Data stories for analytics dashboards

Hi, this is Jennifer Werkmeister, Senior Product Manager with Adobe Analytics. Today, I’m going to show you how to create data stories in mobile scorecard projects viewable in the analytics dashboards app. What do I mean by data story? Well, I mean any collection of supporting data points, business context and related metrics around a central theme or metric. For example, if you are focused on web traffic, your most important metric may be visits. But you may also be interested in new visitors, unique visitors, and you may want to see it broken down by webpage or what device type the traffic is coming from. Data stories in mobile scorecard projects lets you put your most important metrics front and center, while telling the whole story behind the metrics with multiple detail slides. When an app user taps on a tile, they can then swipe through the underlying detail views. To create a data story, start with a mobile scorecard project. I’ve started a simple project here using some financial services demo data. To begin adding slides to your data story, simply click on a tile that you want to create a story from. Let’s start with revenue. Your first slide is generated from the tile by default. To add new slides, either hover over or click on a slide. I can either duplicate this existing slide, or I can create a completely blank slide.

If I create a blank slide, I can start by dragging and dropping components and visualizations over from the left rail, or by choosing a layout which will automatically populate the slide with the data from the tile.

You can also delete a slide by clicking the trash icon. Now let’s start customizing our story starting with the tile. Right now, the slide is outlined in blue. So if I want to focus on just the tile, I’ll click it again. See now that just the tile is outlined in blue and the right panel here says tile properties. Here I can change the title, the chart type, et cetera, for just the tile. I’m going to change this first tile to a horizontal bar and break it down by account type.

So we’ll go over here to visualizations and drag in horizontal bar.

Notice that when I dragged horizontal bar onto the tile, the horizontal bar chart also appeared on all of the slides. When you drag and drop something onto a tile it’ll automatically apply to all of your slides, but it doesn’t have to. Watch now, as I drag and drop account type.

You see in that blue box above the tile it says add tile and slides, but I can hold shift to apply it to just the tile only. So I’m going to do that. I’ll hold shift and apply it to just the tile.

Now, I actually do want to include account type on my first but not my second slide, so I’ll drag that over now.

For my second slide, I want to see it by marketing channel. You’ll, when I drag and drop things over to the slides they do not impact the tile. Slides may inherit components from the tile, but not the other way around. You can change the visualization for individual slides. For example, I can change this from a horizontal bar to a donut. You can also change the layout. In this example, let’s say I know there are a lot of questions about what different marketing channels mean. I want to include a little text that explains each marketing channel. I like all the details included in the table, so I’m going to choose a layout that has both text and table. I’ll click on the pen to include text.

I can also format the text using the options above.

Click the close button or anywhere else on the canvas to close the editing window.

There, now I think I’m satisfied with this particular story. Just to be sure, I’m going to go up to the preview button to see how it would look for my end user in the app.

The preview window lets me see and interact with my data story as if I were an app user. So I’m going to click here on my total revenue tile, and I can see first my total revenue by account type, and then if I swipe, I can see my total revenue by marketing channel complete with the explanations that I included. That looks great.

Let’s try another story. I want to show you that you can include different metrics in a data story too.

Let’s look at this accounts created metric as an example. So I want to see not just how many accounts have been created, but how many people are getting through each step of the process per device type. I’ll get my canvas ready by adding some blank slides.

My first slide will be the total accounts created, but then I’ll have a slide each for step one, two, and three.

Now, I want to see all of these broken down by device type so I can see if and where UI challenges may be preventing customers from completing account creation. It will be easy for me to add device type to all of my slides by adding it to the tile. To navigate back to the tile screen, I can click on the navigation bar below. You’ll notice that the navigation bar updates with little icons that represents what’s on each slide. This makes it easier to navigate to the right spot if you have a lot of slides. You can also navigate back and forth by using the arrows on your keyboard or by grabbing a component and holding it to the left or right of your screen to scroll.

There, now I’ve added device type to all of my slides. I can go back in and add even more filters, breakdowns, change the layout, and change the visualization on each of these slides if I want to. That’s the beauty of data stories. Everything is customizable so you can share all of the information you want and exclude everything that you don’t need. I hope you’ve enjoyed this presentation. Thank you for watching.