Using the Classification Rule Builder in Adobe Analytics using-the-classification-rule-builder-in-adobe-analytics

Transcript

In this video, we’re going to look at the Adobe Analytics Classification Rule Builder and how you can use it to create automatic, rule-based classifications for variables across your report suites. Rules defined in Rule Builder are processed frequently, reducing the need for you to manually upload classifications regularly. For example, you could use the Classification Rule Builder to define a rule set that helps you bucket pages with various page names into a more friendly classification or into a bucket that has a higher level of granularity. Another example use case would be to break out a wide variety of variables that are being passed in with a delimiter. So if you’re capturing within your campaign code the medium, the publisher, and the campaign name, all of these can be broken out into separate variables on the campaign using the Classification Rule Builder. Before getting started with classification rules, you’ll need to have already created classifications based on your variables. For this walkthrough, I’ll be using the marketing channel variable that’s based on my campaign variable within my selected report suite. See the supporting documentation to learn how to create classifications. Now let’s look at how to set up classification rules using the Classification Rule Builder. To navigate to the Classification Rule Builder, click Admin, Classification Rule Builder, and from here you can see a list of any existing rule sets that have already been created. To create a new rule set, click Add Rule Set and provide a relevant name. Next, you want to select a report suite and variables and start defining your classification rules. Click on the name of your rule set, and this will bring you to the page where you can begin to define your rule set. First, click Select Report Suite and Variables. From here, select the report suite and the variable that you’d like to classify. As you can see, you can continue adding report suites and variables, however, generally you want to focus on one specific type of variable at a time. So, for example, let’s say that we want to classify the campaign variable, then click Save. Now, to create the rule, you’ll start by defining the rule type. You can select Starts With or Ends With to define that you’d like to classify variables that start or end with a specific set of characters. Contains would look to see if what you’ve defined is found anywhere within the variable. And then Regular Expression is a more complex but also powerful capability where you can use regular expressions to look for certain characters within your variable values to more dynamically classify the variables. Let’s look at a rule set that’s already been created to better understand how rules are structured. This is my marketing channel breakout here, and you can see that I’ve set up a few different classification rules. First, it’s important to note that priority of rules within the rule builder really matters. Rules are evaluated from the top down through the list, so for every single value that is evaluated, if it matches the defined criteria, it’s classified. Then it moves on to the next rule, and if it matches this next set of criteria, it will overwrite the value that was previously set before, and this will continue on down through the list of rules. So every rule is always run on every single value within your defined variable. A good recommendation is to start all your classification rules with a catch-all. So for this first value, we’ve done this and set the rule type to be Regular Expression, and we’ve set the equal to dot star, and it has a value of some type, and then set your classification to say unclassified and then dollar sign zero. So let’s look at how this rule is actually built. If we look here, the dot simply says if any single character exists, and then the star means zero or more of any single character, then the values will be captured in my match group. If it matches, then it’s assigned to a specific variable number, which for this is a dollar sign and then a zero. Now we can adjust the Regular Expression to say that within this sample key, I can set parentheses to look for ABCD, and then add the dot star afterwards. So as you can see, dollar sign zero is matched to the full match group, then because of the parenthesis, we have two separate match groups here. I’ll cancel this because I want to leave the Regular Expression as the original catch-all of dot star . Now we want to determine what is the classification that I want to define based on my match criteria. This is important because within my campaign variable, within my report suite, I have several different classifications for campaign. So under set classification, I’ll choose which I want to set, and for this rule set, that’s marketing channel. Then in the last column, we define what we’re setting the classification to. In this instance, I’m setting it to unclassified and then concatenating that with a dollar sign zero. So it’s returning the full value of the base variable and then prepending it with unclassified, making it very easy to find. This enables an analyst to stay proactively informed as they can see a potential opportunity to adjust the rule set in order to classify something being improperly classified by rule builder. Now let’s jump down to the bottom of the rules list and look at this ends with rule. Here rule builder is looking through the key to see if it ends with the characters FB. So any key ending in FB will be classified as Facebook. Next we’ll look at this contains rule type. Here we’re defining that any campaign key that contains the characters SOC will be classified as social media for the marketing channel. And then let’s look at another regular expression example. First it’s worth noting that there are a lot of use cases for regular expressions here in the rule builder. It’s a more complex but also powerful way of defining classification rules. For more information on how to use regular expression for classification rules, see the supporting documentation where you can find examples and a regular expression reference table. This regular expression rule type is taking the first portion of our campaign code ahead of the colon and is assigning it to $1. So when we come back to our rule, we can set the marketing channel classification to $1. So that it’s assigning just that first section of the campaign code as the marketing channel. Before activating your classification rule set, you’ll want to make sure you test it. To do this click test rule set and this will take you to a new screen where you can test against some sample keys. If you’ve previously done any testing, this list will be pre-populated with your previous list of sample keys. Otherwise you can add in some sample keys here. It’s easiest to go into your report suite and copy and paste a sample of your existing keys. Then once you’re ready click run test to see how the rule set would be applied to the sampling of keys. You can hover over any classification result to see why and how those different values are being set. Depending on what you see here, you may notice that your rules need to be adjusted to achieve the classification results that you’re looking for. Once you’re confident that your rules are working as expected, you can return to the rule set and activate it. One final step before we activate our rule set is to set the look back window. This is how you define how far back you want to look at all of the values that were collected in the variables that you’re classifying. Look back window by default sets itself to one month. This can be increased by monthly increments up to six months. So at six months you’re looking at the last six months of values that have been populated into your variable. Generally it’s recommended to increase your look back window to six months unless you have a reason not to. Now that everything looks the way that we want it to, the rule set can be activated. To activate the rule set, click activate and within the next 24 hours your classifications will be applied with the rules generated on the last six months of data. Any new value that becomes available will also be classified based on the active rule set. You should now be familiar with the classification rule builder, including the elements of a rule set and how to create and activate classification rules. Have fun classifying!