Build a Time-Parting Heatmap In Analysis Workspace build-a-time-parting-heatmap-in-analysis-workspace

Transcript

Hi, this is Jen Lasser with Adobe Analytics Product Management. In this video, I’m gonna show you how to create what we like to call a time parting heat map. This is a tape we showed last year at Summit and found that our customers really enjoyed. Time parting is a way to take the timestamp of collected hits and break it into more meaningful information. For example, you can see here we have dimensions of day of week and hour of day. These are both time parting dimensions. Now while this information is helpful in its separate tables, there’s a trick you can do to make it a lot more visual and easy to understand for your end users. So, let’s say that you are a content manager and you have a new page that you want to publish onto your website and you want to know what the best time is to publish that page that will get you the most views of the new content. So, I’m gonna show you how to take this data and turn it into a more visual, easy to understand output. So, the first thing that you want to do is create a cross-tab table. So, what I’m gonna do here is just delete my day of week table and I’ll expand my hour of day. I want hour of day down the rows like I have here and then I want to bring over day of week to form a cross tab.

Opening up the day of week dimension, I can select all the items and bring it in dropping it under occurrences.

So, now we can see all of the occurrences to our site by day and by hour of day. If we want to choose a different metric, we can simply replace it by dropping in something like visits over occurrences. The next and final step is to multi select the columns and then choose the column settings gear. You want to turn all of the settings off. Uncheck number, percent and then for background, change to Conditional formatting. Conditional formatting will auto generate a range from red to green representing the values that are in the cell and where they fall in that range. In order to make sure each column is assessed by the same range of values, you want to change from auto-generated to custom. That will ensure that every column in the table has an upper limit of 2599 and a lower limit of 662. So, if we minimize that settings modal, you can see now that we have a very visual representation of the visits to our site. Very quickly eyeballing this, you can see that the late morning, early afternoon is the time when people come to our site the most and you can also see on Friday that we get a lot of viewers earlier in the morning. So, if I was a content manager trying to decide when to publish my new page, I think, I would choose Friday earlier in the morning to push out that content. If you want to change to a different metric, it’s a really easy approach. So, let’s say you wanted to look at when people order on your website instead of visit. You can simply drag over your orders metric, replace visits up top here, once you drop it, don’t panic, it’ll change everything to red, the other stuff that you need to do to make this work for a new metric is, again, multi select the columns, click the gear and then just toggle the Conditional formatting to auto-generated and back to custom again. That way it will define a new custom range for all of the columns to be assessed by that works with the metric you’ve just added in. So rather than look at the visits to the site, we can look at orders by day and hour of day instead. The last trick I wanted to share with you here is to fit more data onto the screen, so, if you want to see more hours of the day in this table, take advantage of the new View density setting under Project info and Settings. Right now I’m set to comfortable but if I switch this to compact, I’ll be able to fit even more rows of data on a screen at a single time. So, now we can see the entire hours of day and days of week all in one shot.