Cool custom report: scruffy campaign attribution
The Scene
You’re in the basement of your house looking at a bag of old clothing left behind by the previous tenants. Idly, with barbeque tongs and oven mitts you pull out item after item. At the bottom, you hold up what looks like an early Fugazi roadie tee shirt, all skanky and moldy. Wow.
The Analogy
This particular cool custom report is like that — all-but-abandoned, in dire need of being worked on, likely to fall apart at any moment, and possibly extremely cool.
The Outsider went down to the basement after the recent WebTrends Lunch-n-Learn about “campaign attribution.” The Outsider remembers an old visitor history parameter, undocumented for the past couple years, that still somehow persists in version 8.5 — it’s WT.vr.ac.
The Details
“.ac” stands for “active campaigns.”
“Active campaigns” means “all the WT.mc_id campaign IDs that were still active at the time of the visit.”
Note that this is not “initial” or “most recent” or “the current visit.” “Active” means “everything within 90 days.” 90 is the default value that is configurable in the .wlp file and the wtm_wtx.ini file, in this line:
campaigndurationdays = 90
The value of 90 (or whatever) in this line seems to be unchanged by the recent campaign-lifetime settings that were added to 8.5.
Trying it On
If you have Visitor History turned on and you create a dimension based on WT.vr.ac (with measure “visits”), you’ll get a report where each row is a comma-delimited list of all the campaign IDs that were active at the time of the visit, along with the number of visits that had that particular list of campaigns still active in their visit history. If you use a revenue or conversion dimension, you’ll have similar stats but associated with KPIs.
In other words, if you are looking at June data and somebody visited on June 10 and, during the previous 90 days, that same cookie-person had the April25, May07, and June03 campaigns in their history, they’ll appear as one visit with that combination of campaigns. You’ll see a row for “April25,May07,June03″ with at least one visit counted. Or something like that.
No, this info is not available in the Visitor History Table export that we’ve described previously.
The Implications
If you’re willing to put in the time, you have the opportunity to analyze this information in nifty ways. It’s especially productive if one of your measures is some kind of conversion or revenue.
To properly analyze, you’ll need to export the results to Excel etc for some further crunching to get the good stuff:
- Partial attribution, weighted any way you want – 20% to the oldest campaign, 70% to the latest, and the other 10% split between all others? 100% to the latest and another 100% split among all the previous ones?
- Understanding whether lotsa campaign responses are better (in terms of KPIs) than a few, versus the other way around. Seriously, what if you see that people with 10 campaign responses in the last 90 days never bought anything, while people with 2 responses made up the bulk of the buyers? Ouch.
- Noticing that the May campaign appears in conversions disporportionately – OMG you could actually be talking about causality if you find this one. You are such a good debater, er, analyst. (Small USA election campaign joke there, sorry.)
Pause. Curb your enthusiasm.
The Flaws
Did we mention that this is a scruffy VH parameter? It has flaws, which are probably the reason why WebTrends deep-sixed it years ago while thankfully (for us) not completely destroying it.
- Within a given row, the campaign names appear in no sensible order — definitely not chronological or consistent in any way. The order isn’t even dependent on the alphabetical order of the underlying campaign GUID.
- It’s entirely possible to see the same exact combination of campaigns listed more than once, but differently-ordered each time. Crazy. Requires more work to sort it out, yes.
But in our tests, despite these flaws, the WT.vr.ac parameter works. We haven’t done really extensive tests and haven’t played with Visitor-type measures. We hope other people do and let us know about what they find.
The Consequences
We, the WebTrends Outsiders, are hoping that within WebTrends Inc there is a flurry of e-mails about this post. What is this thing, who overlooked it when we tried to wipe it out, who left it in the basement, now what?
As for “now what” we’d like to see WebTrends consider whether extended and/or partial campaign attribution should be tried on for size.
7 comments
This is fantastic. “Scruffy” or not this is exactly what I have been looking for. Thanks.
This *is* moldy and nasty but terrific. Do you have any idea why things are so out of order? I would guess that the varying order question can actually be fixed in the program, if WebTrends would ever decide to assign somebody to it.
Somebody should make an Excel sheet (to distribute), that untangles an exported version and has places for weights.
Wicked – the Outsiders need to put these posts together and publish a WT hacks guide for the rest of us mere mortals.
In the past I was curious to know if it were possible to know all previous known campaigns for a visitor, but “Mother Nature” told me it wasn’t nice to fool around too much with those VH parameters. Now I see that it is worthwhile to play and test. Gloves off!
WebTrends flurry abound (*or* WT.vr.rac is not dead)
I performed a visitor history table (VHT) export to see what columns are available per visitor cookie (analytics is cookie-based, and column ‘A’ proves it). Send me an email and I will send it to you (sean.browning@webtrends.com).
Column ‘N’ is the most recent campaign associated with that cookie.
To create a custom report on that value, you need to report on a parameter called WT.vr.rac (stepping lightly: not the WT.vr.ac like the forementioned article says).
((***Campaign drilldown is based on a primary dimension parameter of WT.vr.rac instead of WT.mc_id. <-commit this to memory lest ye pull your hair out creating your next campaign drilldown report!!!))
Page 67 of http://product.webtrends.com/WRC/8.6/ResourceCenter/rc/library/pdf/hdig/How_Do_I_Use_WebTrends_Campaign_Reporting.pdf says:
Enable Visitor History for Profiles That Track Campaigns
WebTrends Analytics campaign reports rely on Visitor History to associate a visitor’s behavior with the
visitor’s access to a campaign. For example, if a visitor requests the landing page for an advertising
campaign, you know the visitor has seen the advertisement and clicked through to your web site. But when
the same visitor returns to the site the next day and makes a purchase, how does WebTrends Analytics
know to attribute the purchase to the campaign? Visitor History makes this information available by
connecting information about visitor activity over time. When you identify your campaigns with the
WT.mc_id parameter, WebTrends Analytics automatically generates the WT.vr.rac parameter for
subsequent hits within the visit. WebTrends Analytics converts WT.vr.rac into a series of campaign-specific
parameters that in turn provide the data for campaign drilldown reports.
Note
Visitor History requires that visitors be “strongly” identified using a session tracking method
other than IP address and user agent…(read as “cookie” – FPC/TPC – just not a session cookie).
Before Analytics 8.5 this WT.vr.rac was set forever until it got stomped on and replaced.
In Analytics 8.5 this now gets cleared out after 90 days (the default setting).
We always had campaign attribution, but until Analytics 8.5 we did not have a way to expire it.
Pre 8.5 there was a config setting to change that 90 days to something else.
Now there is a user interface setting to change this:
-edit your profile
-select Analysis tab
-select Visitor History in the drop down
-change the 90 day setting to your liking for Campaigns and for Search Engine terms.
This discussion warms my heart!
Happy New Year.
-SEAN
Dare we go over the top?
We dare.
https://product.webtrends.com/WRC/8.5/Documents/AdministrationUsersGuide.pdf
This doc has a chapter that lists the ways that WT.vr.rac and other WT.vr.* visitor history parameters are used in all WebTrends Analytics reports.
Seek the Preconfigured Custom Report Reference chapter (like p.266) to find the custom report matrix. You’ll be glad you did.
-SEAN
Sean – bringing that expiration time into the GUI was a wonderful thing.
WT.vr.rac still stomps on previous campaigns and assumes the most recent campaign is all that matters. (Well, initial campaign is in there, but ..) Or, Sean, do you know something I don’t know?
This is pretty neat. I would however wish that there was some sort of way for webtrends to register Banner and search impressions, without adding a trillion servercalls to the account. 99% of banner exposure are impressions. They are push marketing and their influence on buyers goes beyond just making people click. If only webtrends would actually integrate with some adserving providers, customers cousl actually do a wealth of interesting stuff:
1. serve banners based on previous customer behavior and purchases.
2. show banner and search add impression influence on other campign intercation. How many banners are show to a customer before they actually convert through a search ad, and so forth. This is interesting, because search ads are mostly pull marketing, meaning cusomers have already made a buying decision of a specifc product based on other interactions, before searching fro it on Google.
3. Show what websites that serves your banner influence facebook ads, search ads and even e-mail ads.
4. Show how many interactions with your content it takes the average user to convert.
The list could go on and on. I am still a little baffled why webtrends arent doing this already.
Leave a Comment