Configure substring component settings

I’m going to show you a useful feature in Customer Journey Analytics that allows you to do string manipulation so that your dimensions appear as desired in your reports. The feature is called substring component settings. It’s only available on Dimensions and the impact is retroactive to the data it’s applied to. You’ll see an immediate transformation in the report once you apply the setting. This is just one of several ways available to you to transform data coming in from analytics or any other data source bringing in dimension values. Again, we’re not dealing with metrics. I’m showing you a very basic report in Customer Journey Analytics. It has two freeform tables, one with demographic group and the other with URL. Now, what I want to do is group the first freeform table by age range, and then remove the HTTPS protocol portion of the URL from the second freeform table. Here’s how we do that. First I’m going to modify the demographic group component. In the first freeform table titled Age Range, I’m going to select the data view from the list box. Then I’m going to select this pencil icon to edit the data view. Next, I’ll click on the Components link in the top navigation. The components available to the data view display. To easily find the dimension, I’ll use the search box at the top.

Looking at the Dimensions section toward the bottom, I see the filtered list of components that meet the search criteria. I’ll select the first item from the list, which is based on EVAR 11. This is the dimension I want to adjust. When I do this, the right rail displays a section titled Component Settings. And I’m going to collapse, actually, Component Settings. When I do that, I can easily see this section called Set Substring. What I’m going to do is select the check box to the left so that I can see the options I have available to work with. I’ll click on the box below Method. There are six methods available. We have From the Left, From the Right, Delimiter, URL Parse, Trim, and Regex. If you recall, the values and demographic group are delimited by a pipe character with the age range appearing to the left and gender appearing to the right. I want to use just the age range in this component. Given my use case, I’m going to select delimiter. Next, we’ll handle the criterion. So we have From the Left, From the Right, Convert to array. I’ll start the evaluation beginning at the left of the string, so I’m not going to change this setting. Next I’m going to enter the pipe as the delimiter. Last I’ll address the index. I want the first part of the string to the left of the pipe character, so I’ll keep this set to one. All right, now I’m going to save and continue by clicking the command in the upper right corner. This takes me to the settings screen. With the data preview panel on the right, I’m going to select Save and Finish to see how this has impacted the component in my report. Notice the component is updated to reflect the aggregation based on the age range and the metrics are updated accordingly. This is exactly what I wanted to do. All right, let’s do another one. If you recall, I want to remove the HTTPS protocol from the dimensions or the values in the Pages component. I’m going to select the data view item from the list box. And when I mouse over this, I see the pencil icon. This is going to take me to the edit page for this data view. Now I’m going to click on the Components link in the top navigation. To find the dimension easily, I’ll use the search box at the top. Looking at the Dimensions section toward the bottom, we see the filtered list of components that meet the criteria. I’ll select the first item in the list, which is based on webpage details. Again, the right panel displays a section titled Component Settings, and then I’m going to select the checkbox to the left to see the substring options. This time I’m going to use the From the Left method. In the From list I’ll select Position. Now I’m going to enter eight, since it’s the first eight characters I want to remove from the string. Last, I’ll ensure string end is set. Now that I’m done, I’ll select Save and Continue at the top. This takes me to the settings page where I’ll select Save and Finish. All right, now I’m going to review the Pages component to make sure I’m seeing the desired effect, and once again, I’m seeing that. Okay, that concludes my demonstration of using the substrings component setting in Customer Journey Analytics. Give it a try in your projects. Good luck. -