Customize the menu in Reports & Analytics

Hi, my name is Daniel. I’d like to share with you some ideas on how and why you may want to customize the menus in Adobe Analytics. First on the reports feed manager screen, click on the name of Report Suite, mouse over Edit Settings, then mouse over General and click on Customize menus.

So, there’s a lot here. The menu system in Adobe Analytics is listed here. There’s a bunch of top level menus, but also sub menus and sub sub-menus all with important reports listed. So, this is a very exhaustive list of the reports available in analytics, but it can be kind of hard to navigate. And so, the ability is given to customize this to rename things, to drag and drop things, to hide things. I’ll show you how that works. So first, let’s click on the Site Metrics menu, Custom Events and Customer Events 1-20. This is a list of the events for this report suite and say that you want to rename this folder in this sub menu here, Custom Events 1-20 to something that’s a little easier or a little more friendly to look at. So, you may, you click on it, notice that everything you click on, you can click the buttons then along the top, and it will make an adjustment. So, click on the Custom Events 1-20 and then click the Rename button and you can just type right over this. I’ll call it Events, hit Enter, and it saves it. Know that it doesn’t actually save it, but it captures the change at the very end you’ll want to make sure to hit the Save button to actually save these changes to your report suite.

So that’s an example of how I may want to rename something. Now next to the Rename button, there’s this Default name. So, if I have this selected and click on default name, it’ll undo my change and set it back to what it was before. On the topic of undoing, this button restores defaults, it restores the entire menu to its default state. So all of the changes that you make, if I click around remove things, hide things, rename things, rearrange things and then I click the Restore Defaults button, it will undo all those changes and save it. So, it’s like an undo of everything all at once and save type of button. So, use that with caution but it’s nice to reset your entire system and start over. So, let’s rename and then the default name buttons toggle visibility is an important one. If there’s something that you don’t want to see you can hide it. Let me use the example of Adobe target. Say, you’re not using that tool and you just want to hide the menu itself. You can click on one or more of the items underneath of it and hide those items. Or in my case, I’m just going to click on the entire menu and toggle visibility which will then hide it and everything underneath it from being viewed. Say, you’re not using a mobile app and you want to hide that one too. That might be another good one and say the Bots menu is not useful to you, so you do that as well. So, you can hide and toggle the visibility of many different things. If I want to undo or show one of these, I just click on it and then toggle visibility and it shows up. The other one remains hidden though. So, that’s how you use that feature. I’m going to move now to the new folder feature. This is an interesting one. If I click on the top level and hit New Folder it’s going to put a folder right where I clicked. So, I can name this favorites let’s say and then I can use the rearrange feature which I’ll show now to drag things into it. So, say I want my props, my traffic variables to show up in that menu, the favorites menu, I click on them I’ll drag and drop it right on top of that and there it is. It’s now in my favorites menu. And while I’m at it, I might as well rename this to call it what I refer to it as Props. So, we’ve covered new folders, renaming, default name, visibility. Now we talked about restoring defaults and the final button is restore simplified. So, what this will do is it will undo all my changes just like the restorative false button does but it will turn it into a much more condensed set of menus.

Now that the top level will be more condensed but then there’s also sub-levels underneath. So, you can still get to what you’re looking for. I’ll show you how that looks. Here we have simplified names and simplified number of items here but we’ll note that there’s still these several levels of sub menus to the system. So, you can still get the reports you want. So that’s a nice option resource simplified. If I want to go back to the larger one I’d hit Restore Defaults and it would move it to the longer list of menu items. Now, just a review of a couple of use cases you may want to use this feature of customizing menus for, one would be to hide things you don’t need, another would be to rename things that you want to have clear visibility to and even move them to a different level in the reporting menu. So, hopefully that’s helpful. One final note is that this report, the real-time report is only available here in these menus. So, if you need access that this is the place to find it.

I’ll end with a recommendation. And that is that the Adobe workspace interface. The analytics workspace interface has a great search function so that you can look up say if I have five, you can type V5 or if a five or type in page for the page name report and it will help you find reports very quickly and often more efficiently than the menu system will. So these may not be used as much as they once were, but if you use them and when you use them you can make sure they’re customized in a way that makes it easy for you to use these. So hopefully that’s helpful? Have a great day. - -