The standard way of measuring the success of or tying sales back to a customer behaviour, piece of content or site feature is most recent, or ‘last click wins’. So the last search term entered, last banner clicked, or last promotional page viewed before a purchase will have the sale credited to it. Merchandising Variables allow you to attribute sales more fairly to the behaviour, piece of content or site feature that contributed to them.

Consider the below journey;

A Visitor comes to our site with the intention of buying a suitcase and a hairdryer.

1. The visitor searches ‘suitcase’
2. The visitor finds a suitcase (£30) they like and adds it to their basket
3. The visitor searches ‘hairdryer’
4. The visitor finds a hairdryer (£25) they like and adds it to their basket
5. The visitor purchases the suitcase and hairdryer

With a standard eVar the sales would be attributed as the below;

Which makes ‘hairdryer’ look great and ‘suitcase’ look rubbish. Not very helpful for understanding how many sales were driven by each term!

However, with a Merchandising variable this attribution could be improved. With a Conversion Variable Syntax Merchandising Variable we could set a binding event of ‘add to basket’. This means that whenever a product is added to basket its product string is bound to the last variable set (in this case search term), and any subsequent actions where that product string is captured (such as a purchase) would be tied back to that variable. In the above example when the suitcase is added to basket its product string is bound to the last search term entered (‘suitcase’) and when the hairdryer is added to basket its product string is bound to the last search term entered (‘hairdryer’).

In this scenario the report would look like this;

Which is a much fairer picture of how each term performed.

As well as a Conversion Variable Syntax there are Product Syntax Merchandising eVars, where the eVar variable is captured within the product string, meaning that it is always tied to the correct value. A use case of this might be capturing when a customer interacts with Reviews or Content on a product details page, so that you can tie that interaction to the specific product.

In the above search example we wouldn’t be able to use a Product Syntax Merhandising eVar as product string doesn’t exist when a search is made.

One thing to be aware of is that when using a Conversion Syntax eVar while we might set / capture a value on a page, it won’t actually be stored until a product is set. This is why these are called “merchandising eVar’s” because they’re intended to be used for merchandising and therefore require a product to work. This might mean you can debug and see a value going in to an eVar but can’t actually find that value in a report if a product hasn’t been subsequently viewed.

Note: The ‘instances’ metric is not currently supported with Merchandising variables.