Overview of Classifications in Adobe Analytics overview-of-classifications-in-adobe-analytics

In this video, we’re going to talk about a powerful feature in Adobe Analytics called Classifications. A classification gives you, the user, the ability to actually classify the raw data coming into any of your custom reports. This means you can make your reports a little bit friendlier. For example, maybe you’re pulling the SKU of a product into the product variable and the product SKU is a long series of numbers and letters. Something like 12345ABCDEF. That SKU could be valuable in a report, but there could be users who view those reports that have no idea what that SKU combination means. So what you can do is take your SKUs and classify them so that it’s easier to recognize and understand their value. So instead of a long SKU, you could make it the product name such as Red Nike Air Jordan sneakers. Then your report would have that friendlier, more easily identifiable product name within the report. Another feature of Classifications that’s often used is bucketing. So for example, if you have a particular variable that’s, say, pulling in the page, load time, a page load time, a lot of people will pull in is the number of seconds it took for a particular page to load. Sometimes the difference may be tenths of a second, which is quite granular, like the difference between 1.1 and 1.2 seconds. In a scenario like this, you can bucket those values into a few different sets of classifications. For example, maybe you have a bucket that’s 1 to 2 seconds, another that’s 2 to 4, and one that’s 4 to 6 seconds, something like that. You could also use bucketing at the product level. So if we go back to our earlier example about Nike Red Air Jordan sneakers, each aspect of that product could be included in different classifications. You could have a classification around brand, which would be Nike, around color, which would be red, a classification around product name, which would be Air Jordan’s, and then one around product type, which would be sneaker. And so you’d be able to create all of those different reports just simply based on one set of raw data, which in this example was the product SKU of 12345ABCDEF. Keep in mind that the classification report is actually retroactive. So if you’re looking to classify data from last month, but you’re not able to classify it until this month, you can actually make that change today. And even the data that you were looking at from last month will still be retroactively updated and classified for you, which is quite powerful. Now that we’ve covered a few different ways, you can use classifications. And keep in mind those are just a few examples out of many. Let’s go ahead and actually take a look at the Classification tool so you can get a feel for how to set up classifications yourself. The first thing you need to do is make sure you have admin access to your report suite. Once you do, you have admin access, you want to go to Admin, then Report suites.

Select your report suite and then hover over Edit Settings. If you’re editing a conversion variable, which could be something like tracking codes or products, then you want to go to Edit Settings > Conversion > Conversion Classifications. And then if you’re looking to edit a traffic variable, you would do that within Traffic and Classifications. So let’s go through and take a look at our Conversion Classifications. I’m going to go ahead and click that one. And when it loads you’re going to see what current conversion classifications have already been set up for you. It will bring you to a screen very similar to the one that you’re seeing here. This dropdown menu lets you select from all of the different conversion variables that you have available to classify. By default, you’ll have Product and Campaign, Zip Code, etc. And also all of your custom conversion variables below that. For this example, what I want to do is Classify Campaign. Here in Classifications, we can see a list of all the classifications that have been created for this report. Now if you want to add an additional classification to your report suite to the Campaign variable, you’ll do that by hovering over the arrow next to Campaign and clicking Add Classification. Note that I selected the arrow next to Campaign, since that’s the variable that I’m actually classifying. What’s really cool about Classifications in Adobe Analytics is that you can actually classify a classification. For example, say we wanted to classify all of our marketing channels. We can actually add a sub-classification to that class affiliation. If you’re curious to learn more about sub-classifications, see the supporting documentation. So let’s create that new classification. We want to click Add Classification based on Campaign. And we’ll call this new classification “Size”. So we can go ahead and push Size as our new classification for the campaign. And when I hit save it will add Size as a new classification for Campaign. And just like that we’ve got a brand new report created within our report suite that’s based off of Campaign. Of course there isn’t anything in the report yet because we haven’t actually told the tool what kind of information we need to push into this report. Where we do that is in Admin and then Classification Importer. From here will be able to see what classification actions have already been set up. And we can also import and export those classifications as well. So the first thing I’d like to do is go to the Browser Export tab. From here I can see a list of all of my different report suites, and then all of the different variables that have classifications enabled on them. The one that we just set up was in this report suite, and it was for the Campaign variable. Then scroll down. And for this example we’ll leave all of the settings here as is. Then we’ll click Export File to download a spreadsheet that has a list of all the different classifications that have already been set up within the tool. Since this is a brand new one, we won’t have any classification set up in there yet. The file will download as .TAB file-type, which can be opened in Excel. So we’ll open this TAB file and you can see there’s a little bit of information in here. Since we haven’t sent any data to this report just yet it’s mostly a blank template. You can see that this first column contains three rows of headers. If it has these two hash marks, those indicate that they’re required headers for your TAB file. So leave them as is. Then row four contains the different column headers available to you. So “Key” is the raw data value that’s getting pulled into Adobe Analytics and into the campaign report. You also have headers defined for “Marketing Channel”, “Delivery Tool”, “Campaign Name” and so on. And these items are the classifications that are currently set up based on the campaign report. So we could go in and manually enter the different campaign values that we’re expecting to be populated in this report. However, that would be a very tedious way to do things. I mentioned earlier that we have the option to do this retroactively. So what I’ll do is open this other report suite, which does have data.

I’m going to click Export File and click Save. Once it’s downloaded, we’ll open our more exciting classification file. And we can see we have a lot more data in the spreadsheet. And so in the left column there’s a list of all the raw data files that we’re pulling directly into the tracking code report. And if we wanted to, we could update this sheet with any known values for the unclassified raw data listed here. So let’s say we happen to know that this Marketing Channel Email is “Facebook”, Marketing Channel Display is “Facebook app”, the Campaign is “Facebook fan page”, and the Creative Owner is “Sue”. If we wanted to, we could continue to add any additional campaigns we know about. If we wanted to, we could also scroll down to the bottom and add any additional upcoming campaigns that haven’t gone live yet. This allows us to preemptively plan for those and push that data into the Platform as well. So once we’re done, we’ll save this file. And then the next step is to actually import the new file into Adobe Analytics. And this is done from Admin and then Classification Importer. Then we’ll head over to the Import File section of the Classification Importer. Now over here you’ll see there’s actually two different ways that we can import a file. We can import it right here in the Browser which is what we’re going to do. But you can also if necessary import it over FTP. Generally FTP is used for one of two reasons. If the tab file that you’re trying to push in. So the spreadsheet we looked at earlier is bigger than 50MB, you would likely need to import it via FTP. Another reason would be if it’s a set of products or a set of reports that changes often, you could actually set up a weekly or daily import from one of your other systems that automatically sends classifications to FTP. This option would be good for customers who have rapidly changing product information, and so they push that information from other systems this way. So for our example we have the report suite. We select the data set that we want to classify. And we choose our file. And we can choose to either overwrite the data when there’s a conflict. Or we can choose to say if there’s a conflict to leave the data as is. And we could also choose to download it after the import is complete to confirm that all the data went through. Once you’ve done that, click Import File, and usually within about 24 hours or less, all of your updates will start to propagate into your reports. And that’s essentially what you need to know to set up classifications within your report suite. Now let’s take a look at what some of these reports could look like. We’ll head over to Workspace and set up a new project.

Make sure you have the correct report suite selected, and then we’ll drag over the Tracking Code dimension. Now these tracking codes aren’t very easy to identify. So let’s see what other reports are tied to Tracking Code that we could replace this with. So we have the Campaign Name or the Marketing Channel. Let’s take a look at Marketing Channel. So we’ll drag that over to replace the Tracking Code. And now we can see that this is a much friendlier view of the report. We know that there are a few different tracking codes associated with each marketing channel. Let’s say we want to see what tracking codes are tied to social media. We’ll drag and drop Tracking Code onto the “Social Media” Marketing Channel to drill in and see the actual tracking codes tied to that channel that are driving this revenue data. Similarly, I could drill into the campaign names. There are lots of insightful ways to break down the data here. Now, you may have noticed there is a fairly large, Unspecified bucket. This includes any underlying raw data values that have not been classified. So if we take the Tracking Code dimension and drag it over to Unspecified, we can see here all of the same tracking codes we were looking at in the Excel file earlier that haven’t been classified yet. And so these are some of the ways you can use Classifications to classify and organize the raw data coming into your customer reports. I hope you found this video to be valuable. And thank you for watching.