Tips and tricks on how to simplify and spend less time training users

Ensuring business users within your organization are well-trained on Adobe Analytics is crucial to help build a culture of data-driven decision-making. Users who can easily find information within Adobe Analytics can answer simple business questions on their own, allowing more time for analysts to answer challenging business questions. Sharing your knowledge helps drive data democracy and enables business users to be more independent in making performance-based decisions.

Therefore, it is crucial to spend time setting up a structure to enable continuous training of users, and especially to allow new users to be onboarded on-demand. Creating a small portfolio of training content that can be reused as needed will save you time. The best part is it doesn’t require extra effort. Don’t forget, Adobe also provides classroom and remote-based training, but only you know the nuances of any custom implementation.

Basic Training for all

First things first, create a standardized basic training session for using Adobe Analytics that will fit in most people’s calendars. This will likely be about one hour and contain everything users need to get started with Adobe Analytics in your organization.

  • Write an agenda to keep your training session moving and so that you do not forget some of the basics, which may not be top of mind to you anymore.
  • Don’t forget simple things like how to gain access, login, as well as changing passwords or email addresses.
  • Walk users through the interface, describe the basic building blocks of dimension, metrics and date ranges.
  • Describe the difference between page views, visits and visitors.
  • Show examples of how to build projects, freeform tables and visualizations in Analysis Workspace.
  • Allow time for Q&A.

Press record

You may find yourself repeating the most basic training over and over again, as team members join the organization, as roles change within your company or to provide new interns access. After you have successfully delivered one or two training sessions as practice rounds, be sure and record a live training session to increase your own efficiency by providing automated on-demand training.

  • Most company video communication tools offer a record functionality, it might be as simple as pressing the record button on your next scheduled training session. Make sure this is in line with company privacy policies, or find ways to ensure conformity, i.e., by asking attendees to deactivate their cameras before pressing record.
  • If your company does not provide this ability, there are several free or subscription-based online tools for recording screen share and webcam video along with simple video editing functionality.
  • Be sure to find a place to host the videos in accordance with IT security policies. Online tools generally have a hosting functionality to allow playback to end-users. Otherwise, you will need to host the video on a corporate server or via a password-protected video hosting site.

Advanced Training for some

Of course, one standard basic training session will not cover every question and every use case for users in your organization. Once you have created the basic training, move on to other relevant training topics in additional sessions.

  • Be sure and record these sessions as well and make them available one by one as you create the new content.
  • Occasionally, as your implementation grows and evolves, you may need to update your training sessions to keep the content current.
  • Depending on how your implementation and your organization is structured, it might be relevant to create training sessions that target a specific department or group: i.e. providing training to an IT department around browser and operating system usage, demonstrating alerts around site availability versus providing training to a marketing department around referrers, marketing channels and most visited content pages.
  • You do not need to create all the content yourself. Adobe has some excellent free learning paths and additional training content, which you can offer to your users within Adobe Experience League.

Train your users to train others

In every department, there is generally one user who is more advanced and knowledgeable in Adobe Analytics. Leverage their expertise and work with them to become an “Adobe Analytics Department Leader.” By creating this support level, you are helping users advance their skill set, getting your organization more invested in Adobe Analytics and preserving your time for more advanced and challenging questions.

  • Invest time training your department leaders to become advanced users, so they can comfortably answer any questions and help new users in the department. This time invested will pay dividends later.
  • Make sure you set expectations that all the department’s questions should be funneled through the department leader. If they are not able to answer a question, that is when you should be brought in to help.
IMPORTANT
Remember, empowering your users with your knowledge helps ease the burden of answering the same simple questions over and over, allowing you time to focus on big picture analysis and strengthening the quality of your implementation.
recommendation-more-help
ee36f8de-52ce-47f1-8f0c-257e5efbcd1a