Adding Customization to Actions in YWAThe following post is by Yahoo!’s Tim Hampshire, he is a YWA Account Manager and Support Specialist. Actions are a powerful feature of YWA that allow you to track conversion events that take place on your site. Currently YWA allows you create up to 50 of these custom actions which you can quickly run out of if you do not define them with care. In this post we will demonstrate how to use Custom Fields to store additional information about your actions in order to avoid overusing the limited number of actions available in YWA. How Not To Use Actions in YWA Let’s suppose we are working on setting up YWA on a cooking site where the users can view flash video presentations for each of the recipes on the site. For the reporting, we are interested in seeing how often each one of these videos are viewed. One way of accomplishing this would be to define an action for each individual video:
The number of actions used could also get compounded by cycling through the various forms of each recipe:
Using this method of defining actions we would very quickly find ourselves running into YWA’s limit of 50 custom actions. We also might find that adding extra categories to these actions would be laborious and potentially error prone. The Correct Usage of Actions in YWA When creating actions in YWA, you will want to define them as broadly as possible so that they can be used on multiple locations of your site. We can then use Custom Fields to capture detailed information about the specifics of the action performed. Using Custom Fields with our actions in this way will add the detailed classification and grouping information we are looking for when running granular reports in YWA. |
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