Create a business requirements document create-a-business-requirements-document

Transcript

Hey, everybody, this is Doug. In this video, I want to talk about the BRD, or the Business Requirements Document. This is a document where we actually log what it is that we want to know about our site. Why do we have analytics? What are we tracking on our site? Okay, so you’re going to want to write down the things that you want to know about your site, and again, the reason why you’re using Adobe Analytics. Now, this is a document here that is just a sample document. You can use any document that you want to record this stuff, but I highly recommend that you do write it down. You record it, you think about it, you talk to people. You’re going to want to talk to the people in your organization who need to know stuff about your site and get the business requirements. So, this might be a longer process as you talk to different people in your company, and get the requirements that they might have to know how things are working on your site. And so you’re going to want to write this down. Now, again, this is just a sample document and it’s actually, kind of a mix between a Business Requirements Document and what we will call an SDR, a Solution Design Reference on these other tabs down here. So, we’ll kind of start with this Business Requirements Document and again, you can use something like this or you can use just a Word doc or whatever you want to use to write down the business requirements for your site. And I’ll put a link to this sample on the page. But, it doesn’t matter whatever you use, it should just be good for you and your company to write down these business objectives. Okay. Now the next thing to know is, how do you know what you want to track? Well, we’ve had this conversation with people before which is, they say, “What should we track?” and we’re like, “Well, what do you want to track?” and they say, “Well, how about everything?” And so, if you would like some recommendations you can definitely talk to client care or you can talk to Adobe Consulting, or you can go on our great community and ask what people are tracking, those kinds of things. But, I’m guessing that you at least already have a good idea of the kinds of things that you want to track on your site. And let me kind of show you how I walk through this with customers as we write these down. I’m going to jump over to a couple of sample sites.

And here’s one just a fake site called Geometrix Clothiers. And so, if this were your site, some of the things you might want to track are, things like, you know, which pages, that’s pretty common to every site, of course, which pages people are looking at. You might want to know which sections of your site people are going to. So are they spending more time looking at the Men’s section, or the Women’s section or the Jewelry, the Children, the Home, et cetera. So which sections of the site are they going to the most? Those are some very common traffic questions that most people want answered. And then we start looking at the things that we’re trying to get people to do, other then just click around. So in this case, this is a shopping site. So for sure on this site, we’re going to want to know what people buy. So if we go to a product page and they add it to cart and they walk through the process and they purchase it. So that would be on there where we definitely want to know what people are buying and what are they adding to their cart and those kinds of things. Now, if you’re not a retail site, of course, you’re going to have other things on your site that you want them to do. It might be to sign up for something, it might be register, it might be apply for something, it might be fill out a form, it might be watch a video, whatever it is you’re going to want to know what those things are and write those down. On this site, for example, there’s some other things like, apply for a credit card, or book some travel, or sign up for a newsletter, et cetera. So, there are a couple of other things on this site that we’ll write down momentarily. But again it’s up to what you have on your site. So, walk around you site and say, "Oh yeah, I’d really like to know "if people are going to this area or that area. "Are they doing this thing, “are they doing that thing?”, et cetera. Here’s another example. This is a travel site. So, I want to know what sections they’re going to, what pages they’re going to. I want to know if they log in. I want to know if they register. I want to know if they share. I want to know what they’re looking for, so I’m probably going to put, you know, the From cities, I’m going to put the To cities, I mean, I might put the dates, but I don’t know, do we need to know that? Maybe, cause maybe we want to know that people are booking more in the summer. When they’re actually looking for flights, et cetera. So, those are great things. There’s a lot on this, of course, you want to know. If people are looking at different offers and are they clicking on them and are they booking them and those kinds of things. So, you might have a very complicated site or you might have a simple site. But just go through and write those things down. Talk to people in your organization and then write those down in the BRD. Let’s go back. Okay, so for example, I might just write something like, track pages. I’m going to track page sections, and we often call those site sections, in analytics. I might even want to track internal search. So, what are they looking for when they come to my site. I have a little search bar, there. And then for shopping cart stuff I’m going to track product views, cart adds, I mean I could put this on different lines, of course. In fact maybe I will. So I’m just going to say, for now I’m going to track product views, track cart adds. I should capitalize, if I’m going to capitalize some of 'em.

Track purchases, and then we also said we were going to track credit card applications.

So when they apply for a credit card. And again, of course, this could go on and on but that’s good for now in this example. And then you can fill out anything you want around 'em. For this example, you know, you could say, oh this is content category and that’s the same as well. And you could say this is search, and this is shopping cart. And you could go down through this and do that, and so, this is credit card. So anyway, it depends on how much information you want on here, the main thing really is that you start off by getting those requirements down. Now in the next step, we’re actually going to map that to the variables that we have available to us. So you’ll see that over here on this section, we can start to identify, well, are we going to have that in event over here? Are we going to an eVar? Which reports is that going to populate? You know, are we going to use props? Implementation status, you can have any of that in here, but again, I think the main thing to start off with is just at least getting the business requirements down. And then the next step will be mapping it over to the individual variables. So anyway, that’s a quick look at the BRD. Definitely take the time to write down your business requirements and then we’ll worry about how we’re going to grab them and how we’re going to put them into variables. Good Luck.