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When holding a property constant in a funnel, is an event included if it contains multiple values of the property?

  • 1 June 2023
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Hi,

 

I’m trying to figure out if we can use “holding property constant” in our funnels to be able to check if customers are purchasing the same product of which they saw the product page earlier or which they added to their shopping cart earlier.

We have events called Product Page Viewed, Shopping Cart Item Added and Purchase Completed. At the moment only the Product Page Viewed event contains the event property product_id, but after finding out about the feature we are adding the property to the other events soon.

Now each time Product Page Viewed or Shopping Cart Item Added are called they will only contain one product_id, but as a Purchase can contain multiple items from the shopping cart the event Purchase Completed will sometimes contain multiple product_id’s. My question is:
If we are holding product_id constant in a funnel, will an event Purchase Completed still be included if the property product_id has multiple values of which only one of them is the product_id in the previous event?

For example:

A) Shopping Cart Item Added with product_id: 1
B) Shopping Cart Item Added with product_id: 2
C) Purchase Completed with with product_id: 1, 2

Performing a funnel analysis with holding property constant: product_id

Will this conversion be included in the funnel analysis?

 

Kind regards,

Jonne Zomerdijk

Stuvia

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Best answer by dangrainger 5 June 2023, 11:39

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Hi @Jonne. The simple answer is….no! We have a very similar scenario, albeit the other way round to you; namely that a user can search for multiple holiday parks/ arrival dates, but when they complete a booking they will only have a single holiday park/ date. When you hold something constant, the function seems to use “exact match” on the variable, not “contains”.

There’s a simple solution if you’re an Enterprise customer, namely Derived Properties (https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/5874857623707-Derived-properties-Add-new-event-and-user-properties-retroactively). You can create a derived property that splits your string of multiple values…e.g. “prod_1,prod_2,prod_3” becomes “prod_1”, “prod_2” and “prod_3” as separate rows in the derived property. Then you can hold this property’s value constant in your funnel chart.

Another solution, again for customers on the higher plans, is to use Object Arrays for your product data: https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/9623000954907-Cart-analysis-Use-object-arrays-to-drive-behavioral-insights. The you can hold constant on the product-level variables.

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Hi @dangrainger,

 

Thanks a lot for helping me out! I think the second solution will work for us. I’ll let you know once we have deployed and tested the updated Event Properties.

 

Kind regards,

Jonne Zomerdijk

Stuvia

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Good morning (or afternoon depending on your timezone) @dangrainger,

 

We have deployed the updated Event Properties as follows, and I’m still having problems using the ‘holding property constant’-feature on our whole funnel.

You can see below that we have the property “content_id” for the events Search Result Clicked, Document Page Viewed and Shopping Cart Item Added. For the event Purchase completed we used an Object Array to to add several items to the property within an array.

The array for the property ”content_ids” seems to be correctly parsed, and we were able to use property splitting to make it useful for the filters. It is however still not possible to select content_id in the “hold property constant”-feature when Purchase Completed is in the funnel.

Could you help me set it up correctly so that it will become an option?

 

Kind regards,

Jonne Zomerdijk

Stuvia 

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You need to apply the object array with ell events that your “product data” is used (i.e. in your case the product data is “content_ids)….even if there’s only a single item in the object array. Then you can hold constant on “content_ids.content_id” in your funnel.

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Thanks again @dangrainger,
We got everything working now, it’s a success!

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Thank you @dangrainger  as always for being an amazing Amplitude power user! I love the out-of-box solution with derived property!

@Jonne I am glad that Cart analysis helped with your use case. 

I would like to jump in and clarify how array values work in the funnel chart for future references. If it is a simple array value like [1, 2], it should work with holding constant feature in funnel charts. 

The array property used to only work with exact match, but it has been changed some time ago. I sent test data to my own org and verified that the array would work with holding constant in funnels in the structure of the original post. I sent the following to my test user: 

  • "add to cart" with product_id value = 1
  • "add to cart" with product_id value = 2
  • "add to cart" with product_id value = 2
  • "purchase completed" with product_id value = [1, 2]

In the funnel chart with holding "product_id" constant, I got the conversion of 2 > 2. Please see attached screenshots.

 

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