Transaction ID – HR Example

The Transaction ID feature in Adobe Analytics is one of the most underrated in the product. Transaction ID allows you to “close the loop,” so to speak, and import offline metrics related to online activity and apply those metrics to pre-existing dimension values.  This means that you can set a unique ID online and then import offline metrics tied to that unique ID and have the offline metrics associated with all eVar values that were present when the online ID was set. For example, if you want to see how many people who complete a lead form end up becoming customers a few weeks later, you can set a Transaction ID and then later import a “1” into a Success Event for each ID that becomes a customer. This will give “1” to every eVar value that was present when the Transaction ID was set, such as campaign code, visit number, etc…. It is almost like you are tricking Adobe Analytics into thinking that the offline event happened online. In the past, I have described how you could use Transaction ID to import recurring revenue and import product returns, but in this post, I will share another example related to Human Resources and recruiting.

Did They Get Hired?

So let’s imagine that you work for an organization that uses Adobe Analytics and hires a lot of folks. It is always a good thing if you can get more groups to use analytics (to justify the cost), so why not have the HR department leverage the tool as well? On your website, you have job postings and visitors can view jobs and then click to apply. You would want to set a success event for “Job Views” and another for “Job Clicks” and store the Job ID # in an eVar. Then if a user submits a job application, you would capture this with a “Job Applications” Success Event. Thus, you would have a report that looks like this:

Let’s assume that your organization is also using marketing campaigns to find potential employees. These campaign codes would be captured in the Campaigns (Tracking Code) eVar and, of course, you can also see all of these job metrics in this and any other eVar reports:

But what if you wanted to see which of these job applicants were actually hired? Moreover, what if you wanted to see which marketing campaigns led to hires vs. just unqualified applicants? All of this can be done with Transaction ID. As long as you have some sort of back-end system that knows the unique “transaction” ID and knows if a hire took place, you can upload the offline metric and close the loop. Here is what the Transaction ID upload file might look like:

Notice that we are setting a new “Job Hires” Success Event success event and tying it to the Transaction ID. This will bind the offline metric to the Job # eVar value, the campaign code and any other eVars. Once this has loaded, you can see a report that looks like this:

Additionally, you can then switch to the Campaigns report to see this:

This allows you to then create Calculated Metrics to see which marketing campaigns are most effective at driving new hires.

Are They Superstars?

If you want to get a bit more advanced with Transaction ID, you can extend this concept to import additional metrics related to employee performance. For example, let’s say that each new hire is evaluated after their first six months on the job and that they are rated on a scale of 1 (bad) to 10 (great). In the future, you can import their performance as another numeric Success Event (just be sure to have your Adobe account manager extend Transaction ID beyond the default 90 days):

Which will allow you to see a report like this:

Then you can create a Calculated Metric that divides the rating by the number of hires. This will allow you to see ratings per hire in any eVar report, like the Campaigns report shown here:

Final Thoughts

This is a creative way to apply the concept of Transaction ID, but as you can imagine, there are many other ways to utilize this functionality. Anytime that you want to tie offline metrics to online metrics, you should consider using Transaction ID.