Is This a Case for Merchandising Evars?

Question

using appMeasurement here and I have a challenge on a page where I need to correlate two varied dimensions to an event

Let's say for example that we have a list on the page with multi-selection boxes (add) as in the table below. Here we have four items selected and being added at once (one button to submit all adds)

Category	ID	Action
Apples	123	Add
Banana	000
Apples	456	Add
Oranges	456	Add
Apples	012	Add

I could put both the Category and ID into two ListVars, but upon breaking down in reporting, I don't think they would end up being correlated, that ID 456 has one "add" each for Apples & Oranges

Should this be solved by putting Category into a product string with the ID as a merchandising Evar ?

Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted Answer

ok, let me play with this a bit... I will need to use a demo site to pass some duplicates (not of my lists in production do)

Sorry for getting back to this so late...

Like you, I was unable to get a proper count for duplicated items in the list... so the only way I know how to deal with tracking this is to use your s.products to pass the values. However, I would pair this with a numeric merchandising event.

So for example, the product list notation is:

category;product;quantity;price;merch events;merch eVars

If you are using s.products for other items, I would even considering using the "category" here, not to identify "apples" or "bananas", but rather to denote this use from others (we use our products list for about 20 different things, I use the category to specify each "use", then use the products or merchandiing eVars as the actual data)

Let's assume s.products is being used already, so we will make use of the category to denote the usage (i.e. "fruit")

We'll use the product id for the actual fruit id.

We'll set up a merchandising eVar as the "category" (apple, banana, etc)

We'll set up a second merchandising eVar as the "type" (soda, pie, etc)

And we'll configure a numeric event (not a counter)

When you track your data

1|apple|pie,
2|orange|soda,
2|orange|soda,

It will look like this:

s.events = "event1";
s.products = "fruit;1;;;event1=1;eVar1=apple|eVar2=pie,fruit;2;;;event1=2;eVar1=orange|eVar2=soda"

So you will increment "1|apple|pie" once, and "2|orange|soda" twice

There are no quantity/price values here, since this isn't a purchase event.... and it's weird, but you need to also set the event into your s.events (just not numerically incremented) for the events to count.

Now, you can use event1 (or whatever your actual event is), with your eVars to see 1 or 2, etc for the usage.

*** Updated Dec 22, 2023 - fixed the mixed up order of items in Products List as pointed out by @iceboats (apologies for that)

Jennifer_Dungan · Answer

I use the Product String and merchandising eVars in our implementation (what I would give for multiple dimensions like this one)... as it stands, I use Product List for about 20 different uses...

However, depending on your complexity, you could use a single list var, using a notation that allows you to pass category and id as pairs, then use classification to split them out.

so something like:

"Apples|123,Bananas|000,Apples|456"

The list would use comma as the delimiter, resulting in rows like this:

Apples|123
Bananas|000
Apples|456

Then you could use regex on your list to extract the Category and the Id into their own classifications.

Now you could pull out Category, and break down by ID:

Apples
- 123
- 456
Bananas
- 000

In your case, you probably don't need merchandising eVars and events (unless your description was simplified)... and this should achieve what you need...

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