How does Ometria process abandoned basket events?

An abandoned basket event is when a visitor to your website puts products in their basket and then leaves the session before checking out/placing an order.

In Ometria, you can trigger automation campaigns based on an abandoned basket event.

This article explains how Ometria collects abandoned baskets events and triggers emails.

See also: Segmenting contacts by visit

Collecting the data

Ometria records and processes two types of data:

1. Interaction data: Visits, page views and site ecommerce events such as add to basket, login, transaction, form validation errors.
2. Ecommerce data: Includes all details on products, categories, transactions and customers.

Abandoned baskets are related to interaction data.

Interaction events are gathered per visitor, using JavaScript web tracking. 

Once an event is recorded, it is processed by the ‘real-time’ system. This information includes:

• Country (IP geolocation)
• Number of pages viewed
• Time on site
• Time of last interaction
• Unique visitor ID (stored in persistent cookie)
• Number of previous visits from this visitor ID
• Landing page URL
• Last page viewed URL
• Products and categories viewed in the visit
• Channel that sent the visit (e.g. search, CPC, referral) along with contextual information about the source (e.g. search keywords, referring page URL)
• Device type (mobile/computer/tablet) and browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc.)
• Contents of shopping basket (id, products, quantity and value)
• Previous visitor information (e.g. identity and customer information)
• Each incoming event updates the active session record for the visitor that sent the event.

Ometria’s abandoned basket logic

Once a visit session starts, if the visitor adds anything to their basket Ometria records the event (with product ID, quantity and total) against their visit. 

After 30 minutes of inactivity their session will ‘close’, and Ometria checks if the following conditions are met:

1. If the visit is identified.
2. If no order was placed in that session.

If both conditions are met, then the abandoned basket event is processed and the 'time of abandonment' is the time of the session being closed.

When Ometria is checking that contacts meet the conditions to enter an automation campaign using an abandoned basket trigger, it will also check that the contact has placed no orders in the past 24 hours before the abandoned basket event (‘time of abandonment’).

This means that the abandoned basket event will be processed only if all apply:

1. A contact has added something to their basket
2. The contact has not completed an order in the 24 hours before the event
3. The contact is identified (in this session or a previous one).

Product criteria

Ometria also checks the following product specific criteria:

1. The product added to the basket has a valid URL.

2. The product(s) in the basket is active in Ometria. Or the product data passed to Ometria contains the field: "is_active"=true;. 

Diagram