Using Report Builder to learn the Adobe Analytics API
- Topics:
- Report Builder
CREATED FOR:
- Intermediate
- User
Report Builder is something we all know & love. So what if I told you that you could use what you know about Report Builder to advance your Adobe Analytics skillset even further? In this video, we will walk through how to take debug Report Builder requests and use them to learn how to craft your own Analytics API queries.
Transcript
Hi, this is Jen Lasser with Adobe Analytics Product Management. In this video, I’m going to show you how to easily use Report Builder to start learning our analytics API.
So you may or may not know but Report Builder is a friendly UI that interacts with our analytics API on your behalf. By stepping through the Report Builder Wizard, you are crafting an API call that will ask Adobe for data, return it, and parse it into excel. This process translates to a QAPI request, a GET API request, and then finally we do some parsing logic on our side to render the data in Excel as you would expect to see it. So by pulling up a debugger side by side with Report Builder, you can actually see the requests that go out to our API, and find the API logic behind them that was written for you. So, let’s go ahead and try this out.
In Report Builder, we’re gonna go ahead and create a request just by going through the two steps of the wizard.
So I’ll start with a very simple request. I’ll pick a pages report for yesterday.
Aggregated is fine. We’ll skip segments for now. We’ll go next. And then I’ll just select visits here.
I’ll select a cell to import the data to.
And then before I click finish, I’m gonna pull up a debugger.
So I’ll just do a split screen here so you can see both.
In the debugger you’re gonna be able to see a bunch of requests that are going out. But we wanna focus in on just the requests related to the API calls that Report Builder is making. So I’m using Charles here as my debugger. You can really use any third party debugger that you’d like.
And we’re just gonna filter the debugger down to any calls that say report dot.
So back in report builder here, I’m gonna click finish. And as that runs we should see two calls go out, Report.Queue and then when the data is ready to be returned to Report Builder and parsed, we’ll see a Report.Get Request.
And then the data you see renders in Report Builder. So within the queue request on the Request tab, this is where you’re gonna find the API logic that was written for you. Now, it reads left to right which is a little hard to see so you can just hit Ctrl+C or copy and paste it over to the notepad and hit Ctrl+V.
From the notepad it’ll format it in a more readable format. And what you see here is everything you need to write your own API request. Aside from the small authentication logic needed at the beginning, this is exactly how you would write a request to query your API. So at the top here you have different report level settings. So we chose yesterday’s data, and you can see that represented in the dateFrom and the dateTo.
We also selected Visits and that’s our only metric. So that’s our sortBy here, and you can see our reportSuite as well. Below those report settings you’ll see the metrics that have been selected. So we just have visits in here. Elements represents the dimensions. So we have a pages report, top 10, and then the request is closed off. So this is a very simple example. But just wanted to show you very quickly how you can debug your requests and really start breaking down the API calls made for you. So before I wrap up, I’m going to do one more example. And this one will be a little bit more complex. I wanna show you this because even if you already know the API, you can still use this approach to maybe learn a few more advanced ways to make your query’s, or advance things to include in your query’s such as classifications, or calculated metrics, or segments. So let’s do one more request. We’ll go and add it here.
So this time I’m gonna pick something that has a classification so I can show you how that’s represented.
So I’ll do last touch channel detail. We’ll do campaign. Let’s apply a segment this time. So maybe I want just desktop customers.
Let’s choose a longer date range. We’ll do last week. Let’s break it down by day.
Moving to the next screen, let’s give this a second dimension. And let’s do last touch channel detail. Maybe we want our top campaigns with the underlying tracking codes.
I’ll even change the filters here. So instead of top 10, top 10, let’s just do the top five campaigns.
And for details, let’s exclude anything that says unspecified 'cause we don’t wanna see anything that doesn’t have a tracking code. We’ll hit okay, hit okay, and then we’ll add in a couple metrics. So let’s add in visits and let’s add in a calculated metric as well of visits per visitors.
I’ll go ahead and select our cell here.
Let’s start a new Charles session and we’ll go ahead and click finish.
So in Charles we’ll reduce down just to the report calls that are going out.
Can see we’ve already gotten our queue call. On the request tab we’ll have our report description here. So we’ll copy that, paste it over to the notepad, and now you can see a much larger request than the first simple example that we did. So still the same structure there’s just a lot more elements included in here. Now we can see the segments that we had applied. At Adobe we think of them as IDs. So you’re not gonna see the friendly name here, you’ll just see that ID.
We also chose to apply a granularity, so you’ll see dateGranularity by day.
Down in the metrics section, we have visits like we did before but we also have our calculated metric. And just like segments, we refer to these as ID’s as well. So see that in the list. Under elements, so we chose two dimensions in the Report Builder Wizard. The first one was a classification of campaign on the last touch channel detail. And you can see that represented here. So classification of campaign on the base ID of last touch channel detail. And we changed the filter to top five. Followed by the second dimension of last touch channel detail, where we applied a search for things that did not contain unspecified.
So, no matter the level of user that you are of our API, using Report Builder to learn how to craft API requests, I think, is applicable to all. From a basic request to something a bit more advanced that leverages calculated metric segments. You can really learn it all by using Report Builder which is something that we all know and love already.
If you wanna learn more about our API go to the developer documentation in the description of this video. So we hope you found this video helpful and hope you take this forward and use Report Builder to start learning our analytics API soon.
UPDATE: Report Builder updated how it requests the data slightly. You can still use the approach from this video, but the information will be slightly different in a debugger.
In a debugger:
1 - Search for api5.omniture.com. The number might vary from 1-5 depending on your data center.
2 - Go to the Request tab
3 - Search for ‘Report.Queue’ in the request.
There is also an alternate method to debugging requests like this, and it works just as well. You can turn on Report Builder logging from the Options menu and that will record the same information as a debugger would. Logs can be found under Documents > ReportBuilderLogs, and will be organized by day. You can search the file for ‘Report.Queue’ to find each of your requests. Logs also help with troubleshooting any issues.
For more information on this feature, visit the documentation.
Analytics
- Analytics tutorials
- Introduction to Analytics
- What is analytics
- What Can Adobe Analytics Do For Me?
- How Adobe Analysis Workspace Can Change Your Business
- It’s More Than Data. It’s Customer Intelligence
- Adobe Sensei and Adobe Analytics
- Customer Use Case - ServiceNow
- Customer Use Case - Accent Group
- Customer Use Case - The Home Depot
- Summit 2019 Super Session - Travel and Hospitality
- Summit 2019 Super Session - Retail
- Summit 2019 Super Session - High Tech
- Strategy & thought leadership
- Transitioning from other platforms
- Analytics Basics
- Customizing the UI
- Getting Help
- Analysis Workspace
- Analysis Workspace Basics
- Analysis Workspace quick intro
- Analysis Workspace overview
- Navigate the new landing page
- Start your analysis with a pre-built report
- Building a Workspace project from scratch
- Create and manage custom templates in Analysis Workspace
- Understanding how data gets into your Analysis Workspace project
- Foundational metrics in Adobe Analytics
- Component management in Analysis Workspace
- Selecting a report suite in Analysis Workspace
- View Analysis Workspace performance metrics
- Create bot reports
- Tips and Tricks
- Navigating Workspace Projects
- Data Dictionary in Analysis Workspace
- Starting your first project
- Training tutorial template
- Use folders in Analysis Workspace
- Copy and insert panels and visualizations
- Create a table of contents
- Right-click for Workspace efficiency
- Keyboard shortcuts
- Annotations
- View density
- Use filters
- Use multi-select drop-down filters
- Real-time reports
- Using Panels
- Using Tables, Visualizations, and Panels in Analysis Workspace
- Quick Insights Panel in Analysis Workspace
- Using the Attribution IQ Panel
- Media Concurrent Viewers Panel in Analysis Workspace
- Media Playback Time Spent Panel
- Using Drop-down Filters
- Using Panels to Organize your Analysis Workspace Projects
- Choose segments for a panel
- Multiple Report Suites in Analysis Workspace
- Next/Previous and Page Summary Workspace Panels & Reports
- Understanding attribution panel and lookback windows
- Building Freeform Tables
- Understand your data–freeform tables
- Use the left rail to build freeform tables
- Easy drag and drop to blank projects
- Work with dimensions in a freeform table
- Work with metrics in a freeform table
- Row and column settings in freeform tables
- Freeform table totals
- Use the freeform table builder
- Right-click for workspace efficiency
- Reorder static rows
- Use Attribution IQ in freeform tables
- Cross-sell analysis
- Freeform table filters
- Time-parting dimensions
- Visualizations
- Visualization types and overview
- Visualization use cases
- Data visualization playbook
- Getting data into visualizations
- Using component drop-downs in Workspace
- Area and area stacked visualizations
- Bar and bar stacked visualizations
- Bullet graph visualization
- Donut visualization
- Histogram visualization
- Unlocking insights with histograms
- Line visualization
- Combo charts
- Adding trend lines to line visualizations
- Map visualization
- Summary number and summary change visualizations
- Key metric summary visualization
- Text visualization
- More than words - Using text visualizations and descriptions
- Scatterplot visualization
- Treemap visualization
- Venn diagram visualization
- Use the cumulative average function to apply metric smoothing
- Flexible layouts
- Changing the scale/axis on visualizations
- Dimension-graph live linking
- Set the granularity for visualizations
- Link inside or outside of your project
- Customize visualization legends
- 100% stacked visualizations
- Table and visualization data source settings
- Build a time-parting heatmap
- Analyzing Customer Journeys
- Applying Segments
- Apply segments to your Analysis Workspace project
- Apply ad hoc segments
- Use different Attribution IQ models with segments
- Choose segments for a panel
- Use segments as Dimensions in Analysis Workspace
- Use segments to limit data in Analysis Workspace
- Quick segments in Analysis Workspace
- Building Customer Journey Segments
- Building Customer Journey Segments - Part 2
- Metrics
- Dimensions
- Calendar and Date Ranges
- Curate and Share Projects
- Attribution IQ
- Using Cross-tab Analysis to Explore Basic Marketing Attribution
- Adding side-by-side comparisons of Attribution IQ Models
- Attribution IQ in Calculated Metrics
- Using Attribution IQ in Freeform Tables
- Using the Attribution IQ Panel
- Using different Attribution IQ models with segments
- Algorithmic Model in Attribution IQ
- Custom Look-back Windows in Attribution IQ
- Cohort Analysis
- Cohort Analysis in Analysis Workspace
- Understand your data–Cohort Tables
- Overview of Cohort Tables
- Cohort Table Settings
- Churn Analysis with Cohort Tables
- Cohort Analysis Using Any Dimension
- Latency Analysis with Cohort Tables
- Calculate Rolling Retention in Cohort Tables
- Use Cohort Analysis to Understand Customer Behavior
- Voice Analytics
- How to Manage and Track Your Voice Assistant App Data
- Understand Differences Across Voice-Enabled Devices
- Finding Opportunities To Increase Engagement for Voice Apps
- Reducing Error Rates and Improving Success Rates in Your Voice App
- Understand User Behavior on Voice Assistants
- Understanding the User’s Voice Journey
- Analysis Workspace Basics
- Administration
- Key Admin Skills
- Creating an empowered community
- Simplify and spend less time training users
- Getting the Right People on Your Analytics Team
- Gaining a seat at the table
- Telling impactful stories with data
- Translating Adobe Analytics technical language in a non-technical way
- Working cross-functionally
- Are you asking the right questions?
- Admin Tips and Best Practices
- Download the implementation playbook
- Audit your data dictionary
- Create standardized naming conventions
- Create standardized code templates
- Create basic videos and training
- Create an internal Adobe Analytics site
- Use a global report suite
- Create a news & announcements project
- Drive success with executive summary dashboards
- Create Operational Dashboards
- Company Settings
- User Management
- Manage Report Suites
- How to Configure General Account Settings
- Customize Calendar Settings
- Configure Paid Search Detection
- Set up marketing channels
- Create marketing channel processing rules
- Manipulating incoming data with Processing Rules
- Configuring Traffic Variables (props)
- Configure traffic classifications
- Configure hierarchy variables
- Configuring Variables in the Admin Console
- Configure conversion classifications
- Configuring List Variables
- Configure Finding Methods
- Set Internal URL Filters
- Configuring Zip and Postal Code Settings
- Enable the Timestamp Optional setting
- Configure bot rules in Analytics
- Data Governance and GDPR
- Traffic Management
- Logs
- Key Admin Skills
- Implementation
- Implementation Basics
- Experience Platform Tags
- Implement Experience Cloud solutions in websites using Tags
- Basic configuration of the Analytics extension
- Configure library management in the Analytics extension
- Configure general settings in the Analytics extension
- Configure global variable settings in the Analytics extension
- Use custom code in the Analytics extension
- Use a data layer to set variables
- Use doPlugins and implementation plug-ins
- Configure easy download link tracking
- Configure easy exit link tracking
- Prepare Tags for your Analytics implementation
- Create data elements for the Analytics implementation
- Create a global page load rule
- Validate the global page load rule
- Create rules for special pages
- Create rules for success events
- Publish Tags libraries to stage and production
- Using JavaScript
- Components
- Segmentation
- Segment builder overview
- Finding and creating segments
- Rolling date ranges in segments
- Segment comparison in Analysis Workspace
- Segment containers
- Segment management and sharing
- Applying segments in Analysis Workspace
- Using segments as dimensions
- Using segments to limit data
- Differences between the segment builder and quick segments
- Sequential segmentation
- Before/After sequences in sequential segmentation
- Segmentation on distinct dimension counts
- Dimension models in segmentation
- Use ‘equals any of’ in segmentation
- Analytics Insider Webinar - Customer Segmentation Strategies
- Now just wait a segment… Using segmentation to discover new insights
- Calculated Metrics
- Calculated metric builder overview
- Calculated metrics - implementation-less metrics
- Calculated metrics - segmented metrics
- Calculated metrics - functions
- Approximate count distinct function in calculated metrics
- Quick calculated metrics in Analysis Workspace
- Manage your calculated metrics
- Attribution IQ in calculated metrics
- Use dimensions in calculated metrics
- Take your data analysis to the next level with calculated metrics
- Classifications
- Virtual Report Suites
- Activity Map
- Segmentation
- Additional Tools
- Exporting
- From the UI
- Data Warehouse
- Data Feeds
- Report Builder
- Upgrade and reschedule workbooks
- Add Segments to Multiple Requests at Once in Report Builder
- Anomaly Detection in Report Builder
- Edit Metrics across Requests
- Using Report Builder to learn the Adobe Analytics API
- Get started with Report Builder
- Schedule a Report Builder request
- Use Report Builder advanced delivery options for Power BI
- Integrations
- Experience Cloud
- Audience Manager
- Target
- Adobe Advertising DSP
- Configuring Advertising Analytics
- Implementing tracking templates into search engines
- Introduction to the Adobe Advertising DSP integration
- Create a Pre-launch campaign analysis
- Report on Advertising DSP marketing channels
- Create Analytics site journey profiles
- Create Analytics segments for activation and reporting
- Create Advertising DSP alerts with Adobe Analytics
- Create Analytics custom metrics with Advertising DSP data
- Create Advertising DSP site entry reports
- Create Advertising DSP dashboards
- Ad Hoc Analytics
- Power BI
- Magento
- Data Science
- Vertical-Specific
- Media Analytics
- Mobile App Analytics
- APIs
- Analysis Use Cases