Combo Charts in Analysis Workspace

Transcript

Hello, this is Travis Sabin with Adobe Analytics Product Management and today I’m going to walk you through our combo charts visualization and analysis Workspace. So when you bring in the combo charts onto the panel, this is the builder state that you’ll get. You need to define the X-axis, the Y-axis and what type of line comparison you want to do. So for your X axis, that will be your dimension. You can choose any sort of trended dimension such as day, week, month, or any non trended dimension like page. So I’m going to start with day. And then your metric is your Y-axis. So I’m going to choose visits. Now you can add filters or segments on top of this. You can add up to three segments for any metric that you’ve created.

And so you can use all three of those to stack those segments or filters on top of one another. You can quickly and easily remove them if you want. And then you need to choose which type of line comparison you want to do. So you have three options. You can compare visits from your current date range to a different one. You can choose a function such as median or average or you can choose a secondary metric if you want to compare visits to unique visitors or checkouts or something like that. So I’ll walk through each of these to show you what it looks like. So first, let’s do time comparison. So after you choose time comparison, you then have to choose the time period you want to compare it to. We have some presets here or you can also choose a custom one. So maybe I want to compare this month to last month. And then you can add up to five additional line comparison. So if they want to do another one. And then once you pick your first line comparison, all your subsequent ones have to be the same. The other options will be grayed out you’ll see that here. So let’s say I want to do last month and same month last year. This is a very common report that would be done typically in Reports & Analytics but now it’s really easily done out of the box here. So you can compare last month and last year. And then after you have your inputs provided, you click build and now you’ve got a beautiful looking combo chart with your first primary Y-axis metric as the bar. And then the other comparison, time comparisons as the line. Now you see we have these little, what we call bar bells on the lines to accentuate exactly where they’re positioned.

And so you can compare really easily how your visits are comparing this month to last month and last year.

Once you’re in here, there’s a bunch of settings you can play with and you can turn those barbells off. You can hide the axes if you want if you don’t want those to be displayed. And then if you have a data set, if you’re doing two metrics and you want to do dual axis, you can do that, you can do normalization. So lots of options there. So let’s look at a different type. If I want edit, I just click the edit pencil. And now instead of doing time comparison, I want to do function. So let’s say I want to compare the median and the mean. So this will calculate my median visits over this time period and my mean visits over this time period.

And now I can see I have median in blue and mean in orange, and I can see which days are above or below my mean or median really quickly, all on this same chart. So that’s really, really nice. There are other function options.

So you can do column sum, cumulative average, cumulative column max and column minimum. You can choose all those as your function options. So a great way to do some quick comparisons there. And then the last one is secondary metrics. So this is, if you want to compare, like I said, two metrics against one another over the same time period. You can also add up to three filters or segments onto every additional metric that you provide. So I could go and add three additional filters here if I wanted to. I can compare a whole bunch of things. So I’m going to load this up. I already have visits. Let’s do checkouts and asset clicks, and let’s do entries.

And then we’ll do…

Now that I’ve got my five, I can’t add any more, but I click build and now on this chart, I’ve got all these things, these metrics being displayed all at once so I can easily compare them over the same period of time and get this really, really quick view of them, which is awesome. So combo chart, as you can tell, is built without needing to build a freeform table. You just put your inputs here and you’re off and running. But as with most things in Workspace, we have a table that’s built behind the scenes. So if you wanted to, you could show that table and that data source. And you can see that down here. You can keep hiding if you want, but it’s hidden by default. But there is a table that’s powering this behind the scenes. And the builder state here is what configures that for the most part. But if you wanted to show the data source and then let’s say you wanted to remove one of these. Let’s say I don’t care about entries anymore I can update the table and the chart will update as well. But the thing to know is if you make changes directly on the table here, your settings in the builder will not reflect what’s in the table. And you’ll see this little warning that’ll tell you that you’re out of sync. You can keep doing whatever you want to the table and the combo chart will do its best to reflect whatever changes you make. It’s not supported and it won’t reflect it but the builder itself will not reflect those changes. And if you wanted to get back to your original state, you just click build again and it’ll add back that column and now it’s back here again. So that’s our little out of sync workflow for you. So one other way that you could have happen is let’s say I build a freeform table and a line and I start with a line but I want to change from my align visual type to a combo. You can do that. And I just click that in my menu and now I’ve got my first column as my bar and my second one as my line. And so that’s another way that you could get to it. If you open the builder, you’ll notice though that there are no values in here because we started as a line and you get this warning saying that any changes you make here will override the table. So after you give some inputs, you would override what’s displayed in the table and that would become your new primary governance for the combo chart. So that’s kind of our out of sync workflow. So there’s lots of flexibility that you can use with this combo chart and really, really great out of the box especially those time comparisons, which you can do today in Workspace, but not quite as easily. The combo chart makes it much more simple for you. So we hope you enjoy combo charts and thank you very much. -