Properties

Definition

 

Global definition

A property (formerly known as dimension) is a qualitative value that can be associated to an event. For instance, loading a product page, you can find the name of the product displayed as a property. This property is associated to your organisation and will be fed commonly by all sites listed in it.

 

Criteria

Name

The label that will be used in the interfaces of Piano Analytics to display it and pick it. 

 

Type

The property is fed by your values.
Depending on the property type the property will rely on various calculations.

Type	Customer Type	Data example	Displayed example	Default value	Value limit
STRING	String	"Home"	"Home"	N/A	255
DECIMAL	Decimal	4.5	4.5	x	MIN -1.0E15 / MAX 1.0E15
	Percent	0.12	12%
	Currency	12.73	12.73 €
INTEGER	Integer	12	12	x	int64
	Duration	750	00 : 12 : 30
	DurationMs	145127	145,1 sec
BOOLEAN	Boolean	true / false	icons	N/A
DATE	Date	2019-12-01 00 : 00 : 00	2019-12-01	x
	Time	2019-12-01 12 : 00 : 00	2019-12-01 12 : 00 : 00
	TimeMinute	2019-12-01 12 : 00 : 00	2019-12-01 12 : 00
	TimeHour	2019-12-01 12 : 00 : 00	2019-12-01 12
	TimeMs	2019-12-01 12 : 00 : 00	2019-12-01 12 : 00 : 00.123
ARRAY STRING	String	"Topic 1, Topic 2"	"Topic 1, Topic 2"	N/A	20*255

 

Status

Your property has a status that will apply a specific treatment to it.

Step	Definition	Property state	Requestable
Hit parameter	Data listed in the hit feeding your site.	Undeclared	No
Tag parameter	Data collected or pre-processed by Piano Analytics (i.e.: geolocation) available in rules.	Undeclared	No
Property Draft	To validate a property, you need to specify everything required by properties on a draft, it can be used only in Data Management.	Undeclared	No
Validated	Qualified object (name, description) that can be requested with the API, the type and property key cannot be edited, and it has a rule.	Declared	Yes
Deactivated	Your property can no longer fed by data, but historical data is stored and can be requested.	Declared	Yes (historical data only)

 

Property Key

The property key is the technical key of your property.
It is used in your tagging and in the API.
The property.key + property type combinaison creates a property that is unique to your data model.
The property key cannot exceed 40 characters. 
 

Description

To share the definition of your property to all your users in Piano Analytics, we provide descriptions for you standard and custom properties. We recommend that you fill in this field for your custom properties.
 

Categories

A property can be associated to a set of properties based on a category.
AT Internet provides categories for your standard properties, but you can also create your own categories to setup your own gatherings of properties when looking for a property.
 

Visibility

A property can be hidden to your users in Piano Analytics.
This property will only be visible in the Data Model.

 

Treatment

The values of a property can be defined by 2 different treatments:

• Calculated: the value of the property is deduced from another property (no aggregation)
• Processed: the value of the property is fed by the tag, a Data Management rule or Enrichment, or a Piano Analytics / native enrichment (Geolocation/Device)

Only standard properties can be based on the Calculated treatment.

 

Privacy

If your property contains sensitive data, you can tick the Privacy flag to empty the data in your property value based on the visitor privacy mode you filled (exempt/no-consent...) in the dedicated Privacy Mode Anonymisation field.

Once you Save and Deploy, your property rules will be updated with a first condition block, which will empty the value based on the event's visitor privacy mode. This block can only be edited with the Privacy tick case, or the Privacy Mode Anonymisation field in the Configuration tab of your property.

More use cases to come on the Privacy Centre.

 

Standard & Custom

Piano Analytics provides Standard properties to all its organisations, they are associated to Piano Analytics standard tagging.
You may as well create a property that will be set only to your organisation.
 

Number of properties available

Your organisation allows you to rely on a certain number of custom properties validated in your Data Model.
 

Option	500	1000
Activation	By default	Paid option
Event scope properties	450	900
Session scope properties	50	100
Unlimited characters properties	15	15

 

Creation

To create a property you need to create a draft first.
A draft is an object containing all information required to create a property.
It can only be used in Data Management, to help you prepare and test your property before its validation.

Once the draft has been created, you can validate it as a property with the dedicated button on top of the draft page.

Prior validation, you can edit the property key and type, which will have a direct impact on your property rule, resetting it to the Tag Principle condition block only.

 

Tagging

The tagging of a property can be achieved in different ways:

- By activating a standard analysis, Piano Analytics feeds specific properties and some others are meant to be filled in the tagging i.e.: sales insights

- By activating a custom analysis, you can rely on 2 methods to feed your property:

• setProp ou setProps
  You can add one or several properties to your hit, these properties are associated to all events listed in the hit.
  Developer documentation
• Specify your property directly in your event
  You can add as many properties as needed to your event by specifying them in the tagging.
  Developer documentation

Edition

Custom properties can be edited on various criteria
 

Name	Type	Status	Property Key	Description	Categories	Visibility
Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
		Cannot come back from the deactivated status.

Standard properties can also be edited on various criteria
 

Name	Type	Status	Property Key	Description	Categories	Visibility
No	No	No	No	No	Yes	Yes
					Cannot edit the ones pushed by Piano Analytics

 

Deactivation

You can only deactivate custom properties.
The deactivated status allows you to keep historical data but the property can no longer be fed with data.
By doing so, your documents, and API calls will remain functional on the period that had data prior deactivation.
The deactivated status is definitive, you cannot reactivate a property.

Once the property is set to deactivated, it is still listed in the Data Model.

 

Rule

Your property can be reprocessed based on a rule using several operators, which can help you correct a tagging mistake for instance, without contacting your tech teams.
Some properties provided by Piano Analytics cannot be edited with rules, the Processing tab will then not be displayed.

 

Processing

Condition (IF)

 

Criteria
This condition defined automatically, specifies the criteria that will have an impact on the processing of your property.

 

Criteria categories:

1. Tag parameter
   You can pick or fill in a tag parameter to study, to check the value associated to the event depending on its associated type.
   Example: transaction_firstpurchase but not &p=
   
   
2. User Agent
   You can pick a string matching a specific User Agent associated to the event.
   Example:  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.150 Safari/537.36
   
   
3. Snippet
   You can pick a string to check the value that comes out of a Snippet.
   Learn more about Snippets.
   
   
4. Event URL
   You can pick a string to check in the URL from which the event has been generated.
   You can check the full URL, its domain, or its Query String(specifying the concerned parameter).
   Example: https://www.mysite.com/path/page?article=101&type=202
   URL:  https://www.mysite.com/path/page?article=101&type=202
   Domain:  https://www.mysite.com/
   Query String on type parameter: 202
   
   
5. Source URL
   You can pick a string to check in the URL preceding the current URL generating the event. 
   You can check the full URL, its domain, or its Query String(specifying the concerned parameter).
   Example: https://www.mysite.com/path/page?article=101&type=202
   URL:  https://www.mysite.com/path/page?article=101&type=202
   Domain:  https://www.mysite.com/
   Query String on type parameter: 202

 

Criteria combinaison(AND IF)

It is possible to combine criteria to check a global condition by clicking on the button AND and filling the required information for criteria.

 

Condition result(THEN)

If your condition is met, you can edit the value of the property with several actions.

• Set as empty:
  The value associated to the property on the event checking the condition is empty.
  
  
• Set with: 
  You can pick categories of criteria (except the User Agent) to check a condition to extract its value on the concerned event. You may as well rely on a Snippet or define a fixed value.
  The value (not empty) picked can also be reprocessed with an action.

 

Actions available:

Action	Option	Detail
Parse and save	From the beginning	Specify a separator and the index
	From the end	Specify a separator and the index
Parse and delete	First items	Specify a separator and the number of items to delete
	Last items	Specify a separator and the number of items to delete
Delete	First items	Specify the number of characters to delete
	Last items	Specify the number of characters to delete
Keep	First items	Specify the number of characters to keep
	Last items	Specify the number of characters to keep
Replace	Match tables	Specify the match table and the default behaviour
	Replace a string	Specify the string to search and the string to replace
Edit a string	Shift to upper case
	To lowercase
	Empty the value
	Concatenate	Specify the concatenated values
Convert	To integer
	To date	Specify the date format
	To boolean
	To decimal	Specify the separator
Test a condition	If (else if) / else	Specify the condition, its action, and default case

 

Additional condition block(ELSE IF)

You can add condition blocks by clicking on the Add an action link.
Please note that conditions are checked in a sequence, meaning that if a condition is validated before another block only the first condition block's processing is applied.
 

Default case(ELSE)

If the event didn't meet any condition, the ELSE block defines a default case with a value based on the 2 results of the condition (set as empty or set with).
 

Compatibility Mode

Definition

For organisations that used to be on Analytics Suite 2, and having Data Manager v2 rules or custom items, we transfered the processing to Property rules.
This condition is applied by default prior the rule of property and can be deleted if needed.
It takes the content associated to your custom items or your Data Manager rules to adapt them in the processing.
If the value of the compatibility mode is enriched then it prevails, otherwise standard condition criteria are applied.

Example :
You declared a custom site variable x1 named Colour, to specify the colour of your product displayed on Analytics Suite 2.
Custom site variables became properties in Analytics Suite Delta.
Thanks to the compatibility mode, if you send a x1 in the hit, we keep the value and associate it to the property Colour before any processing rule in the Compatibility mode block. If the conditions are not met, we provide you the ability to specify the tag parameter as set in Analytics Suite Delta (colour), and if any condition is not met, we let the value empty.
 

Reference table
To check quickly how your custom item (site custom variable, page custom variable, custom source) has been converted into your property, we specify the conversion we set with the Compatibility mode in the Reference table tab.

Deletion
Deleting the Compatibility mode is definitive, by deleting the block you will only be able to rely on Analytics Suite Delta processing and that will be set for all sites of the organisation.

 

Moving condition blocks

You can change the order of your condition blocks by clicking on the arrows on the top right corner of each condition block. It cannot be used on Compatibility mode block or Privacy block.

 

Rule application

The rule application is defined by 3 different scopes.
Deploying a rule to one of these scope, will apply the edition of your Data Model by 20 minutes following the click on Save and Deploy.
 

Default rule

Piano Analytics provides a default rule applied to the whole organisation that you can edit if needed.
You can add exceptions to this rule by clicking on the button New rule.
Virtual sites cannot benefit from the processing of the default rule.
 

Site

You can pick a site and make an exception to the to the rule set to the organisation.
This site can only have one rule for this property.
You cannot pick a virtual site (icon crossed grey cloud).

Site group

As soon as you want to apply a rule to various site, you need to create a group of site for Data Management to apply the rule.
 

Copy the default rule

You can tick the case Copy the default rule to have the components of the main rule imported to your new rule.
By doing so, specific edition on a sub perimeter is easier.

Snippet

Definition

A snippet is a set of treatments applied to a tag parameter. The value of the snippet can then be taken in a rule to avoid manual retyping in several conditions, it can also clarify readability. By going to the Snippet tab you can find all snippets created for your property. A property can rely on as many Snippets as needed.

 

Creation

From the Snippet tab of your property you can create a snippet by clicking on the dedicated button.
The process relies on several steps:

1. Naming the snippet and picking the output type for the snippet

2. Picking the data source

3. Picking actions to apply to your data

4. Save and Deploy

Once the Snippet is saved, you will then need to rely on it in your criteria of a rule to have it fully deployed(used here). 

 

Use

You can specify a snippet saved for your property by picking a condition specifying the snippet criteria, then the snippet. By doing so you are conditioning an action based on the OUT value of your snippet.

 

Deletion

You can delete a snippet on your property at all times.
To delete it you must make sure that it is not listed in your rule, by checking its conditions, and then click on the bin icon in the Snippet list of the dedicated tab. This modification can only be taken into account once the property is Saved and Deployed without the snippet.

If it is being used in your rule, the snippet will not be available to deletion.

 

Test

Before saving rules of your property, you can test them by relying on the dedicated panel on the right side.
This interface takes conditions and processing applied through your rule to check the data in various cases (output).
Criteria used in your conditions being extracted to the test panel, you only have to fill in the values associated to each parameter.
You can also add additional parameters if needed by clicking on the dedicated button.

It is also possible to fill in a site number to check any difference between the organisation and the site rule.