track and analyze number of items in basket

[FTeichmann]

Hey All,

Working in e-commerce context, we want to start analyzing our customer interactions when it comes to basket sizes.
Unfortunately, after working through the documentation and help pages, some questions are still left open on how to track relevant data.
Basket size is available as numeric value in the data layer for all major page events.

We want to build segments to investigate customer journeys with >5 items in basket e.g. at the time of

• start of the visit (entry)
• entering the checkout (special page views)
• end of the visit (exit) with no order placed

Going through the Adobe Analytics options we found the following limitations:

• text eVars: cannot be handled as numeric and will make calculations / filtering in workspace very hard
• counter eVars: can only count upwards and require tracking an event chain. As our customers can remove items from the basket and share baskets between them this will not be correct.
• numeric events: sounds very promising but won't this falsely add the numbers together when we attach this data to all relevant tracking calls?
• counter events: same problem as counter eVars

Any help appreciated.

[EricMatisoff · Accepted solution]

Hi @FTeichmann - great question. Off the top of my head, your best bet is to probably capture the number of items in the basket in a text eVar. You could then apply Classifications (and even automate them via Classification Rule Builder) to bucket them.

So this would help you create a report like:

Basket Size                 Page Views

0                                  7,123

1                                  812

2                                  70

... etc

But you could also bucket the basket sizes so it looks like:

Basket Bucket            Page Views

0                                  7,123

1-5                               812

6-10                             70

... etc

With Classifications, you can:

- make multiple buckets (so you've got buckets of 0, 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, etc but also 0, 1-9, 10-19, 20-29, etc)

- retroactively update your data - so if on Monday you start collecting the data into an evar, then apply the classification on Wednesday, the data from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and going forward will all be bucketed.

- build segments

- apply to Flow visualizations and more

However, to your point, this will make it hard to create calculations since it's a dimension and not a metric. 

My suggestion would be to also pass the data in to Adobe via a Numeric Event. Since you're passing the value on just about every hit, you'll want to normalize the data in a calculated metric. I was able to do this in by applying a Calc Metric with a hit-based segment saying that the Numeric Event exists to the Occurrences metric as a denominator:

(note that my numeric event is called Euro Revenue, yours would be Basket Size. But same concept)

Hope that helps!

[FTeichmann]

Hi @EricMatisoff, 

thank you for this reply, I can't wait to try this out.