Broadly speaking, there are three categories of taxonomy that apply to the digital marketing space: Web, Content, and Campaign. We’ll review each of them in a series of blog posts in an attempt to better explain their similarities, differences, and importance when considering your digital marketing efforts.
Web taxonomy is the process of organizing and categorizing interactions to determine what action a user took in a given moment, or general information about the session and user, while visiting your website. It’s all about visualizing the engagement a visitor had with your site.
There are three general components of structure to the taxonomy: granularity (when), event naming and triggers (what), and parameter key/value pairs (who/how). Web taxonomy is used to create a logic structure to describe what a user did, how a user is accessing your website, and who (anonymous, or not) the user is.
Let’s start with the first component: granularity. This is an extremely important, and often ignored aspect to describing what happened. Granularity is just a data-fancy way of saying “period of time”. This granular taxonomy describes a moment in time an action occurred, or the entire session of engagement and all of the actions within that time period (normally 30 minutes), or a user’s history (normally over 2 years) of all of the interactions they’ve ever had on your site.
Granularity takes care of the when; next up is what happened: the event or interaction. Simply put, this is a succinct description of what action the user took, for example: clicking on the submit button, viewing a page, or watching a video for 1 minute.
There are two very important elements for any taxonomy: consistency in naming convention and in trigger logic. For example, let’s say your website has a contact form; so what do we call this? One vote is “Contact Us”, another is “submit contact” and yet another is “Contact submission”; sure, they all make sense to us, but the are also all distinct events when doing math (which, btw, is the only language computers know: “01101000 01101001”). Even more annoying is that “Contact Us”, “contact us” and “contact_us” are also all different. Any option is fine, as long as you use the EXACT same name all the time. At Roots we are fans of the following naming conventions:
- all_lower_case
- no_special_characters
- underscores_instead_of_spaces_or_dashes
The second component is when the event is triggered; like when did it actually happen.
On the surface, it seems straight forward: when the user submitted her information. But is that when the user clicks the button, or when the user sees a “Thank You” page or message (meaning the information was actually sent to the server). And if you settle on the “click”, is that any click on the button or do you check to make sure no errors occurred (if the user is like “I forgot my dang name!”). Any option would work, as long as you are consistent in applying the same logic everywhere on your site.
Finally, there are the parameters: this is all the additional information used to enrich describing the event. A lot comes out of the box with analytics tools like GA4 and Adobe: page url, timestamp, device, medium and source, daily horoscope. The best part is when you get to apply your own; here are some super useful parameter names and descriptions:
- user_id (especially if you have a login process)
- user_type (maybe you describe subscription tiers, or funnel stages)
- product_name (if you have e-commerce)
- conversion (count of specific actions you deem as high value)
- content_fragment_id (if you do that sort of thing)
- is_it_friday_yet (learn more about friday)
The other part of the parameter is the value. This is going to be really specific, and can either be a long, concrete list (like a ‘sku_id’) or a short list of options (small, medium, large). The important features are that they are meaningful to you, and consistent. Consistency is most important in how you apply the value. Pushing this to the data layer is the most stable way to ensure consistency (more on that another day).
What does this all mean for you? Consistency. If you remember none of our other ramblings, just be consistent in your taxonomy. If you continue to call a thing by the same name every single time, you can use that data for interesting questions. And there is no perfect formula for what to call a thing; just be thoughtful and consistent. Act decisively; practice daily. Be a digital marketing ninja.
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