulling reports a lot harder.

As for Campaigns, well this is a huge topic and I actually use three different ways of tracking... First, I use the s.campaign variable (also called Tracking Code)... this is a 1 Week attribution "special" eVar. When there is a campaign in the URL, I set this value, then on subsequent pages (for the next week), unless a new value comes in, this will maintain the campaign values that were set on initial page view:

However, on top of this, I also set a custom Visit Level eVar(s) for my campaign

Example:

Visit 1:

• Page A - Campaign X
  • Page View metric triggered 
  • Tracking Code is set to "X"
    • Instance of Tracking Code is triggered
  • eVar1 is set to "X"
    • Instance of eVar1 is triggered
• Page B
  • Page View metric triggered 
  • Tracking Code is not set, but maintains value of "X"
    • Instance of Tracking Code is not triggered
  • eVar1 is not set, but maintains value of "X"
    • Instance of eVar1 is not triggered
• Page C
  • Page View metric triggered 
  • Tracking Code is not set, but maintains value of "X"
    • Instance of Tracking Code is not triggered
  • eVar1 is not set, but maintains value of "X"
    • Instance of eVar1 is not triggered

Visit 2

• Page D - No Campaign
  • Page View metric triggered 
  • Tracking Code is not set, but maintains value of "X"
    • Instance of Tracking Code is not triggered
  • eVar1 is not set
    • Instance of eVar1 is not triggered
• Page E
  • Page View metric triggered 
  • Tracking Code is not set, but maintains value of "X"
    • Instance of Tracking Code is not triggered
  • eVar1 is not set
    • Instance of eVar1 is not triggered

Visit 3:

• Page F - Campaign Y
  • Page View metric triggered 
  • Tracking Code is set to "Y" (overwriting X)
    • Instance of Tracking Code is triggered
  • eVar1 is set to "Y"
    • Instance of eVar1 is triggered
• Page G
  • Page View metric triggered 
  • Tracking Code is not set, but maintains value of "Y"
    • Instance of Tracking Code is not triggered
  • eVar1 is not set, but maintains value of "Y"
    • Instance of eVar1 is not triggered

This of course will only cover your campaigns, there is also Marketing Channels that you will want to look into, this allows you to capture your Campaigns, along with other sources like "Social Media", "Paid" and "Natural" Searches, Emails, etc... so while you may have a Campaign X running, you may have it used in different channels that you need to distinguish.

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/marketing-channels/c-getting-started-mchannel.html?lang=en

Marketing Channels by default have a 30 Day attribution, and you can also have some additional logic about which channels should not overwrite other channels (for instance, the default setting for "Direct" traffic is to not override other channels, so that your marketing efforts get the attribution... but also, if Direct overwrote the previous value, your 30 Day attribution wouldn't work any longer... each visit would overwrite the previous, making your Marketing Channels Visit based....

You can change the attributions on all of the above, we have our Marketing Channels set to 1 Week... and with custom attribution modelling available in Workspace, we can always look at 1 Month, or 6 Month attribution as we need (it's actually easier to use custom attribution to look at larger time frames, than to smaller ones)

Here is are a few User Group Session recordings that might help you:

NOAM East - Campaign Multiverse of Madness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2w8KjeRkSQ 

NOAM Central - Marketing Channels Set up and Reporting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1AbkKFCXzc