Context-Aware Sessions in Virtual Report Suites

Hello, this is Justin Grover with Adobe Product Management and I’d like to share some of the the features that we’ve added to Virtual Report Suites in the Adobe Analytics release in October of 2017. What I’m going to do is I’m going to show you how to adjust a Visit Definition within a Virtual Report Suite. So one of the things that we’ve added here is that we’ve made segments optional and that’s because a Virtual Report Suite can now be more than just a segment that’s applied to our report, it can also change the way the data’s processed. So if I click Continue here I can take him to the Visit Definition tab and what this does is this allows me to enable Report Time Processing. What that means is we will actually calculate some of the things at report time as opposed to data collection time for that Report Suite. By doing this it allows me to change the Visit Timeout. So typically visits have traditionally been 30 minutes in activity in the tool. I can change that anywhere from one minute clear up to two hours. In a later release we will add you know additional options there. But what this does is this allows me to to be very precise about how I calculate a visit and this is pretty typical for people who who deal with mobile apps, visits are often very different on a mobile app. And typically you want a much smaller timeout say like five minutes or something like that. Additionally what I can do is I can prevent background hits from starting a New Visit. A background hit is simply a hit that the operating system on a mobile device sends in when the app is in the background so the user is not actually using the app but they are but they are recording information that’s useful. This can be useful for things like tripping a Geo-fence, certain types of push messages, things like that. Finally, I can I can also have it Start a New Visit upon Launch. So this what this will do is. this will allow us to to Start a New Visit every time we receive a launch event from the SDK regardless of what the visit timeout is. And so this can be really helpful if you’re trying to get launches and visits to match up. One of the really interesting things that happens when you do this, is this changes the definition for a visit everywhere in the product. So it changes in the way we count in reporting, it changes it in the way that we do segmentation with a visit container. And it also changes the way we persist Evars for things that expire on a visit. So let’s go ahead and look at this how this actually applies in the data. If I go over here to Workspace I’ve set up a few different Virtual Report Suites with different options. And so what we can do is if I have here I have a one minute timeout. And so you can see that the number of visits that I have for the app is sixteen hundred for this time period. If I change that to a to say a two hour timeout, so I have another Virtual Report Suite with a two hour timeout on the same dataset, you can see that the number of visits that I have goes down because people have a longer window to to get included in that test session. I can also do things like a five minute timeout which is a little somewhere in between. And then finally if I if I go ahead and do a Start on Launch you can actually see that the number is much, much lower because of the way that we’re doing some of the processing there. What this does is this lets you fine tune the way you record a visit. And we really recommend that you think pretty critically about what it is, what your application is doing and what a typical usage pattern is. And that can be very helpful as you’re trying to figure out what the appropriate visit timeout is. Usually for mobile apps we recommend somewhere in the neighborhood of five minutes if it’s a website, somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 minutes, though that can change depending on the requirements of your business. One of the other things to note is this isn’t just, because it is a Virtual Report Suite it applies across all time. So when you change this setting, you can go back and look at this in different ways. So it’s a very non-destructive way to look at the data. You can play around with multiple Report Suites like I did here and try to change the definition is to see what looks right and to do analysis to figure out what the right thing is without having to worry about future data implications for that. We hope you like this feature, we hope that that it’s useful for you and we are excited to deliver this feature in the fall 2017 release.