Pricing State

If you are an online retailer, there are situations in which you will offer your products in various pricing states. For example, there may be some products that are on sale, some that have discounts based upon a discount code or some that are on clearance. In these cases, you may want to document the original price, the discounted price and see how the pricing state impacts conversion. In this post, I will show how to do this in Adobe Analytics and a few examples.

Capturing the Pricing State

The first thing you may want to see is whether pricing state has any conversion implications. This can be tracked in general and by product or product category. To do this, you will want to set an eVar with the current pricing state when visitors open each product page. For example, if a visitor opens Product A and it is a product priced at retail price, you may pass the phrase “retail price” to the eVar. But if a product is discounted, you would pass in the type of discount the visitor saw. Let’s imagine that your visitor viewed a product that had this pricing associated with it:

In this case, the pricing state was “clearance” and it was discounted sixty-seven percent. There are a few ways to capture this, but to save eVars, I would probably capture this as “clearance:67” in the eVar to denote that the active pricing state was “clearance” and the percent off amount. Here is what the report might look like when viewed with the Product Views Success Event (with retail price value excluded):

This report can be broken down by Product as needed or you can begin with the Products report and then break that down by Pricing State as needed. And if you have classified your Products into Product Categories, you can see the same information by Product Category.

Of course, those who have been reading my blog for a while may recognize that this new “Pricing State” eVar will require the use of Merchandising. This is due to the fact that your visitors may view multiple products, and Adobe Analytics needs to record the pricing state for each product viewed versus just storing the last pricing state and applying that to all products (as would be done with a non-Merchandising eVar). In this case, since we are setting the Pricing State eVar on the product page where we are already setting the Products variable, I would suggest using Product Syntax Merchandising.

Once you have set the eVar, each product viewed will have a its own Pricing State value and Adobe Analytics will wait and see which products are purchased in the visit or beyond (depending upon your eVar expiration). That means that you can add both the Product Views and Orders metrics to the Pricing State eVar report and create a calculated metric to see the conversion rate. The report may look something like this (again shown with retail pricing filtered out):

This type of report will allow you to see if any combination of pricing state and discount percent performs better than others. You can use the search filter or segmentation to narrow down items as needed (i.e. just sale rows).

By capturing both the pricing state and the discount percent in the same eVar, you can later use the SAINT Classifications Rule Builder to group all items by pricing state (i.e. all “clearance” items together) and use REGEX to see a report by discount percent. That gets you three reports with only one eVar. You can switch to the pricing state type classification to see a higher-level view of conversion by pricing state as shown here:

Or you can switch to the discount classification to see performance by discount amount, agnostic of pricing state as shown here:

Pricing State Metrics

While conducting analysis related to Pricing State, keep in mind that it is also possible to capture the dollar amounts associated with Pricing States in currency Success Events. Since all of the amounts are present the product page, it is simply a matter of passing the correct amounts to the appropriate Success Events. Let’s look at this via an example. If a visitor views the product shown above, you know that the original price was $40 and the current price is $12.99. Therefore, if a visitor orders this product, $12.99 will be passed to the Revenue metric (using the Purchase event), but nothing will be done with the $40 amount.

But if desired, you could capture the original $40 price on the order confirmation page in a new metric called “Original Price.” This new metric would always capture the original price and can be compared to the Revenue amount by Product or Product Category. This can be done by creating a calculated metric that divides Revenue by this new Original Price metric. You can add this calculated to the Products report or the Product Category report to see which products and categories are selling the most/least at a discount as shown here:

On its own, this new calculated metric will show you percent of discount across the entire site. This might be an interesting KPI to monitor or upon which to set alerts in Adobe Analytics:

Another cool way you can use these metrics is in the Campaigns area. By opening the Campaigns report, you can see which campaigns lead to the most/least discounted sales (see below). This might help you shift marketing dollars to campaigns that are driving sales for non-discounted products.

These are just some of the ways that you can augment your Adobe Analytics implementation by capturing data related to pricing state and discount amounts. Enjoy!