15 for 15: Your Kiss is on my List (Var)!

It’s not just a great 80’s song from a great 80’s band with great 80’s hair. We use lists for all sorts of things on a day-to-day basis. Birth­day Lists. To-do Lists. Gro­cery Lists. Even Jolly Ole St. Nick makes his list and checks it twice. Is it any won­der that we do the same with our web­sites? What sorts of lists do you have on your site? Here are a few that you may have run across.

• Prod­uct Lists
• Wish Lists
• Lists of Dis­play Ads
• Lists of Search Refinements

All of these might be appro­pri­ate places to use a new piece of func­tion­al­ity in Site­Cat­a­lyst 15. Intro­duc­ing: the long-anticipated List Var!

In your escapades with Site­Cat­a­lyst imple­men­ta­tions, you may have had the plea­sure of using a spe­cial kind of s.prop called a “list prop.” This is a vari­able where you can pass mul­ti­ple val­ues in a delim­ited list. The list is then processed so that each of the indi­vid­ual val­ues gets credit for that page view.

The List Var fol­lows the same con­cept except after the man­ner of an eVar. In other words, the value will per­sist and you can apply Con­ver­sion met­rics to your reports. How cool is that?

Here are a few things you will need to know about List Vars.

• You will need to update your Site­Cat­a­lyst code to H.23 or higher and you will need to use the ver­sion 15 interface.
• You must deter­mine a sin­gle char­ac­ter to use as a delimiter.
• You can select the Expi­ra­tion and Allo­ca­tion for the List Var. How­ever, you only have the option for First and Last Allocation.
• There is no length limit on the full string, but there is a limit of 255 char­ac­ters for each delim­ited value.
• There are three list vars avail­able for your use (list1, list2, and list3)

Let’s take a look at a con­crete exam­ple. Sup­pose we per­form a search on the site and add sev­eral refine­ments to the search. On the Refine­ments Results page we might pass a value into a List Var for Refine­ment Type with a comma delim­iter such as:

s.list1=“Brand,Price,Size”;

Then we select our prod­uct and make a pur­chase for $30. The rev­enue will be allo­cated in the Refine­ment Type report like so:

Brand — $30

Price — $30

Size — $30

Total — $30

Each value gets full credit for the sub­se­quent con­ver­sions, but the met­rics are de-duplicated in the total.

As you can see, List Vars bring excit­ing new pos­si­bil­i­ties to your Site­Cat­a­lyst imple­men­ta­tions. What data points are you con­sid­er­ing using List Vars for? I’d love to hear about them in the com­ments section.

Have spe­cific ques­tions about Adobe Site­Cat­a­lyst?  Want to track a data point on your web­site, but not sure where to start with the imple­men­ta­tion?  Fol­low me on Twit­ter @sitecattips Please feel free to leave a com­ment here or send me an email at adobe­site­cat­a­lyst (at) adobe​.com