Skill Exchange Event Aug 2023 - Grow Track - Experience Makers Spotlight

Transcript

Hello, I am Kaya Walton and today we’re going to jump into the wonderful world of segments in Adobe Analytics. But first, a few things about myself. I am the Director of Analytics for Voice of America, a US federal agency that broadcasts news around the world. I have the privilege of working with newsrooms and journalists that publish content in over 40 languages and reach millions of people. I’m a proud alumna of the University of Maryland system, go Terps and retrievers, and right now I’m obsessed with all things Women’s World Cup. Today’s session is all about segments. We will introduce you to what segments are, why they’re important, and we’ll walk you through how to create and share segments. Finally, we will go through some examples of what kind of segments you can use in your organization. Let’s start with understanding what segments are. Segments are a group of site visitors based on certain characteristics or actions. They are important because they can help you understand whether events on your website or digital platforms are caused by a particular audience. Does today’s surge in traffic caused by search, social media, or something else? They can also give you insights into which strategies work for your website or digital platforms. How well did a marketing campaign do in generating sales or traffic is a great example of that. They can also serve as indicators of anomalies that are affecting your data. If a country is blocking your website, you can use segments to isolate traffic and other key performance indicators to that country to see what’s going on. There are three levels of segment containers. These levels determine the scope of what Adobe Analytics should include in the data when you apply that segment. The first one is hit containers. These containers are the most narrow and will let you isolate events based on specific conditions. You can see how many site entries use a specific tracking code or how many orders use a particular coupon. Visit containers will include all of the events that happened during the session, even if the condition only calls one of those events or attributes to be true. For example, if you want to understand what visitors did after landing on your site or using a specific tracking code, you’ll have to set segment container to visits. Visitor container will include the comprehensive history of the visitors that qualify for your segment condition. So if you’re searching for visitors who came to the website because of social media, you can set the segment container to visitor and get data on every visit, every event associated with that visitor. So let’s learn how to build segments. Before we jump into segments, the first thing we need to learn is operators. Operators allows us to define the conditions that we want to apply to our data so we can narrow down our audience. There are different operators depending on the element you’re trying to use. The first type is standard operators. These operators can be used to constrain any dimension, segment, or metric event. Some of my frequently used standard operators are equals if I want the element to be the exact match to the value I’m looking for, contains if I want a partial match to my input value, contains any of if I have a list of input values that I want the segment to capture any element that contains one or more of those values. You can also use these operators to exclude any matches by selecting the operators that say does not. For example, does not equal or does not contain. There are special operators that will identify data where the element just exists. So if I want to segment the audience that viewed a video, I can set up a segment where video plays exist. Match operators can also pinpoint data rows with exact matches. But in this case, you can use an asterisk to represent any words or characters. This is especially helpful if you need words in a specific sequence. For example, if you want to search for product pages for toothpaste, but there are different flavors in between the brand name and toothpaste on the page title, you can set up the segment to say brand name asterisk toothpaste. So all toothpaste pages like brand name mint toothpaste or brand name bubblegum toothpaste can be included. Data and distinct count operators can be used to narrow down the count or numeric value to create the segment. For example, if I want to create a segment for new visitors to my website, I can create a segment where the visit number equals one. Distinct count operators can be used when you’re trying to constrain the audience pool based on a particular count of a dimension. If I want to find visitors who viewed more than one video or orders that browse more than five products, I can use these operators to create that segment. Now that you know how to leverage operators to define your segments, let’s start building. The fastest way to build and apply a segment in Workspace is through Quick Segments. You can click on the funnel icon at the top left of the panel and it will open into this Quick Segment section. You’ll need to name the Quick Segment, define the level of container you want to use, and drag and drop dimensions or metrics into the segment. In this case, I’m trying to create a segment of mobile visitors from the United States. I had the option of dropping the country dimension and typing United States in the input level, but a quick way to do that is to go into the country dimension and find United States and drop that into the Quick Segment section. I also wanted to isolate this to mobile users only, so I added another dimension that looked into the mobile device type items and dropped mobile phone into the segment. When I hit apply, it will update the data with this particular segment. If I found this too limiting, I can always click on the open builder button to go to the segment builder. Speaking of, there are also other ways to find a segment builder. You can find it under the components dropdown navigation, or if you click on the plus button above the segment section on the component list on the left, that will direct you to the segment builder. The first step is to select the report suite. This usually defaults to the most current report suite you have used. You can change it if you want this segment to default to a particular report suite, but you can still use this segment on other report suites with your instance as long as you have access to it. Then we set a name for the segment. I try to be as descriptive but concise when it comes to titles. I can always add more information to the other parts of the segment. Our organizations also use prefix terms to organize segments, so if a segment is only going to be used in the short term, we will ad hoc or campaign to the beginning of the title. If it’s something that should be used organization-wide, we will add general to the title. This is entirely up to your organization, but it helps keep segments organized if you have some governance before you jump in. The description is where I add more information that I could not include in the title. It could include details about the different containers in the definition that might not be straightforward. I also put notes with dates whenever I update the segment. I really leverage this space to help with the continuity just in case someone needs to come in after me and make changes. Tags are a great way to organize your segments. This is another section where some governance might be helpful to develop with other folks in your organization so it does not become messy. I will guarantee that you and your colleagues will build a lot of segments, so the more segments there are, the more important tags become in finding the segments you need to use. So, it is time to define your segment. This is the space where you can create different conditions to constrain the audience to the ones you are specifically looking for. The first part is to define what the level is for your entire segment. Is it a hit segment? Do you want to capture all of the visits or visitors? You can then drag and drop dimensions, metrics, and other segments into the definition section. Don’t forget to set the connecting operators. If you want all of the conditions met, use AND. If you want at least one condition met, you can use OR. In some cases, you might need to cluster conditions because you need at least one of those conditions met, but you’ll need to pair it up with a condition that is required for that segment. You can use nested segments to make this happen. If you click on the options button on the top right, there is an option to add a container. You can also use this dropdown to exclude a condition. That will create a separate box where you can drag and drop dimensions, metrics, and segments. Side note, when you drop a segment into the definition, Adobe Analytics will automatically create that segment as a container. Clicking on the container icon on the top right will let you select the level of the container. If you click on the gear icon, it will drop down to options where you can add a container within the container. You can also set the conditions in the container to be excluded. You can set a name for the container. You can also delete the container using this dropdown. Clicking on the X on the right of each condition will delete the condition, so be careful. You can also set the attribution model for that particular condition. Attribution models are only available for dimensions. Repeating, which is the default setting, will include any hits for that specified dimension, even those who are set to that dimension until a specific expiration date. Elements removes the persistent values, which are the instances where the dimension is set to stay the same until it expires. Non-repeating only looks for unique instances. Once you’ve set the definition, the graph on the top right will update to give you an estimate of how many unique visitors, visits, and page views will apply to the segment. This is a really great tool to assess whether you’ve set up the segment correctly. Usually, if the graph is set to zero across KPIs, you may need to re-evaluate the conditions in your segment. Publishing the segment to the Experience Cloud will allow you and other users in your Adobe Analytics organization to access this segment and other Experience Cloud tools like Audience Manager, Advertising Cloud, and Adobe Target. Once a segment is published in the Experience Cloud, it is also added to the Audience Library where you can tie it to other Experience Cloud tools. You can finish creating the segment by clicking on the Save button. If you changed your mind, you can hit Cancel and go back to the Segment Manager. So far, we’ve only talked about segments that narrow the audience down based on specific conditions. What if we want them to meet these conditions but in the specific order? Say hello to sequential segments. Segmental segments let you set these conditions to be met in a specific order. In this case, you want any visitor that came to a website via a search engine and then watched a video. You can also limit the audience based on the sequence when the sequence happened. Everyone is any data that matches the sequence. Using our original example, let’s say Person A arrived from search, went through different pages, and then watched a video. All of those events, including leading up to watching the video, will count in the sequential segment. If we select Only Before Sequence, you’ll only see the events that happened before Person A watched the video. If we select Only After Sequence, we will only see the events that happened after Person A watched the video. You can also set date ranges to the sequence to limit them to a particular audience. If I select After and set date range to one week, this segment will only include any instance where video play happened after at least one week. If I select Within and set the date range to one hour, this segment will include any instance where video play happened within one hour of arriving on the website via a search engine. A quick shortcut I like to use when building sequential segments is through fallout visualizations. I drop a fallout into Workspace and set up the different conditions of my sequential segment. Once I’ve completed the last step, I right-click the last bar and select Create a Segment from this touchpoint, and it will open Segment Builder with a sequential definition filled out. You can stack segments in Workspace. This is the quickest way to apply both segments to the panel. This functions as if you’re using an AND operator. If you want more flexibility in setting up stacked segments, I suggest you use the Segment Builder. I have mentioned Segment Manager a few times now, so let me walk you through that. When you click on Segments under the Components menu, it will direct you to the Segment Manager. This is where you’ll find all of the segments created in your organization that you have access to. You can add a new segment by clicking the Add button on the top. If you know the name or keywords associated with the segment you’re looking for, you can search for that in the search bar. You can sort segments based on the headers. The information for each segment includes the name and description of the segment. You can only sort by the name. The default report suite associated with the segment. The owner or the person who originally created the segment. The segment tags with whom the segment is shared with. Is it published to the marketing cloud? And when was it last modified? You can click on the checkbox in the header to select all segments. Tread carefully when you use that. All of the segments in your organization are listed here. You can select one or more to edit those segments. Clicking on the star will mark it as one of your favorite segments. A check next to the segment means it has been approved. The little box icon means it has been shared with someone else. The menu on the left are filters you can use to narrow down the list of segments based on the criteria that you’re looking for. You can narrow down by tag, report suite, owners. When you select one or more segments, additional icons show up on the top to help you manage them. Clicking on the tag icon lets you edit the tags associated with the selected segments. I’m going to skip the share button for now, but I want to talk about that in depth in a second. The delete button lets you remove the segment. If you want to change the name of the segment, click on the rename button. It will make the segment title editable. The approve unapproved button is only available to Adobe Analytics administrators, and this is a great way to indicate if segments can be used agency wide. We talked about the need for governance, and you can use this feature to show users which segments they can use that follow the organization’s definition of that audience. This is incredibly helpful, especially when other users use the same name or try to create duplicate segments. If you want to duplicate the segment and make changes to it, you can click on the copy icon. You can export a list of the selected segments into a CSV file by clicking on the export to CSV icon. So let’s go back to sharing. The share icon lets you give other users access to use the segment. Why is this important? It goes back to governance. Sharing segments lets you standardize the definition of specific audiences. By allowing them to access approved segments, other users can use the segment in their workspace projects, or even apply them to their segments. Every time you update that segment, it updates all of the projects where that segment has been applied. Unfortunately, it does not update segments if other users apply them to their own segment. When you click on that icon, you get this window. You can quickly share the segment with everyone who has access to Adobe Analytics in your organization. You can also select specific user groups or users to access the segment. Now that you know how to build and manage these segments, let’s go over how you can use them in Workspace. We have talked about quick segments before. This is great if you’re just creating a segment on the fly without needing to save it for the long term. You can drag and drop segments to the top of the panel. If you use more than one, it stacks them as if you’re looking for the data that applies to all of the segments. If you want to remove a segment, simply hover over it and click on the X. You can also create a dropdown if you want quick access to the segments that apply to the panel. Hold down the shift button as you drop the segments at the top of the panel. This automatically creates an option for null filter. You can select the segments by clicking on the dropdown button. You can also remove segments from the dropdown by clicking on the X. You can add segments to the top of the freeform table under a metric to apply the segment to that metric. You can add more than one by dragging another segment to the left or right of the segment that’s already there. If you want to replace the segment with another, drag the segment on top of the existing one. You can even rearrange the order of the segments. Again, if you change your mind and want to remove a segment from the table column, simply click on the X. You can also apply segments as data rows by dropping them into the body of a freeform table. You can add as many segments as you want. If you want to remove one or more, you can node the icon to use. You can even use segments to break down dimension items. Drag the segment to a specific data row and break down that dimension item for the segment you selected. By now, you should be experts on how to create and manage and apply these segments. So what kind of segment should you be building? It really depends on your organization and its goals. The best thing about segments in Adobe Analytics is that they’re so versatile that you can start with a question related to your business needs and answer that with at least one segment and a report. You can slice and dice your data based on visitor attributes. For example, your mobile app has a tendency to crash and you’ve been tasked to provide insights on what developers should fix first. You can create a segment based on visits to your mobile app and apply that to a table that breaks down crashes by device or operating system. This will help you identify the devices that are more prone to causing crashes so developers can look into those for potential fixes. Your marketing managers want to know whether it’s worth focusing on customer retention instead of acquisition. So you can create two segments, one for new visitors and one for returning. You can apply these segments to compare the average number of items per order. At our organization, we get blocked by governments all the time in limited media markets. Usually we’ll get a report from in-country and we’ll have to verify using analytics to see if this is true. So I create a segment from all visits from the country or countries in that newsroom’s target markets. Then I apply that to a visualization that breaks down visits over time. I also like breaking it down by country segment or region segment so I get more details about the block. Segments can also be based on actions. The user experience team wants to know if certain platforms or devices have a higher tendency to generate incomplete transactions. This would be where sequential segments can be used to include the different instances where the customer could jump off the transaction process. You can then apply that segment to a device freeform table to see if there are issues specific to one or more devices. So let’s say your website team wants to know what kind of content they should feature first on the site search result pages. You can create a segment where at least one site search query was completed and apply that to a table broken down by content type or use that segment as a data row and apply content consumption metrics like article views or video plays as columns. Another example is your shipping and handling team wants to see if they can increase shipping costs for your products. They want to know what the upper limit is of what they can charge before that significant number of customers leave checkout. This is where a stack segment comes in and you can create a segment where the exit page is the checkout page and the transaction was not complete. You can then apply that to a table of shipping costs associated with the transaction. Traffic sources are another great basis for creating segments. So let’s say your SEO wants to know what products get the most orders from search traffic. You can create a segment that captures search as a referrer type. Then you can use that segment to report that shows the different products and the respective number of orders. The homepage editor wants to know if the visitors that entered through the homepage ever played the featured video. I would create a segment where the landing page is the homepage and use that as a data row with video plays as a metric column. The shipping example we used in the previous slide is another great example of using segments based on traffic sources. So as you can see segments are a great way to slice and dice your data for meaningful and actionable information. Creating segments can be easy. You can use quick segments and fallout visualizations to make simple segments. If you want to build more robust segments, the segment builder is a great tool to narrow down the data. Sharing segments is a great way to get everyone who uses Adobe Analytics on the same page and save you from so much clutter in the segment manager. Segments can also be very versatile when you apply them to workspace projects because they can be based on attributes, events, or other variables. Thank you so much for joining me in learning about segments and I hope you found it useful. Hey Kayla, nice to see you. Thanks for joining us live. Hey Brad, hi everyone. Hey, hey. All right, let’s get into our last and final Q&A session of the day. All right, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Our first question is from Inderpreet. I think he might have been our all-star today on questions. So Inderpreet, gold star for you. Could you please explain how to decide the level of container, whether hit visit or visitor? And would it be helpful if you gave us an example too, if Inderpreet helps us out on that? All right. Great question. So hit will only capture the instance when the segment conditions or segment can, yeah, all the segment conditions happen. So I’m going to use the example of if you’re directing people to your homepage using a specific tracking code, hit level will only track the entries at that particular point. Visits using a visit container will capture all of the event during the session, that particular session. So if you want to track what happened after people landed with that tracking code, landed on your homepage, you should use container. If you want to track the history of that visitor after they’ve used that specific tracking code, even after their first visit, you should use the visitor container to be able to get the history and understand how they interact with your website or your digital platform, even after landing on your homepage through that specific tracking code. Got it, got it, got it. Another container question here. Okay. How important is setting up the container level to create a segment? So that’s very important. Container levels actually set the parameters of your segment. So like I talked about, if you want to know the complete history or just the specific session or just that particular moment, those containers can determine what type of data you’re going to be collecting based on when you apply that segment. So scope, you have to think about the scope first, understand that before creating your segment and setting that container level. Got it, got it. Okay. Can you use regular expressions in segment conditions? All right. That’s a really good question. So it’s very limited. The only character you can use is what we call wild card or it’s the asterisk for everybody else that represents either one character or set of characters. And it’s only available if you use the match operator. So you have to set it to either matches or does not match. Okay, cool. If I use another segment in my segment, will that update automatically or how does that work? Unfortunately, no, it will save the settings of that segment when you first added it to your segment or any other workspace asset. So if you own both and you know you’ve made changes on the original segment, you’ll have to go back to the second or the new segment and then refresh the original segment. This is why governance is really, really important, especially if you have other users working with the same segments, because once they update something, you’ll have to go back to the other segments or other assets that use that and update those. Okay. Okay. That makes sense. If I delete a segment that is shared with other people, will it affect projects that use that segment? It does not. So Adobe Analytics will retain that segment and it will continue to run on any segments or workspace projects that use that old segment. Again, I cannot stress enough using the documentation or the data dictionary to help track all these embedded segments. Complicated segments are totally okay. That’s why Adobe Analytics lets us use that feature. But it’s really important to have that documentation to keep those notes. As someone who works in an organization with a mother agency and five different sub-agencies, it can get super chaotic. Having as much metadata as possible is important. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Audience, if you have any more questions, feel free to write us in because Kay is an expert here. How long have you been using Adobe Analytics for, years-wise? I don’t want to date myself. A very, very long time ago, before it was even called Adobe Analytics. I’ll just leave it as that. All right. All right. A few of you out in the crowd that can be in that same time frame. To the Jeff, Mandys, and Gens of the world, we’d love to have you as a part of our group. All right. On to the next question. Is there a way to look at the change history of a segment? There are actually two paths to this. If you’re an admin, the way to do this is going through the logs and looking up segment updates under the usage and access logs. Standard users unfortunately do not have access to this, so you can either talk to your organization admin or work with your organization to maintain notes in the description of your segments. The quick way before you get in touch with your organization admin is to look at the date modified in the segment builder or the segment manager and be able to see when was the last, when was it created and when was the last time it was edited, but you can always talk to your organization admins to give you that information. Awesome. Okay. Switching gears a little bit, I got a question for you. All right. You know, as a member and I am the leader of the Adobe Analytics champion program, what do you say for those folks that are striving to become a champion in the future? What are the things that you’ve done or your acts of advocacy to be labeled as an Adobe champion? Ooh, that is a really great question. So one advocating for the use of Adobe Analytics in your organization. For me working at VOA, it’s really all about understanding the data, understanding your audience and helping the people, the staff, my editorial staff or newsrooms understand what the data is telling you about your audience and then teaching them how to get that from Adobe Analytics. The other thing too is participate in the community. I think even before I was champion, Experience League is such a great community. It’s not just being able to ask questions and get those answers, but also just to learn from different experts from different industries and fields. As someone who’s not necessarily in e-commerce, I learned a lot from other champions and other people on Experience League that dabble in it. And I hope that they also get to learn something from me as a content publisher and not as an e-commerce person. And so it’s really all about building community and advocating for a data-driven strategy. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So for all of you future champions out there, you know who to connect with on LinkedIn now, right? That’s what I’m saying. All right, next question. What path would you suggest to become an expert in Adobe Workspace? So there, Experience League, we cannot stress enough the documentation there. There’s also video training. We’ve mentioned earlier that there’s an Adobe Analytics YouTube channel if you’re more of a visual learner. And so, and just diving in, if you have access to Workspace, and I’m a big fan of kinesthetic learning, being able to just experiment and understand, start first with a question. So if you want to understand who’s my audience, where do they come from, and then try to figure out what variables and dimensions you can use to answer that question, that’s the best way to learn. As much as I love documentation and videos, it’s always the experience and trials and errors that get me through learning how to use a particular platform. Cool. All right, well, those are all the questions that we have for today. So thank you so much for being with us and look forward to seeing you on the next one. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.