Virtual report suites in Adobe Analytics virtual-report-suites-in-adobe-analytics

Hey everybody, this is Doug. In this video I want to give you an overview of virtual report suites.

So what are virtual report suites? Well, they are basically a subset of the data from one of your report suites. And you get to decide how to define that based on the data. And I’ll show you here in just a second as we walk through the virtual report suite wizard. So for example, if this was your report suite and you have all this data and everything and you think, you know what, I have groups of people that really spend their time limited to one set of data. And so instead of them always having to go and, you know, create a segment or apply a segment to everything they do, I want to basically build a report suite based only on that segment and have them work only with that data. Because sometimes it’s not just to save them time, but sometimes it might be even security related, right? You don’t want certain groups looking at certain data, etc. So you want to limit people to specific data and a virtual report suite is great for that. So to create a new virtual report suite, you open Adobe analytics and you don’t have to go to workspace yet. You can just go right to components. If you’re in your workspace, of course, you can go to components as well. But make sure that you save your project here, because as you go to the virtual report suite builder, you will lose your changes if you don’t save those. So you just go to components and then down to virtual report suites. And I’m going to leave this open because we’re going to come back here in a minute. But I did that already over on this tab. And so I have that here. And you can see that I’ve already created one virtual report suite called Washington State Visitors. Now, you can do this, like I said, based on any segment. So can it be geo? Sure. Could it be, you know, different parts of your site? Maybe you are a newspaper site and you have headlines and you’ve got sports, you’ve got entertainment and these are different groups. So you could do it based on that. You could do it based on whatever, right? In this case, just as an example, I’m going to use geo related. So I already created this one called Washington State Visitors. Let’s create another one. I’m going to add a virtual report suite.

Now that will come up and you’ll see if I jump down to the source report suite, this will be, you know, this report suite that I just had there open. And it’ll also show you over here in your data preview the total number of hits for the virtual report suite, which is 100 percent of the original, because I haven’t added a segment to limit that yet. So you’re going to give it a name. In this case, I’ll give it California Visitors. And you can put in the description and tags if you want. I’m not going to worry about that right now. And yes, you can choose any report suite here as the source report suite. It doesn’t have to be one that you were just looking at. You can get to choose a time zone for this report suite. And this is very cool because especially with geo like this, if you had your source report suite and all that data in one time zone. But when you break this out to different geographies, you want to put it in that time zone, then that is perfect. You can just set that right here. Then we’re going to add a segment. So we’re going to go up here and we’re going to go Kelly. And I just created this segment so you can see here that it is US States equals California. So I’m just going to grab this and I’m going to drop it in there. And as you can see, this limits the data to only California visitors, which is you can see here for total hits, it is a little over 10 percent of the total hits, six percent of the visitors, etc. You can also add additional segments and that will even limit it further. But let’s go ahead and move on from here. So I go up to continue. Let me get rid of that right there so it doesn’t try to find all those letters now on this step, which is the visit definition step up here. There are a couple of things to configure. First of all, you can configure the visit definition right here. So enable report time processing. What that means is instead of having the processing all happen when you are collecting the data, which is the normal way of things happening, you can defer that processing to report time. And that’s what you need to do if you’re going to change the visits timeout, because you might already know this, that 30 minutes is the default timeout to start a new visit. Well, if it makes a lot more sense for your business to have shorter timeouts, you can change that. Of course, you can even do it longer as well. So you can change the timeout period. You can say, you know what, if people are not doing anything for 15 minutes, then I’m going to start a new visit. And that will, I don’t know if you saw that, that will actually change the total number of visits over there as well. And that number will go up a little. The other thing you can do here is you can start a new visit with any event. So you have your events over here and you can say, you know what, for me, I want to start a new visit every time they, you know, start a new video and they do this one thing or whatever you need in order to start a visit at the right time. And we’ll dig down on that a little bit more in a different video. And you’ve got a couple of mobile app settings here as well to prevent the background hits from starting a new visit and to start a new visit upon each app launch. So those are the things you can define on the visit. You can click here for components or you can also hit continue and that’ll take you to that next section. And then in here you can choose if you want a subset of components, if you want to curate the components that this report suite will have access to, then you can limit those by checking the box and then bringing those over and adding those. In this case, if I want them to have all the data, but we limited it to the geo, then, you know, probably makes sense to add all. So I’m going to do that and then I can hit save.

This brings me back to my list and now I’ve got California visitors and Washington State visitors and these are now virtual report suites and available to you. So I’m going to go back to our project and analysis workspace and I’m going to go to components. I’m going to refresh components. There we go. And let’s see if that gave me those other ones. So now if I click this down, I probably need to refresh the whole thing, not just the components over here, but the list over here. So I’m going to go ahead and refresh the page. And now if we go over, hopefully we see both of them, we do. So this little dot here, if I hover over that, you can see this is a virtual report suite. So you can see that it’s just treated like a regular report suite. And so now if we choose one of those, you know, we just want to look at our, you know, California visitors that we just created. And you can see here that we had, you know, 93,000 visitors in this time period for everybody. If I choose that, and that number goes down quite a bit.

And then the last piece, I guess I’ll just mention is that, you know, to limit that to the right people that’s done in the Adobe admin console. And so you would just limit that like you would any report suites so that you just had the right people being able to access this report suite. So anyway, I hope that was helpful. Just kind of walk through how to create virtual report suites and have a great day.