Activity Map overview in Adobe Analytics

Hi, I’m Ben Gaines with Adobe Analytics Product Management. And in this video, I wanna walk you through the new Activity Map tool, which is a browser plugin that lets you visualize user activity data directly on the pages of your website. In the past you may have used or heard of the ClickMap tool. And Activity Map is sort of an evolution of that original ClickMap tool with a bunch of great new functionality that we’re really excited to get into your hands as of the spring 2016 Adobe Analytics release. So here we’re looking at Adobe.com, which of course is my company’s homepage. And we’re looking at a bunch of very fake data so don’t read really anything into the data that you see on here. But what you should notice is that we have these graphical overlays on top of each link on the page telling us the number of clicks that have occurred on each link during the date range that I have selected, which as you can see here is April 14th. And I could change that to anything that I wanted to. I can, one of the great new features of Activity Map is that I can replace the clicks metric with any of my standard or calculated metrics from any of my report suites in Adobe Analytics. You can see I’ve got a tremendous list here to choose from. I’m actually going to leave it on clicks at this point only because the data doesn’t actually, the data is faked and doesn’t actually refresh when I change the metric. But as you can see, I could choose from any of my metrics. The great thing about that is that it allows me to very easily see the downstream impact of a certain path that a user might take. I may notice that a link on my homepage generates a lot of downstream revenue. That can clue me in to some things. I can start using some of the other data and segments in Adobe Analytics to start to understand why that might be the case. Speaking of segments, those are here in the Activity Map plugin as well. I can use any of my segments from anywhere in Adobe Analytics. I’m gonna go ahead and apply a first-time visits segment here. Again, the data won’t actually change but you can at least get the idea.

And there you have it. Now, sure enough, the data hasn’t actually, the data actually has changed a little bit but not in a particularly meaningful way because this is all of course very fake. I can control the view here. I can either view gradients or I can view bubbles which just are a different way of visualizing the clicks. I can actually click on any of these bubbles or on the overlays themselves to get some more detail about the link in question, the link that I’ve clicked and chosen to view some more detail on. One of the most interesting and exciting things about Activity Map is that there is sort of a standard mode that’s very similar to Adobe Analytics, the rest of Adobe Analytics, in the sense that you choose a data range and metrics and segments. There’s also a live mode, which provides access to real-time click data. Again, the data is not real and it doesn’t change very much when we apply the live mode in this demo environment. But what you can see is that we have a very granular view of the number of clicks that took place on this page over the last 15 minutes. I can view that last 15 minutes minute by minute or I can go all the way up to last 120 minutes in 10-minute increments. With the live mode, the only metric that I have to choose from is clicks at the moment but for viewing particularly in the case of publishers with maybe a homepage and you wanna see what links on that page are getting clicked over the last 15 minutes so that you can optimize that layout and swap out old links that are no longer of interest. This is a great tool and a great way to do it. You’ll see it just refreshed because we just got a new minute of data that’s available to us now. And so the data has sort of reloaded to show us the most recent rolling 15 minutes here in Activity Map. I’m gonna switch back to standard mode and show a couple of other things in here. If I click this icon, I get some great contextual data right here on this page. I can see each link on the page. They’re all listed here. So I get sort of a tabular view of my Activity Map data. The other thing that I can do is switch over here to page details and I get a Sankey diagram showing where people came from to get to this page and where they went afterward. I can start to pick out possibly trends with where this page fits in a user’s path or a customer’s journey. I also get a bunch of summary data about this page, metrics that I’d have throughout the rest of Adobe Analytics like number of single page visits, average time spent on this page, and so on and so forth. I can download all of this data by clicking the download button as well. To get the new Activity Map plugin all you need to do is there will be a new version of the AppMeasurement JavaScript code, version 1.6. Any version 1.6 or newer will install Activity Map when added to your implementation. If you’re using Adobe DTM, this is a very simple process. You just choose the latest version of the code from the dropdown if DTM is managing your implementation. If not, then you’ll need to go to the admin console in Adobe Analytics, get the code, and install it in your tag manager of choice or directly on your website. And make sure that the Activity Map module is installed when you do so. It comes installed by default, just don’t remove it. That will get you on the path toward installing Activity Map in your implementation. The only other thing you’ll need to do is go into the, have an admin go into the admin console, and in the report suite settings page there is an option for Activity Map reporting, and he or she will need to follow those steps, very clearly laid, out to enable this for your organization. Activity Map is, as I mentioned, an amazing way to visualize activity data and particularly for people in your organization who may not use Adobe Analytics in their day-to-day role. If they have responsibility for content or user experience design, this is a a great way to give them access to data in a very hands on, usable, visual format. We’re very excited about it. We hope that you are too. And happy analyzing.