Activity Map overview in Adobe Analytics

Transcript

In this video, I want to walk you through the Activity Map tool, which is a browser plugin that lets you visualize user activity data directly on the pages of your website.

So here we’re looking at Adobe.com, and you’ll notice 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’ve selected. I can click here, and I can change that to any date range that I’d like to analyze.

One of the great 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 that I’ve got a tremendous list here to choose from. For this video, I’m actually going to leave it on “Clicks”, but as you can see, I could choose from any of the metrics listed here. And 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, and that can clue me into 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 available here in the Activity Map plugin as well. I can use any of my segments from anywhere in Adobe Analytics. I’m going to go ahead and apply a “New Visitors” segment here. I can control the view here. I can either view gradients or I can view bubbles, which are just a different way of visualizing the clicks. I can actually click on any of these bubbles or on the overlays themselves to view more details about the link in question.

One of the most interesting and exciting things about Activity Map is that there’s a standard mode that’s very similar to Adobe Analytics, in the sense that you choose a date range, metrics and segments. But there’s also a live mode, which provides access to real time click data.

What you can see when we apply the live mode is that we have a very granular view available here. 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 the last 120 minutes in ten minute increments with the live mode, the only metric that I have to choose from is linked clicks. But for example, in the case of publishers who maybe want to see what links on a home page are getting clicked over the last 15 minutes, so they can then optimize that layout and swap out old links that are no longer of interest. This is a great tool to help with that sort of scenario.

You’ll also notice that the data refreshes as we get a new minute of data that’s available to us. And so the data has sort of reloaded to show us the most recent rolling 15 minutes here in Activity Map. I’m going to switch back to standard mode and show a couple of other features available 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 is listed here. So I get a sort of 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. From that, I can start to pick out trends with where this page fits into a user’s path or a customer’s journey. I also get a bunch of summary data about this page, including 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. I can download all of this data by clicking the Download button as well. If Activity Map isn’t already enabled for your organization and Analytics, admin will need to activate Activity Map, enable Activity Map reports and add users to the Activity Map Access product profile. Detailed steps to do this are outlined in the Analytics Activity Map documentation available on Experience League.

You can then download and install the Activity Map plugin from the Tools section in your Adobe Analytics instance.

Activity Map is an amazing way to visualize activity data, particularly for people in your organization who might not use Adobe Analytics in their day-to-day role if they’re responsible for content or user experience design. This is a great way to give them access to data in a very hands on, usable and visual format. We’re very excited about the functionality Activity Map provides, and we hope you are too.