Request suggestions on analytics scenarios for a B2C website

[srikanthpogula]

Hi Team,

We are moving our B2C and B2B websites from AMS to AEMaaCS. We are re-designing the website and developing new AEM components since we have too many legacy custom AEM components created 6-7 years back. I am looking for suggestions(at a high level) on scenarios for implementing Analytics on B2C website which has product listing pages, product detail pages, shopping cart experience, article pages, blog pages.

In the existing system we have below rules implemented, would like to find out from Analytics experts on additional scenarios which we can implement to have clear view of customer behavior on the website

1. Page load rule to track page name, URL, referring URL, parent page structure
2. Button/link clicks to track link name/title, link category (for ex menu links, footer links, CTA links, etc...) and link URL
3. Product Views - SKU, URL
4. Add to cart button click
5. Cart views
6. Purchase event on Order confirmation/Thank You page - to track order numbers, revenue at product level
7. Search - very basic info is being tracked, feel there is lot to improve
8. PLP filtering and sort options
9. Ajax error reporting - for example if any ajax call fails to get data to be displayed on web page

Note: We have Analytics license, do not have Customer Journey Analytics license.

[bjoern__koth]

Hi @srikanthpogula,

upfront: when you are implementing new AEM components, you may want to look into tracking with AEM core components tracking which - partially - provide an out of the box tracking for when core components are shown and interacted with. "Partially" is the key. In my experience, these cover only parts of the standard tracking requirements (component shown / hidden) which events you may still need to pick up and implement in separate Launch rules. Yet still worthwhile having a look at it

Some ideas from the top of my head.

1. if this is the actual information, I would throw in as much as possible additional information that could potentially be useful to enrich your tracking data e.g.,
   • country and language information
   • AEM internal content path of the page, if possible, language country and language independent.
     This can be extremely useful if your content has the same content structure e.g. if your content follows the same page structure
     /<country>/<language>/path/to/page for different variations, you could use the country and language independent /path/to/page as the aggregated view on a single page across all countries and languages
2. Edge Network forwarding and Web SDK - consider bringing the technical setup on the latest Adobe Tech stack
   • If you are implementing Edge Network forwarding and Web SDK: implement a FPID cookie servlet that makes your user identifiable for a longer
3. Activity Map - consider enabling the Activity Map plugin to capture more captured click information. These days, you can configure it to send the clicked information on the following page to not cause additional server calls.
4. Search: enhance amount of captured information. Make sure to persist search terms in an marchandising eVar. This can come really handy in tracking your checkout funnel since you can attribute specific search terms to specific product events. It is surely more sophisticated to set up but can give you a great deal of additional insights
   https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/analytics/admin/admin-tools/manage-report-suites/edit-rep...
5. User login status (logged in true / false)

I am sure the experts in here have a ton more ideas

[Amruthesh_AG]

@srikanthpogulaI have implemented analytics tracking for B2C project.

I have attached some scenarios in the file. you can refer.

Since it has implemented with legacy technology and planning to migrate to webSDK.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

So you could look into the AEM Core Components as @bjoern__koth said, personally, I didn't really like the partial nature of what was provided, but also our site (when we were on AEM) had some pages that were entirely built in React, with no AEM connectivity at all, so we opted to not deal with different methods. However, I also have heard from some people that did use it that sometimes some of the information was missing when it shouldn't have been... that might have been an implementation error on their side (I have no personal experience)... just make sure you test fully no matter what way you go.

I definitely agree with Bjorn on using Activity Map over creating click data on every link... this will reduce your server calls significantly.. 

Now, there are a lot of issues with the "Activity Map" browser extension lately with compatibility.. but to be honest, I haven't used the extension for years... I exclusively use the data in Workspace.

However, to make it work better for you, I use 

s.ActivityMap.regionIDAttribute = "data-linkregion"

(https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/analytics/implementation/vars/page-vars/activitymap-regio...)

And have our developers "region-ize" the site with custom data attributes to break the site out into meaningful regions. So instead of it automatically picking up the nearest ID (which is more for developers than for users), I ensure our site is broken out into regions like "header", "footer", "main-menu", "main-content", "right-rail", etc... I even go so far as to break all the dynamic content blocks into named regions based on their content (we are a new site, so on our home page we have a "news" block, an "opinion" block, a "sports" block, etc... so I make sure all those regions are appropriately named). If you have any PII regions or links, you can override those as well (for your regions, make your dynamic region name not include the PII, for links, you can do one-off overrides with s_objectID (https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/analytics/components/dimensions/activity-map-link), or you can exclude links or regions with the exclude:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/analytics/implementation/vars/page-vars/activitymap-linke...
or
https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/analytics/implementation/vars/page-vars/activitymap-regio...

Basically, with a little effort you can take the out-of-the-box implementation which is okay, and make it really powerful.

With Search, depending on what you might need, there is a lot you can do... in my implementation, I track the "Search Action" (i.e. the actual submit of the search), as well as each page of the search... We have both a "search form in the header" - which is simple keywords only, and a "refine search" on the results page allowing for additional filtering... On the submit, I track which of these was in use, along with relevant search criteria. On the results page itself, I include the total number of results found by the search, the results per page, the page number I am on, and the sort order being used (also, with all the relevant search criteria).

Part of this, is that a search result could be bookmarked, or as the user is navigating around... search submitted > results > item 1 > back to results > item 2 > back to results > etc

In that scenario, I hit the results 3 times, but I only performed a single search.. So by tracking the search action and all the pages I can see more about how the user is interacting with our search... And also, if people are bookmarking search results, or some website decides to link to our results page, I have more visibility into that as well.

I am sure since you know your site better than we do, that you will be able to come up with a lot of additional tracking that we might not be able to suggest.

But like most implementations, start with the most important items, get them stable, and work towards adding additional tracking when you are ready to go.

[Rite18]

@srikanthpogula it is all about the user  journey and interaction with your site not dependent on the AEM on prem or Cloud version as AEM is change would be limited to enhanced templates and components based on the new UX, however, if a new UX is not introduce any additional user interaction then the same rule can be used or updated if needed, or if UX introduces new then plan to add on new rules and analytics tracking 

[SrikanthPo3]

Hi @Rite18 Yes, agree with you the reason I mentioned about moving to AEMaaCS is that we have an opportunity to fill the current gaps we have in capturing analytics which can help us get more insights on user behavior, find out the customer pain points on the website, maintain optimal bounce rate and increase conversion.

Cart and Checkout pages - Is there anything that can be done in addition to just cart view, checkout events being fired?