About Attributes

Attributes are properties that carry information corresponding to visitors. These are the variables whose values help you identify and segment visitors. Some of the common attributes include the traffic source of the visitor, the browsers used by visitors to land on your webpage, the visitor’s location, etc. 

Using attributes, you can track the visitor data that is critical to your business, such as visitors' gender, subscription level, etc. For example, if you are a SaaS company, you may want to categorize users based on their subscription plans, or a travel agency that recently ran promotional offers may want to view conversions by age group.

Types of Attributes in VWO

In VWO, attributes are of the following two types: 

• STANDARD ATTRIBUTES: These are the predefined attributes, such as Traffic Source, Operating System, Browser, Location, etc., on the VWO platform that VWO automatically collects. These attributes are available to be applied in your campaigns for targeting and report segmentation.
  
  
• MY ATTRIBUTES: These are the ones that you can create and configure based on your specific business needs. For example, you can create an attribute to identify the customers who have been using your website for a very long time and appreciate their association with a special offer. Or, you can identify the customers who have made very few purchases and encourage them with a discount. These attributes can be applied only for your campaign report segmentation.
  
  
• UNREGISTERED ATTRIBUTES: These are the attributes that are captured by VWO from your website but not found registered in VWO. At times, instead of creating an attribute on the VWO platform, you would use the custom code of an attribute and tweak it to become another to be tracked on your website. Sometimes, such unregistered attributes may come into VWO from a third-party integration. In such cases, you may not be able to use the data of those attributes for any analysis or segmentation. But VWO captures such attributes and brings them to you, so you can choose to have them registered in VWO. If you’re passing an attribute to VWO that you have not created under MY ATTRIBUTES, VWO captures it and displays it under UNREGISTERED ATTRIBUTES.
  
  NOTE: These attributes will continue to stay for 3 days or until registered.

  Clicking on these attributes will reveal the corresponding metadata, which includes the data type, API name of the attribute, and sample values.
  

  INFO: Sample Values are the values of the unregistered attributes captured from your website/application by VWO.
  You can choose to save these attributes to VWO by clicking on the Register Attribute button at the top-right. This will allow you to configure the attributes and save them under MY ATTRIBUTES.
  NOTE: Upon registering the unregistered attributes, they will be removed from the UNREGISTERED ATTRIBUTES section.
• ARCHIVED ATTRIBUTES: If you are no longer using a custom attribute, you can clear up the space by archiving it. Such attributes appear under the ARCHIVED ATTRIBUTES section. The number of archived attributes will also be displayed along with the section name in parentheses.
  Any existing campaign that has been using these archived attributes will continue to use them. These archived attributes will appear in the visitor segmentation section of the existing campaigns with an ‘ARCHIVED’ tag. However, these attributes will not be available for a new campaign or any existing campaign that hasn’t yet used them. To learn how to archive an attribute, click here.

Creating Attributes in VWO

To create an attribute in VWO, from the main menu panel, access Data360 > Attributes. Click +Create and enter the details in the following fields:

To finalize your changes, click Create. The created attribute appears in the MY ATTRIBUTES section on the left.

Clicking on a custom attribute displays the details of the same, along with a custom code snippet. The code snippet is available for the web version (browser-based) and SDKs (for FullStack). These code snippets contain the placeholders for the attribute variables, which need to be applied in the respective places. This ensures that each time the event is triggered, it captures the variable data from your website and stores them in VWO. These variables differ with the type of code; hence you need to apply the variables correspondingly.

For server-side SDKs, by integrating the VWO server-side SDKs with your application, you can A/B test your applications on the server side. To integrate an SDK, you just need to install the SDK from the respective package manager and then import it into your application. Since backend applications can be written in different programming languages, we offer VWO SDKs in different languages, such as Node.js, Python, PHP, Java, .NET, Ruby, Go, etc. The custom attribute code is, therefore, also made available in all these languages.

Click on the Copy Code icon at the top-right corner of the code snippet box to copy the code. After initializing the VWO SDK and the corresponding variables into your code repository, use this code in your application to enable this custom attribute for post-campaign segmentation.

ATTENTION: Deleting attributes isn't supported. Therefore it's important to exercise caution while specifying API names for the custom attributes, as modifications cannot be made at a later stage.

Managing Attributes in VWO

Once an attribute is created, you can modify or clone the same based on your needs. To do so, select the custom attribute that you wish to work on, click on the vertical ellipsis icon at the top-right, and perform the required action as follows: 

• To Edit - Click on the Edit option, make the required changes, and click Save.
  
  NOTE: The API Name and the Data Type fields cannot be modified.
• To Clone - Click on the Clone option, enter the attribute Name and the API Name, apply the required changes, and click Create.
  The cloned attribute appears in the MY ATTRIBUTES section on the left.
  
  
• To Archive - Click on the Archive option, and in the archival confirmation popup that appears, click Archive. Now the archived event will be moved from the MY ATTRIBUTES section to the ARCHIVED EVENTS section. You can always review an archived attribute by clicking on it.
  
  An archived attribute can be edited just like any custom attribute, cloned into a new custom attribute, or unarchived to be used again in your campaigns.
  
  To unarchive, select the archived attribute, click on the vertical ellipsis icon that appears at the top-right, and select the Unarchive option. In the confirmation popup that appears, click on the Unarchive button. Now, the custom attribute will be moved from the ARCHIVED ATTRIBUTES section to MY ATTRIBUTES.

Applying Attributes in VWO

You can apply attributes to segment your visitors while targeting your campaigns (pre-segmentation) and filtering reports (post-segmentation).

Pre-segmentation:

Pre-segmentation is the filter that you can apply while setting up your campaign to target your campaign to those visitors that satiate your criteria. 

Let’s consider that you are running a fashion business; then, you can target your campaign to visitors based on their gender and present your variations featuring changes that are specific to the gender of the visitors. 

This can be configured at the time of campaign creation. You can access Configuration > Audience and Traffic > Target Audience > Custom Segment to configure the pre-segmentation settings for an A/B test.

Click on the first dropdown; the standard attributes will appear under the Attributes section. Select an attribute, set the relation in the second dropdown, and enter the corresponding required value in the last field.

You can add more conditions by clicking Add another condition.

Post-segmentation (Report Segmentation):

Post-segmentation is the filter criteria that you set up in your campaign reports for a targeted study. Once you have your campaign results populated, you can filter the report based on Attributes such as purchase price. For example, you can filter out those visitors who have made a purchase of $70 and above. Or, you can analyze and identify those visitors who have purchased a given product. This way, you can identify the problematic or low-performing areas and approach them with appropriate measures. 

For applying post segmentation to the results of an A/B test campaign, click on the VWO campaign you want to look into and go to Reports > All Visitors > Custom Segment.

Click on the first dropdown; all the standard and custom attributes will appear here. Select an attribute, set the relation in the second dropdown, and enter the corresponding required value in the last field.

You can add more conditions by clicking Add another condition.

Defining Scope for Custom Attributes

User Scope - Upon selecting this option, VWO produces the data of visitors by looking for the latest value of the attributes that match with the one you have specified in the filtering criteria. These attributes can be age, favourite sports, current plan, etc.

For example, you can tag visitors with their plan type and analyze the funnel performance of users on the Lite plan against the Pro plan. Or, you can track the gender information and then view heatmaps/session recordings only for female visitors.

Session Scope - Upon selecting this option, VWO produces the data of visitors by looking for the latest value of the attributes corresponding to each session that matches with the one you have specified in the filtering criteria. These attributes can be signed-in visitors, total purchases made during a session, total time spent on a given page during a session, etc.

For example, you can compare the conversion rate for the Add to Cart button goal for signed-in vs. guest users or view heatmaps for only signed-in users. You can also view the differences in the behaviour of visitors who spend a particular amount of time on a specific page.