You MUST go buy the book ;-)

There is also a great help section that you might want to explorer as well:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ywa/

OR connect with a smart YWACN consultant partner, like James.

Cheers
d.

@james – agreed with the s.products. I use the SC version of prodView and products to to do this. I was not aware of the flexibility that the YWA variables had. Very cool. Looks like I need to go by this book. ( I tried to win a free copy last week, but was not creative enough :-( )

What I would love to see, from any of the tools, is a solution like a shopping cart but geared towards non revenue items, without having to use something not *exactly* as it was designed. Not that that has stopped me before.

-Rudi

@rudi – great point – I know you’re experienced with Site Catalyst so let me draw the parallels. In SC you’d be best using the s.products variable for tracking a non-ecommerce site as you describe, mostly because s.products is the only free fully subrelated variable after s.campaigns. In YWA all of the variables, which can be defined with expiration (per an evar) or with no expiration (like sprop), can be fully subrelated. This means with the action tags and the custom variables you’d be able to design a solution that used either the ecommerce variables or customised using the custom variables. YWA also includes custom variables that can hold a date (eg webinar registrations) or an integer (eg number of participants).

cheers, J

You could do exactly what you suggest yourself, which is to treat this as a “normal” product, using PRODUCT_VIEW action values – for then applying a simple filter on revenue equaling $0 in the reports you are working with. If this is not wanted for some reason (hassle seems to be a tad strong in describing the task of applying the filter), I suggest:

a) you create a unique Action, you could call it “Whitepaper Product Views”
b) and then report based on either the actual pages (using URL or TITLE) or simply create a custom field you could call “Whitepaper SKU”

..did that make sense or did I simplify your question ?

Cheers
d. :-)

I am just now beginning to work with YWA, beyond just the default code.

Are there plans (or does it exist and I’ve just missed it) to have a non revenue based type of shopping cart? Let’s say the goal of your web site is not a credit card transaction, but rather the completion of a form. And the “products” you have are white papers, webinars, etc. I still would like to track a “Product View” when a visitor views a description before they fill out the form and download it, but I have always had to go and pull out all the revenue items out of reports and it gets to be a hassle.

-Rudi