Instrument home page shelves to collect conversion data per shelf

[bobsilverberg]

We are considering running an experiment which will involve introducing a regional shelf to the home page. As part of evaluating the results of this experiment, we may want to evaluate the performance of the regional shelf as compared to the performance of other shelves. We don't expect all shelves to perform equally though. For example, we would expect a general shelf, like "Recommended Extensions", to perform better than a niche shelf, like "Creativity Extensions". Therefore, it would be a good idea to generate a baseline of shelf performance.

To do this we would need to instrument the site so that GA knows which shelf, if any, was the source of an install. This issue is about adding that instrumentation.

[bobsilverberg]

@devaneymoz We need to think about how we want to capture this information. Ideally we'd want to differentiate between different shelves (that's the whole idea), but these shelves can change from week to week. Even if we captured the shelf's position, that wouldn't really give us the info we need. For the tag shelf, we are already capturing that it is a tag shelf and which tag it is for, but for other shelves, we are just labeling them all as "featured".

I wonder if we should use the shelfId from the admin? Do you always create a new shelf, when you want to change the contents of a shelf, or do you sometimes edit an existing shelf?

[devaneymoz]

I do not create a new shelf every time. Once one of our standard shelves gets created in admin (e.g. "Translation extensions") then I tend to simply re-shuffle them from week to week. And I rarely if ever edit the shelf once created.

I think the two most important elements to capture in tracking might be:

1. Type of shelf (e.g. "Translation extensions")
2. Position (1 - 8)

[bobsilverberg]

I do not create a new shelf every time. Once one of our standard shelves gets created in admin (e.g. "Translation extensions") then I tend to simply re-shuffle them from week to week. And I rarely if ever edit the shelf once created.

I think the two most important elements to capture in tracking might be:

1. Type of shelf (e.g. "Translation extensions")

2. Position (1 - 8)

Thanks Scott. What I was thinking was that, if shelves are not deleted, then we could use the id of the shelf as the tracker, and then we will always know exactly which shelf was used. Another thought I had was to use the title of the shelf. What do you think of those two ideas?