A Product Container for Christmas

Dear Adobe,

For Christmas this year I would like a product container in the segment builder. It is something I’ve wanted for years and if you saw my post on Product Segmentation Gotchas you’ll realize that there are some ways that people may inevitably get bad data when using product-level dimensions with any of the existing containers. Because there can be multiple products per hit, segmentation on product attributes can be tough. Really, any bad data is due to a misuse of how the segment builder currently works. However, if we were to add additional functionality to the segment builder we can expand the uses of the builder. A product container is also interesting because it isn’t necessarily smaller in scope compared to a visit or hit. One product could span all of those. So because of all this I would love a new container for Christmas.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the segment builder. This would be another one of those little features that adds to the overall amazingness of the product. Or, since containers are a pretty fundamental aspect of the segment builder, maybe it’s much more than just a “little feature”? Hmmm, the more I think about in those terms the more I think it would be a feature of epic proportions 🙂

How would this work?

Good question! I have some ideas around that. I imagine a product container working similar to a product line item in a tabular report. In a table visualization everything on that row is limited to what is associated with that product. Usually we just use product-specific metrics in those types of reports, but if you were to pull in a non-product-specific metric it would pull in whatever was the effective values for the hit that the product was on at that time. So really it wouldn’t be too different from how data is generated now. The big change is making it accessible in the segment builder.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s use the first scenario from the  Product Segmentation Gotchas post. We are interested in segmenting for visits that placed an order where product A had a “2_for_1” discount applied. Let’s say that we have a report suite that has only two orders like so:

Order #101 (the one we want)

Notice that product A has the discount and this visit came from a PPC channel.

Order #102 (the one we don’t want)

Notice that product B has the discount now and this visit came from an Email channel.

Here is the resulting report if we were to not use any segments. You’ll notice that everything lines up great in this view and we know exactly which discount applied to which product.

The Bad

Now let’s get on to our question and try to segment for the visits that had the 2_for_1 discount applied to product A. In the last post I already mentioned that this segment is no good:

If you were to use this to get some high-level summary data it would look like this:

Notice that it doesn’t look any different from the All Visits segment. The reason for this is that we just have two orders in our dataset and each of them have product A and a 2_for_1 discount. To answer our question we really need a way to associate the discount specifically with product A.

The Correct Theoretical Segment

Using my theoretical product container, the correct segment would look something like the image below. Here I’m using a visit-level outer container but my inner container is set to the product level (along with a new cute icon, of course). Keep in mind this is fake!

The results of this would be just what we wanted which is “visits where product A had a ‘2_for_1’ discount applied”.

This visit had an order of multiple products so the segment would include more than just product A in the final result. The inner product container would qualify the product and the outer visit container would then qualify the entire visit. This results in the whole order showing up in our list. We are able to answer our question and avoid including the extra order that was unintentionally included with the first segment. 

Even More Specific

Let’s refine this and say that we wanted just the sales from product A in our segment. The correct segment would look like this with my theoretical product scope in the outer container.

And the results would be trimmed down to just the product-specific dimensions and metrics like so:

Notice that this gives us a single row that is just like the line item in the table report! Now you can see that we have great flexibility to get to just what we want when it comes to product-level dimensions.

Summary

Wow, that was amazing! Fake data and mockups are so cooperative! This may be a little boring for just this simple example but when thousands of products are involved the table would be a mess and I’d be pretty grateful for this feature. There are a bunch of other ways that this could be useful in building segments with this feature at different levels like wrapping visit or visitor containers or working with non-product-specific metrics but this post is already well past my attention span limits. Hopefully this is enough to explain the idea. I know that this Christmas is getting pretty close so I’d be glad to accept it as a belated gift on MLK Day instead. Thanks Adobe!

Sincerely,

Kevin Willeitner

PS, for others that might be reading this, if you’d like this feature to be implemented please vote for it here. After some searching I also found that several people have asked for related capability so vote for theirs as well! Those are linked to in the idea post.