Understanding and creating report suites

Hey, everybody, this is Doug. In this video, I want to talk to you about report suites. A report suite is really the most fundamental level of segmentation in analytics reporting. So, each report suite refers to a collection of data, or kind of all the reports for one entity. Now, that typically means for a site, but it doesn’t have to mean that. So, as you get more and more mature with your analytics, you may want to do other things, other than just one site for one report suite. But that is a really great way to start, is to say, “I have a site, I’m going to have one report suite for that site.” Or, as you’ll see here, you might actually have three, for example, I have tech marketing demos web retail dev, stage, and prod, and this is a really good practice, because you’re going to do all of your testing in a dev report suite, and once you’re done, and you have everything set the way that you like it, you’re going to start pushing data into the staging report suite, and see if the numbers are what you expect, and everything’s working great, and then you can go to prod. And that way, your production report suite is not encumbered with all of your testing data. So, I highly recommend that you start off with your site by creating a development report suite, and all of the testing numbers, and those kinds of things, will go into that report suite, and you’ll be able to distinguish, again, between dev, and stage, and production, and those kinds of things. So, you’ll see I have a number of report suites listed here, and the way that I got here, was just, again, I logged in, and I went to admin, and report suites. And, so, that’s where you can go to see, and create, report suites, and, in fact, do a number of things for them, administer those, and set them up, and set up the settings, and do those kinds of things. But you won’t have these, of course, you’ll have the ones that you have created for your analytics implementation. But, again, overall, just think of it as a bucket, a single bucket that you put a name on, and that you’re putting all of your data in, so that you can see all of your reports for that bucket worth of data. Okay, now, if you don’t have any report suites, or you don’t have the ones that you need yet, we also go in here to create them. So, you’ll simply go up to create new, report suite.

And then, you’ll just fill out this little form here to create a new report suite. Now, when you are first creating it, you can see that you can create it from a template, and these are just, kind of some default templates, or some out of the box templates that you can use. I really, personally, don’t think it’s that important which one of these you choose, because they have very little difference. They might rename a few reports to something that is appropriate to lead generation, or, you know, a retail site, or financial services, etc., but, you’re going to be able to change all of those anyway, and customize them for your own implementation, so, when you’re first creating a first one, I really don’t think it’s that important that you choose one of those. Now, once you have created your first report suite, for example, your dev report suite, then, it gets a little more important, because you probably have set up all of the right reports, and you’ve named them, and you’ve done everything that you want in the settings. And so, when you come back in, for example, to create the staging report suite, then, instead of creating from a template, you choose this: duplicate an existing report suite. And then, again, I can choose my dev report suite, and I can copy that for my new staging report suite and production report suite. So, again, I think that’s a really great feature of creating these report suites, is that you can copy all of the settings of the development or the staging report suite, for example, when you’re creating your production report suite, so, that’s a nice feature. I might also mention that there’s no limit of the number of report suites that you can create. And you’re not paying per report suite, so, you can just do what you need to do for best practices for your site, and for your implementation, without worrying about, “oh, do I have enough money, or time, or whatever, to create another report suite?” That’s not really a factor here. So, you just need to create the report suites that will be the best for your analysis. So, I’m going to go ahead and create a report suite here. Let’s say that I am a lead generation site, or, maybe a subscription site.

Okay, yeah, I’ll say subscription site, but again, I mean, I can choose that, but it would be almost the same as choosing default. And, you’ll see right down here, there’s a prefix already in there. Now, when the provisioning team at Adobe sets up your initial interface here, you are going to have a name space. And so, that will be right there, and no matter what I do, that will be in front of the ID that I give a report suite. And so, a report suite has an ID that cannot change after we create it, and it has a title, or a name, that can change, and you can make it real pretty to look at and stuff. So, right now, when I create this report suite, maybe my subscription report suite, I can start typing, maybe I even start with a hyphen, because you’ll see down below, it’ll give me a preview of what my ID will look like. So, I start with a hyphen, and then say subscription, or maybe I just put subs, like that, and then dev. Now, this doesn’t have to look good, because you really just have to know this as a developer, and you’re not going to need to know what this looks like for your end users, all the people that are going to choose this, because again, that’s just a report suite ID. And right down here, we can put our better looking title, so maybe it’s, you know, my subscription site dev, or something like that. So, that’s what people will see in the drop down when they’re selecting that in the reports. Then, select your time zone, I’ll just choose mountain time, where I am. And, you can choose a base URL if you want to, but it’s not really necessary. You can see which ones are required.

Go live date, and so, you can tell the system when you’re expecting to start receiving data, so we can set up the proper hardware to store your data. So, give us a right date there, and an estimated page views per day, or hits per day. You know, are you expecting 10,000 hits a day? Or are you expecting 10 million? That’s important for us to know as we set up the hardware. So, let’s just say for my little test site, I’m just going to say 1,000. Especially for a development report suite, you might not need that many, but when you create your production report suite, then, of course, you’ll want to set that up. Oh, that’s not in the right spot. You want to set that up with the right number of estimated page views. So, let’s put all the right data in the right fields, okay. Then, you have base currency, and this is the currency that will be stored on the back end at Adobe. It doesn’t have to be necessarily what you see in your reports, you’ll be able to select any currency there, but this is the storing currency, if you will. Then, there’s some other things here that you won’t really need to do for now, especially for this basic video. And then, we just create a report suite.

Okay, now it tells us that it’s done, and it’s been successfully created. And now, we can actually go back over to Reports & Analytics, or workspace, and choose that report suite, but, of course, there would be no numbers in the reports, because we just created that, and we haven’t done an implementation to send data into those. But that’s how you create a report suite, hopefully that helps, and go ahead and create the report suites that you need, so that you can start putting data into those, probably starting with a development report suite, and moving to staging and production after that. Good luck.