A method of testing multiple variants of a webpage, such as different layouts of the Homepage or changing the colour of a call to action. Through Adobe Target we can determine the percentage of visits that should see each variation and then compare key metrics for these groups, such as conversion rate, average order value and sales.
Adobe Analytics
The umbrella term for a set of tools provided by Adobe for web analytics. Reports & Analytics, Analysis Workspace and Report Builder are a few examples. Previously known as Omniture and Site Catalyst.
Adobe Target
An Adobe tool which allows you to design and execute multi-variant or A/B testing on the website. It also provides data as to how each variant performed and can be integrated with Adobe Analytics to perform more advanced analysis into test results.
Agile
The agile way of working means that projects are completed in small iterations with constant testing, development and re-design. Small sections of the project are released as soon as they are complete rather than waiting to release the whole project when everything is complete.
An agile team will consist of people from several different functions with different skill sets working closely together on a product. The team should be self-sufficient for skills and decision making and not require input from anywhere else.
Analysis Workspace
Analysis Workspace is a relatively new tool which brings some of the drag & drop flexibility of Ad Hoc Analysis into the Reports & Analytics interface. It allows multiple reports in a single view, true collaboration and flexible visualisations.
Bot
A bot is a program that runs tasks online, which are often very simple and repetitive. Bots are used because they can perform these tasks at a much quicker rate than a human could.
Spiders or Web Crawlers are a specific type of bot which are used by search engines such as Google. They visit and read websites to ensure that listings are up to date.
Traffic from known bots is removed from analytics as it is not representative of normal user behaviour.
Calculated Metric
A metric that has been created by a user combining existing/out of the box metrics together or with mathematical operations to create a new metric. Examples include Conversion and Average Order Value. Any user can create their own metrics.
Classification
Classification reports are those which categorise data that is captured directly from digital channels. When the direct data is captured, the value is looked up against uploaded data and the classification reports are populated. The most common examples are product reports, which capture product ID’s online and classify them into product categories and brands. Another example is Digital Marketing, all the data for Email tracking codes are captured and classified into ‘Email’ in the Campaign Type report.
Collection Rate
Collection Rate is the percentage of reservations placed online that are collected. It can be reported at a number of levels with order, unit and revenue collection rates being the most common. Traditionally the business reports on order collection rate but it’s important to make sure you understand or explain how any figures you’re dealing with have been calculated.
For example – a customer reserves a £5 pack of batteries and a £1,000 TV but only collects the batteries.
Order collection rate is 100% as the customer has collected part of their order.
Unit collection rate is 50% as the customer collected half of the units within their order.
Revenue collection rate is 0.49% as only £5 out of £1,005 was collected.
Conversion
A general term which states the proportion of a set of users who complete a desired action, such as;
Placing an order
Creating an account
Adding a product to the trolley
Cookies
A cookie is a small amount of data which is sent by a website and is stored in the user’s web browser. Because this value stays the same from hit to hit and from visit to visit (unless the user clears their cookies), Adobe can stitch a string of hits into a visit, and tie multiple visits to a unique visitor.
Cookies can also be used to remember information about a user, such as their login details, settings, or which products they have previously viewed.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)
CSAT is a performance measure which tells you how satisfied customers were with their experience on our digital channels. It is provided through Foresee, a Voice of Customer tool which aggregates customer responses to our online survey. The score is on a scale from 0 to 100, where 0 is poor and 100 is excellent. CSAT score can be looked at top-level, or filters can be applied for different scenarios such as where customers used search or were shopping for a particular category.
Debugging
The Oxford English Dictionary defines debugging as ‘The process of identifying and removing errors from computer hardware or software’
In the context of analytics it can also be the process of checking and validating what, when and how data is being collected by your analytics tool as users browse your site or app. It is a good idea to have a debugging tool available so that you can find information such as the name of a page you want to do some analysis on or which campaign code was triggered when you clicked a banner.
Digital Channel
Refers to all the ways customers can go about shopping with us digitally, examples include Desktop Website, iPad App and New Store Browser. Other examples of channel include fulfillment channel (i.e. whether a customer purchased through Home Delivery, Reservation or Fast Track) and Digital Marketing Channel (i.e. whether a customer visited us through Email, PPC or Affiliates).
Digital Participation
Refers to the proportion of sales that were made through digital channels, e.g. “50% Digital Participation” means that 50% of sales were taken through digital channels and 50% through non-digital channels such as stores. Digital Participation figures usually includes Check & Reserve and New Store Browser sales even though payment is taken in store. Due to the huge variety of fulfillment methods and Channels Argos offers Digital Participation can be calculated in many ways, so make sure you understand exactly how the figure you’re looking at is calculated and be clear of your method when providing others with figures.
eVar
Also known as Conversion Variables, eVars are used to tie success events (such as sales and orders) back to actions the user took before the success event occurred, such as search terms entered or banners clicked. You would use an eVar report to answer the question ‘How many sales did the search term ‘Food Processor’ generate this week?’, or ‘How much revenue did the Home Event banner generate?’ Once an eVar value is counted, it persists until it expires or it is overwritten. Find out more about eVars here.
Hit
A hit is an instance of a data send to Adobe (also known as an image request) that occurs when a web page is loaded or there’s an interaction with an element on a loaded page. Multiple hits can occur on the same page as interactions such as clicking a button, loading a bigger image or interacting with the ratings and reviews will increment a hit without triggering a new page load. There can therefore be more hits than page views but never more page views than hits
Image Request
An image request is the send of data to the Adobe servers when a tagged interaction occurs.
It is a 1×1 pixel image on the tagged object that sends the data to Adobe with a transparent 1×1 pixel image being returned by Adobe to prevent a failure to load image (a red cross in a box) from appearing.
Lister
Refers to a page that is a list of products. May be broken down further into ‘Search’ and ‘Category’ or ‘Browse’ Lister. These differentiate between a lister that is a list of search results and a lister that is reached by navigating down through the web categories. Category listers can be individually identified as they have unique page names. All search listers, however, have the same page name ‘ar:search:mercadoresultslist:’ so it is more difficult to distinguish between different pages.
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
NPS is a measure which tells us how loyal our customers are to Argos, calculated by asking customers on a scale of 1-10, ‘How likely is it that you would recommend Argos to a friend or colleague?’ Customers who score 9-10 are Promoters, those who score 7-8 are Passives and those who score 0-6 are Detractors. NPS is calculated by detracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. It can range from -100 to +100 with a score of 45 considered best in class. For a more detailed explanation click here.
PDP
Product Details Page. Refers to a page that is dedicated to an individual product and usually contains further product information, reviews, richer content such as videos and images, recommended products and a way to purchase or add the specific product to your basket with stock information.
Peak
Refers to the 10 busiest weeks of trading in the year, usually starting with the Gift Guide Launch in Week 42 and ending on Christmas Eve in Week 52.
Profit Margin
Gives the value or percentage of sales that are profit. For example if the cost of a sofa is £5 and you sell it for £7.50, you’ve made £2.50 profit, or £2.50/£5 = 50% profit margin.
Prop
Also known as Traffic Variables, props are used to record the number of times a value was captured or occurred. You would use a prop report to answer the question ‘How many searches for ‘Food Processor’ have we had this week?’, or ‘How many times was the Home Event banner on the Homepage clicked?’ A prop value is counted as it happens, but is then forgotten and is not tied to any subsequent actions made by the user. Find out more about props here.
Qualitative
You might hear people use the term “qualitative data” in a conversation, the definition of this is “relating to, measuring, or measured by the quality of something rather than its quantity“. In practice however what this would usually mean is something like verbatim customer feedback, data whereby a customer has specifically told us what they’re thinking or feeling, why that did or didn’t do something which gives us more detailed (or high quality [qualitative]) data. The downside to this type of data is there is usually not a huge amount of it.
Quantitative
In contrast to the above “quantitative data” by definition is “measured by the quantity of something rather than its quality“. This is data we might have a lot of, but on it’s own isn’t always as insightful as qualitative data. Tools like Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics are usually referred to as quantitative data as they won’t give us the same level of detail as some verbatim customer feedback but as we have a lot of it we can use it to get a better, more accurate picture of insights and trends.
Report Builder
Report Builder is an Adobe Analytics Excel plug-in which allows you to build reports (known as ‘requests’) and import data directly into an Excel workbook. This means you can combine Adobe data with Excels powerful formatting and visualisation capabilities.
Schedule regular or BAU reports to automatically update and land in your inbox. You can run reports across multiple report suites to compare individual channels or use Excel formulas to amalgamate channels together for a quick overview.
Report Suite
Currently, every digital channel has its own Report Suite in Adobe Analytics. This means that data for each of these channels is captured and stored separately, and so reports can only be run for one channel at a time.
Reports & Analytics
Previously known as SiteCatalyst or Omniture, Reports & Analytics is the standard Adobe Analytics interface and is the first interaction most users will have with analytics. It is very good for basic analysis but does not have a great deal of flexibility for slicing & dicing data in different ways.
Segment
A segment is a way of isolating a set of data or customers based on certain behaviours, actions or attributes. It allows you to make the set of data you are looking at more relevant to the question you are trying to answer.
Session
In general, the term ‘session’ is interchangeable with ‘visits’, and the start and end of a session is defined in the same way.
Sometime the term ‘session’ may refer to a ‘browser session’ which ends when the user’s web browser is closed, differing to a visit which would continue until 30 minutes or more has lapsed.
Single Customer View (SCV)
Single Customer View or ‘SCV’ is a business project owned by CMI to give a single view of the customer by combining our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database with a number of other data sources such as transaction and web browsing data. The aim is to deliver more valuable and targeted campaigns to customers improving both their experience and their value to us. The wider scope of this project is to become a full Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) to give us a single source of Business Intelligence (BI) data for the whole business. This wouldn’t replace Adobe Analytics or a number of other tools but would consolidate some of the core data from each for access throughout the business.
Success Event
Events are variables which are used to capture success events such as a product being added to trolley, a login occurring or an order being placed. These events are then set and tied back to an eVar. Find out more here.
Tag
A tag is a piece of JavaScript on a webpage which sends data to a web analytics tool when the tag is activated or ‘fired’ by actions such as loading a page or clicking on an element on the page. The analytics reports are then built on the data sent by these tags.
TLP
Trolley Lister Page, this is the first page of the trolley and checkout process.
Weighted Metric
Metrics which take the volume of customers affected into account. For example, in the case of bounce rate, a high traffic page with high bounce rate is given more significance over a low traffic page with very high bounce rate.
WOW
Stands for ‘Week on Week’ or ‘Week over Week’ and compares a figure to the previous week. So for example, ‘Sales were +2% WOW’ means that sales were 2% higher than the previous week.The formula for this would be "(This Week - Last Week) / Last Week” a common mistake with this is to think it’s one divided by the other but that would give you the participation or percentage of the other rather than the variance.
YOY
Stands for ‘Year on Year’ or ‘Year over Year’ and is a comparison to the same time the previous year. The comparison can be to the exact same time (e.g. week 14 this year compared to week 14 last year) or to the same event (e.g. Easter compared to Easter which is not at the same time every year).The formula for this would be "(This Year - Last Year) / Last Year” a common mistake with this is to think it’s one divided by the other but that would give you the participation or percentage of the other rather than the variance.
