Early next month, thousands of marketers and analysts will descend upon Salt Lake City for Adobe Summit. I have been saying for years that Summit is my favorite week of the year; it has been my honor to work with many of you for almost a decade now, and opportunities to gather, discuss our shared future in this industry and generally geek out on amazing technology are too few and far between. If you will be at Summit this year, either in Salt Lake City or in London, I hope you'll find me and say hello!
At Summit this year I will be reprising my annual Adobe Analytics "tips and tricks" session, in which I try to compile some of the best lesser-used features, hidden gems and common pointers to help you squeeze even more value out of the tool. The theme of the session this year is helping to take your Adobe Analytics game from "very good" to "hall of fame" status through eight little things you can begin to do immediately.
While the session is typically aimed at the intermediate to advanced analytics user, this year's edition includes a handful of great ideas that even relative inexperienced users of Adobe Analytics can learn, take home, and implement right away.We'll spend most of our time in Reports & Analytics (formerly known as SiteCatalyst), but this year's session also includes tips from Adobe Mobile Services, Report Builder and Ad Hoc Analysis.
New to my approach this year is crowdsourcing: I asked several of Adobe Analytics' most experienced users, both inside and outside Adobe, to curate my list of tips and tricks and provide suggestions of their own, so it should be a smorgasbord of analytics goodness!
You can check out the session abstract in the Summit session catalog, and maybe I'll see you there!
This is one that we released in Reports & Analytics last year. A great reason to do this is to target users who complete a certain path. You can use the Fallout report in Reports & Analytics to discover and validate the path (to make sure you've built it correctly), then create a segment with one click. If you are using Profiles & Audiences through Adobe Marketing Cloud, you can then share that segment directly to Marketing Cloud, or use Adobe Mobile Services to push an in-app message to the users who completed that path.
You might know that you can bring up the Adobe Analytics navigation with the press of a key—the forward-slash (/) key to be exact. But you might not know that when you bring up the navigation, your cursor is automatically placed in the search field; you can just start typing. You can press Enter at any time to go to whatever is the first search result showing at the time. You knew that too? Impressive. But did you know that as of our most recent release, you can now find reports by searching on eVar, prop, or event number. For example, if you want to go to the Product Finding Methods report in eVar50, you can search for "Product Finding Methods," or you can search for "eVar50," or even just "50." The search results in the navigation now also return admin console features such as report suites, exclude by IP, company settings and more. You'll be flying around Adobe Analytics in no time!
Sometimes you want to use Report Builder because it allows you to build custom Excel dashboards to help run your business. Other times, you might want to use Report Builder to compile data from various report suites into one place and operate on your data so that your it can be consumed by another process, such as a dashboard for display on a big screen, or ingested by a database. The tip here is that if you choose to send your Report Builder dashboards in CSV format, Report Builder will download all of your data and any calculations that you have embedded will be performed, but then only the left-most worksheet will be delivered. This allows you to do any data manipulation that you need to do in other worksheets, then deliver an easily digestible, simple set of data for just about any purpose you can imagine.
"Yo dawg, I heard you like Analytics." So goes the meme. One of the most common questions I get from our customers is "How can I better understand who at my organization is using Adobe Analytics, and how they are using it?" Admittedly, this could and should be easier in many ways. But the Admin Console in Adobe Analytics does allow you to download the Usage & Access Logs directly into Excel. From there, you can build a quick pivot table to organize the results by report, by user, etc. This can help you understand where to focus as you train your colleagues, which reports and dashboards to optimize/build out and more.
If you have a bunch of report suites in your Adobe Analytics account, it can be a hassle to make settings changes in the Admin Console, such as enabling eVars or turning on pathing for a bunch of props, because you need to go through a long list of report suites and manually select each one. If there are logical grouping to these report suites — such as brands, report suite types (dev, staging, production), etc. — you can select them and then use the "Add Group" feature to create a permanent grouping of suites. That way, the next time you need to make changes across all of those suites, you only need to select the group on the left of the report suite list; you no longer need to find each report suite one by one. This little tip has saved me a TON of time over the years!
If you thought those tips were even remotely decent, you'll love the Adobe Analytics tips and tricks session at Summit. These are the ones that "weren't quite good enough" (and happened to be a little Admin Console-heavy). They get a LOT better from here, including a brand new analysis tool, a new plug-in, and more.
It's the most wonderful time of the year. See you in Salt Lake City!