User interface basics - May 2023 APAC Adobe Analytics Skill Exchange

Transcript

Welcome to the Skill Exchange. This is Ashok Gauravadi. I’m a senior PM for Adobe Analytics, here to lend you a brief introduction to Adobe Analytics and Analysis Workspace. This track is intended for people just starting out on their exciting Adobe Analytics journey. And by the end of the session, you will have familiarized yourself with the analytics user interface. You’ll be able to start creating your first analysis workspace project. And you will learn more about the different building blocks like data tables, visualizations, and panels that will help you translate data into meaningful insights. This is the Getting Started segment of the track. And my colleagues Maria and Jennifer are waiting in the wings to continue your learning path with the analyzing the data and the putting it all together segments in due course. So, let’s get started, shall we? The goals of the session are simple. It’s intended to kickstart your learning path in analytics. We will have barely scratched the surface of everything you can do in the analysis workspace. But you will be armed and ready to rumble by the time you’re done exploring some of the fundamental aspects and concepts of the workspace. We won’t really delve into advanced topics like implementation or APIs or processing rules and such. Since the good news is that those concepts can totally wait until you get a hang of the reporting interface and are hungry to learn more and be the analytics expert at your company. If you are somebody that has never used Adobe Analytics and are looking to get started, then that’s absolutely perfect. Because this right here is square one and the start of a hopefully fruitful data-driven journey as you discover the sheer power and flexibility that the workspace has to offer to make data bend to your will. So, yeah. What is analytics? It’s obviously more than a fleeting business buzzword. In this day and age of hyper-personalization and consumer and customer choice, analytics is a table stakes prerequisite for improving customer experiences. You can only, obviously, improve what you can measure. And analytics is the arsenal that lets you track customer behavior and activity across touchpoints in order to both improve their experience as well as influence the business outcomes you’re after. Data and insights are the lifeblood of business intelligence. And it’s this intelligence that can help you analyze user activity right down to the granularity you seek. You can learn from your past efforts so you can tweak your optimization strategies or channel your advertising spend to avenues that offer the most promise. Analytics is also central to efforts that are squarely aimed at customer conversion and retention and definitely an input to your efforts to engage and delight your customers. So, yeah. In a nutshell, analytics is what separates those businesses that play from those that actually win. So, yeah. Before we get to Adobe Analytics and Analysis Workspace, it’s essential that we get super comfortable with some of the basic reporting terms that are fundamental to being able to use and make sense of data in Adobe Analytics. Everything you do in Workspace will rely on a combination of one or more of these building blocks or components as they’re referred to in Workspace land. The first would be metrics. They are simply quantitative measures of your user or customer activity. This is the component that helps you answer the how many question. Like, for instance, how many page views or purchases or cart editions do you have? These are often counters that get incremented every time a specific activity is performed on one of your digital properties. You can use metrics to quantify something, like how many mobile users from the UK did we have in the second quarter. You can use them to compare two different datasets, like how did purchases on the mobile app compare to purchases on the website last week. You can also use metrics to do historical comparisons. Like, for instance, answer questions like, was there an uptick in revenue after we revamped our lifestyle section of the site? The second of your data building blocks is what we call dimensions. These are non-numeric descriptors you can use to slice and dice your way through your data. This is the component that helps you answer the who, the what, and the which types of questions. Like, for instance, which pages contributed the most to your page views for the month of August? Some typical dimensions include page names, products, marketing channels, campaigns, and so on. The third component that rounds out the trio of fundamental components are segments. These are powerful components in that they can help you apply a custom lens to your data. You can segment your data to get to a subset of visitors or visitor behavior on your site that meet a set of rules or criteria that you define. Segments are incredibly useful and they help you answer such questions as, did visitors from California submit more orders in the month of June than those from Texas? In fact, any example I can come up with will fall short of the sheer flexibility that segments offer you. And if you have mastered segments, trust me, you are well on your way to being an analytics expert. So you probably noticed how I made a distinction between Adobe Analytics and Analysis Workspace. And this is why. Adobe Analytics is the collective term for a bunch of tools that help you collect, process, analyze, and share data. Whereas Workspace is the interface where you would spend most of your time if you’re analyzing data. On the data collection side, you may eventually start getting familiar with Launch, which is how you get tags on your properties and start sending in data in a format that is tailored for your business. You may also start using Adobe Data Connectors or data insertion APIs to send in data to be collected and analyzed in Workspace. Apart from Workspace, there are a couple of ways for you to interact with our data. One of them is the Reports tool, which is a separate section within Analytics, but will be folded into the Analysis Workspace section as part of a transition that will take effect next year. Then by way of methods you can use to export data, you have Report Builder, which is our popular Excel plugin that lets you create and update reports directly in your spreadsheets. There’s also some advanced data export tools like Data Warehouse and Data Feeds that will let you get data out and into other tools like Power BI and so on. You don’t have to worry about any of those other tools or methods for the duration of the session, since we are going to focus exclusively on Analysis Workspace. So getting to Analytics and Analysis Workspace, you will log in via the Experience Cloud. You will need to have your admin create an account for you. You can either log in using your username and password, or if your Analytics instance is set up for SSO, then it’s as easy as logging into your SSO provider. You will need to create your own password in this case. Once you log in, you will land on the Experience Cloud homepage, from where you can navigate to the Analytics instance and then Analysis Workspace. Workspace is an incredibly powerful, suitably flexible data analysis and report creation engine. If you can pardon my immodesty, it is one of the best tools out there for crunching through unimaginable volumes of data, without breaking a sweat or breaking out your SQL or Python skills. It is a combination of multiple features and options like freeform tables, cohort analysis, attribution modeling and navigation padding that you can use to both make sense of your data, as well as distill your understanding into insights that can then be easily distributed across your org. There is no sampling, in that your big picture analysis is based on the full story, and it’s all hosted on the web, so you don’t have to run pesky local editions of the tool. It may take a minute for you to get familiar with the feature-rich interface and get a handle on all the questions Workspace can help you answer. But once you do it, it will become, I promise you, as second nature as any other productivity or communication tool you use in the course of your day. As you get started in Workspace, you can begin with reports, which have pre-built instances of projects fueled by out-of-the-box components. Reports are a quick and easy way for you to get instantaneous value out of Workspace. You have a selection of multiple reports categorized under the engagement, conversion, audience and acquisition buckets. These are similar in spirit to the reports you get to see in something like Google Analytics, if that’s what you’re transitioning from. Once you get a hang of reporting that’s available in Analytics throughout this section, you can then move on to projects, which would allow you to build your own data tables and add visualizations to answer your own business questions. First things first, like I said before, reports used to be a separate section within Analytics, but are now being folded into Workspace. To get to the version of Workspace that will be accessible to all our users starting December, I’d recommend that you turn on the New Landing Page option to get a head start on projects. That way, you’ll be working off of the eventual incarnation of Workspace right off the bat. This is what the Workspace Landing Page looks like. We are constantly at work trying to make this as useful, personalized and delightful as possible. So look out for incremental improvements to this page as you start using it. Like I said, this is how you’d get to those pre-built reports with out-of-the-box components. If you want to get familiar with Workspace and everything it has to offer, you can access the Learning section that would link you to a ton of videos to guide you through various features, functions and use cases that Workspace has to offer. The Learning section is an incredibly handy source for Workspace training you can get through at your own pace. The Landing Page will display a bunch of projects that you created, or those that were created by other users at your company, and were then shared with you. Depending on your permissions, you can create a project and share it with everyone at your company, in which case it’ll show up in this list for every user. You can search for projects by name, or use filters to hone in on a collection of projects that meet a certain criteria. You can start a project so it appears under your favorites, you can delete, share or rename a project from right within the dashboard. You can also create a copy without ever opening the original version, and then work off the copy if you do not want to make changes to the underlying project. You can also pin projects so they appear at the top of the table always. If the columns in the dashboard aren’t doing it for you, you can customize it so the table only includes those columns and labels that make sense to you. Like I said earlier, the Report section is a really handy shortcut to actual reporting in Analytics. You can quickly load up these reports for a seamless introduction to Analytics, even as you’re getting a hang of Workspace. There’s also a training tutorial you can access that’s really nifty. You can use the tutorial that includes simple step-by-step instructions on using and understanding data, adding visualizations and building your first project. I’d highly recommend that you start with reports and then move on to the training tutorial and follow along to build your very first reporting instance. I know we took the scenic route to get here, but finally, here’s how you’d create a project. No surprises, obviously, you’d click the Create Project option from within the landing page. You can also create a project intended for the Adobe Analytics mobile app that offers an experience that is tailored to business users and execs that need to consume insights off of a mobile app, but that can come later. Let’s dive in to see how you’d create a project we consumed on the desktop. So yeah, you’d click Create Project, select Workspace Project, and then the first thing you’d do is select a report suite. We’ll see what report suites are in a minute, but you’ll select one and that’s it. You can start dragging and dropping components onto their rightful places and sections in the project and you’re well underway. Just a quick detour to learn more about report suites. Think of report suites as the equivalent to a view in Google Analytics, for those of you familiar with GA. It is at its most fundamental a collection of data you can use to build your workspace projects. When you tag your sites or apps or send data in via the data insertion APIs, you will direct all of that data to a report suite and that is what you will use to build a project. Report suites are typically set up and configured during the implementation phase. So for those of you that are going to operate at the business end of the tool, you do not need to worry too much about them. Except to the extent that you need to know which reports to use and also to begin your analysis by first selecting the right report suite. So once you’ve selected a report suite, you can dive right into creating your workspace project. You can absolutely trial and error your way to populating data tables and connecting visualizations and adding commentary and so on. Or you can spend just a little while on the learning tab we were looking at earlier to get a hang of the features, options and ideal navigation techniques to make the most of workspace. Like I said, workspace is a bit of a blank canvas so you can totally paint your data masterpiece as long as you get used to some of its whims and quirks. This is a snapshot of the menu options you would find within the project which I’m sure you’ll quickly get familiar with. Moving on, just like metrics, dimensions and segments are the three basic building blocks you would combine to answer a specific business question, panels, visualizations and components are the three basic building blocks you would use to construct your project. You can think of panels as the pages within your project. These pages would in turn contain data tables that are made up of components and also visualizations that help illustrate or simplify the information that you’re trying to present to your viewers. Like they say, a great data is worth a thousand data rows. Ah, wall of text. Sorry about that. Ah, wall of text. Sorry about that. But I just wanted to list all the different panels you can use to lend structure and definition to your project. 7 times out of 10 you’d be using a blank panel to add tables and visualizations. But please don’t lose sight of some of the other panels that are available, especially the quick insights panel that is really popular with users. Just starting out on their workspace journey. Quick insights, like some of the other panels listed here, has a really helpful fill in the blank structure you could use to query your data without having to contend with the ton of options that might be a bit confusing for the untrained eye. So, step 4, after you click through create new project, you select a report suite and choose a panel to structure your data would be to choose your components. All the components contained in the report suites are listed along a left navigation pane within the project and are neatly divvied up across one of four categories. Dimensions, these are usually the rows in the data table. Metrics, these are usually the columns. And then segments and date ranges. Segments and date ranges are the lengths or the constraints you would apply to your table to lend more definition or get to a more or less granular view of your data. I’m sure you would have a lot of fun dragging and dropping your way to glory. Step 5, after you click through from the landing page, select a report suite, choose a panel and add components in various combinations that make sense to you. All that’s left is to add a visualization or 10 to really make your data talk and tell a story. You have no shortage of WIS types to choose from. In fact, you can choose from 21 different visualization types on offer to you within Workspace. We do keep adding to the list so that the number is only going to get bigger, all in service of the storyteller in you. It might seem a bit expansive and open ended at the beginning, but once you get a hang of it, Analysis Workspace can be just the tool you’re looking for to better understand and optimize your customer journeys. Just a side note on the learning tab we were looking at earlier on the homepage. If you are somebody just starting out on your Workspace journey, the learning tab is a nifty resource full of best practices and hard-won wisdom. These are bite-sized videos and user guides that you can keep coming back to as you get started, as you get going and get really good at making your data to all the talking in Workspace. Another great source of hands-on learning is the training tutorial. You can get to the tutorial project via both Workspace and the report section. What it is, is a Workspace project that includes instructions on building your first analysis. It starts off with the very basics. By the end of the tutorial, you would have created a project that includes freeform tables, visualizations, as well as slightly more advanced customer journey analysis tools like flow, fallout and cohort analysis. We highly, highly recommend that you start your Workspace journey by first test driving the tutorials project. So yeah, let me leave you with a sneak peek of Analysis Workspace by giving you a quick demo. So guys, this is how you’d get into Adobe Analytics. On the experience cloud login page, you insert your Adobe ID or login via a single sign on if your org is set up for it. You’d enter your password and be taken to the experience cloud landing page. This right here is the experience cloud landing page and you would navigate to analytics from here. This is the Workspace home page I was talking about and this is where you would come in and choose the new landing page options. So you’re presented with the experience that would be common across all our users starting December next year when we finally retire the report section and fold that into Workspace. This is the Workspace landing page that lets you access all the projects that you have access to, the projects that you have created, the projects that have been shared with you. These are the reports and learning tabs that you can access to get to pre-canned reports under the report section as well as the learning tutorials and video guides to help you get started on Workspace if you’re just getting started. Going back to projects, this is how you would create a Workspace project. You’d click on the blank project link and you’d be dropped on the blank canvas. This is the left nav that will let you access the metrics, dimensions, segments and the date ranges that you’d use to build your project. This right here is the report suite selector and this would include a list of all the report suites that you have access to based on the permissions that your admin has entitled you to. I’m going to choose a report suite and that will determine the components that are listed for me in the left nav. I’m going to drag one metric, any metric, I’m going to look for views. Drag the metric onto the drop zone in the panel. You’ll see that the table has defaulted to date. That is what it would default to if you only drag a metric without adding a dimension to the table. I’m going to see if I can drag a dimension onto the table just so I can see page views broken down by the most popular pages that drove traffic to my site. I drag the page dimension, which like we discussed are the rows. Then I see a list of the top pages that drove the most traffic to my site in terms of page views. Say for instance, I want to see all the page views that can be attributed to people visiting my site from a mobile device. I can drag the segment onto the canvas and the lens is applied. What I’m looking at are those page views and the top pages that can be attributed to mobile customers. You can also apply, like we discussed, date ranges to your heart’s content to arrive at a view that is as granular as you want it to be. So yeah, that’s a demo of Workspace and once you get started with the tutorial, training tutorial, you should be get going with creating projects in no time. Again, for those of you familiar with Workspace to an extent, I’m sorry if I bored you guys to death. But for those of you starting out or those of you that are yet to have a taste of Adobe Analytics or Analysis Workspace, trust me, what we went through so far and what Jennifer and Maria will go through in the course of the rest of the session may seem a bit simplistic or basic, but I cannot overstate how fundamental these concepts are and how everything else you do with analytics will rest on this foundation. Good luck and Godspeed. Really looking forward to the questions you have. Thanks. Hello, I’m back and I’m here with Surbhi Kumar to answer some of your questions. Thanks for joining us, Surbhi. Hey, thank you for having me. It’s great to be here. And that was such a great presentation from Ashok on getting started. I know it was great, wasn’t it? He’s given us lots to discuss. We’ve only got 10, 15 minutes. So let’s jump right in. We’ve got a couple of questions that have come through from the audience and please feel free to continue to pop them in the chat pod if what we’re discussing sort of spurs your imagination or your thought process. I would love to check something because this is something that customers ask all the time and want to just, I guess, understand the difference here or what the value is here. And it’s about the real time nature of analytics. So is Adobe Analytics real time? And if I’m trying to get alerts on what’s happening with my customers, what’s happening, perhaps with my sales or what’s happening with my customer behavior on the website, could I get alerts on any anomalies like something really high, something really dropping down in real time? Yeah, sure. So there are two parts to that question, right? So to answer the first part, yes, the data that flows into your Adobe Analytics from your web properties, that’s your website or mobile app are in real time. So basically saying, let’s say a visitor comes to your Adobe Analytics tagged website, and as in how they are browsing through the website and the pages, Adobe Analytics captures those information in real time, like pages, browsed, clicks, etc. And I think the second question was around the alerts. So yes, you can set up alerts on your metrics to get notified in real time through emails or even connected to your Slack channels. So I believe we will be covering some of those like how to set up those alerts in the upcoming sessions. But to provide some context, there are different ways you can create alerts. One, you can go to your Alert Builder directly under the component section of your Adobe Analytics instance. And another way could be while analyzing your data itself, you can right click and select create alert. And then you can drag and drop metric to create your thresholds and stuff. And this alert can be sent to any analytics users or a group or any email address or phone number as well. Awesome. So we can all be on top of it all the time without having to constantly be checking it. That’s fantastic. Actually, another question has come through that sort of relates to that real time nature. So the question is, do we have, do any of the users of these, sorry, start again, do any of the tools provide real time users screen recording functionality as well? Yeah, so we do have an activity map that’s designed to rank link activities using visual overlays and provide a dashboard of real time analytics to monitor any audience engagement on your websites. So you can get more information about it in Experience League. And if you look for Adobe Analytics activity map, and you can find much more information how to get started and how to install it. Brilliant. Thank you. Next question around the interconnected nature of an analysis, sorry, analysis workspace. So I just, I’ll read this out and just we’ll just check that we understand what this one means. So this analysis workspace doesn’t have the interconnected data tables and visualizations like Power BI. And this is an important feature that Adnan has raised is relevant for their executive summary dashboards. And is there a chance whether we’d see this again in the coming into the tool set in the future? Yeah, just so I understand this correctly, are we talking about like different data sets and different reports suite perhaps in Adobe Analytics? Yeah, that’s what I’m wondering. Adnan, feel free to clarify and we can see if we can come back to you. I’m wondering if it’s about stitching different data sets, different reports suites perhaps together. Yeah, so I guess so there are two types of answers in there. Of course, we can have we can set up a global report suite and then you can have virtual report suites to separate it out. But then in terms of we have a newer application based on Adobe experience platform called customer journey analytics where one of the use cases is to bring in all your data from different report suites in one place, essentially. So that’s more of a customer journey analytics use case. I’d say. Yeah, OK, so we’ll touch on experience in a little bit, but that might be a good place to do a little bit more research and see if that’s what you’re after, Adnan. Next question coming in. How do you add third party APIs to your instance? In the sense to bring in data or to get that data out? I’m going to be guessing it’s about bringing in data. But if there’s if you maybe think about bringing it in and bringing it out, can you answer both? We do have some connectors in Adobe Exchange where we can bring in data from other sources as well. But talking about data out, Adobe Analytics has API connection where you can start streaming and you can connect to your Adobe Analytics raw data and start bringing in those real time events and data into your system, essentially. Experience League might be another one to get some more information on that. All right. Another question here. They’re coming in really thick and fast. So I think took a minute for everyone to get their kind of mindset working through. Question around time zones. What is the time zone that is followed for scheduled reports by the share option in existing projects? That should if I’m not mistaken, that should be your time zone that is set. So in your when you’re setting up your Adobe Analytics instance in the setting, you can select your time zone where what reports you want to get that time zone in. And you can also in those settings, you can also define your weekdays, whether you want to start from a Sunday report or a Monday and things like that. And another one here around sharing analysis with other users at their company, actually, this is something that comes up a lot of questions from my customers, and they really want to make sure that that information is getting to all of the other key business stakeholders that they have. So how how can I share analysis with other users at my company? Do they need to have Adobe Analytics access themselves? Can you export that data? What’s the best way here? Yeah, so there are a few different ways. So if you already have Adobe Analytics workspace that’s created, you can there’s a share option where you can share the actual workspace with existing Adobe Analytics users. But you can also download it as a PDF or a CSV and send it across to whoever wants to get access. We can also schedule those reports if there are certain standard reports like a weekly metric, executive dashboard, or if a campaign is starting, if you want to understand those at a daily basis, you can schedule it and can be that scheduled PDF can be shared across with your business users and that regular cadence as well. Brilliant. And we’ll have probably time for just another couple before we need to move on to the next section. A question around just just thinking a little bit more about how beginners should start to explore, I guess, a little bit more. So so what panels in workspace would be good for a beginner to start exploring? Yeah, that’s a good one. I would say if you want, one way to get started would be just getting yourself familiar with what metrics are there. So jump onto it and start you can start analyzing with how many users do we get at a daily basis to your website or the app, right? And it could be a daily or a monthly just so you can start to get an understanding of what the scale that you’re working with. So once you have that, you can start with finding it over days and weeks or months to see if there’s a pattern and if there were any dips or increase or any seasonalities per se. And from there, once you understand the scale from there, you can start to drill further. So let’s say, all right, I have, let’s say, as an example, 100K visitors every month visiting the website. So next, I want to understand what are they doing on my website, right? What are they reading? Which pages? What sections? So in that case, you can drag and drop your page views and page names to start analyzing your top pages and top sections that they are reading. And from there, next could be where are they coming from? So you want to understand which channels are they coming from or what was the traffic source? So you can start dragging in your marketing channels to start understanding where are they coming from. And it could be you’re also interested in now to understand when are they coming to the website? Is it during morning, afternoon, weekdays, weekend? Is any particular day much more higher than any other days? So these are some of those questions that you can start familiarizing yourself with. But also at the same time, I would say start talking to your stakeholders. What are they interested in understanding from their website and app engagement audiences? Brilliant. That’s really great guidance for a starter and good to get the context of how you want to be thinking about it, thinking about your other stakeholders and why they might be answering or asking those questions. Yeah. We have a kind of a, I guess, a slightly related question and it’s from another survey that is joining us from India. So surveys unite. And I was just thinking this kind of relates to what you were just talking about and relates to what we touched on earlier about the alerts in real time. So survey has asked, are there any nudges notifications that can be given in real time on for content that’s worked on a daily basis? Sorry, that is worked on a daily basis. So I think maybe if we just touch back on to what we asked originally just about those alerts and just make sure that that was clear. Yeah. Just so I understand that correctly on a daily basis. Yes. So you can set up alerts at a particular dimension. So if you go into your components and setting up alerts, we can drag which page do you want that alert for and what metric. If it’s for page views or visits and you can set your threshold as well. And if it’s for a particular campaign code or a particular page, you can assign that filter as well. Brilliant. Thank you. And one that’s come through from Mike, which I really love. It’s questioning whether you can customize the colors that are used in the tables and visualizations. So sometimes he says sometimes he prefers to see a stronger contrast. Sometimes people want to have things in their own branding colors or we might want to think more about accessibility. So what’s possible there? Yes. So once you’re creating your workspace in your project, if you go into your project information and settings, that’s where you will. I’m pretty sure it’s the settings section under your project workspace. That’s where you can get the color palettes so you can select your color palettes. I’m not 100 percent sure if you can import your branding, but you can definitely change the color of your bars and which color palette you want to use. And nice and customizable. Another one here from Akila is Adobe Analytics sharing. Are you able to share analysis workspace or you can only share the project? That makes sense. Yes. So when we’re talking about a project, you can share the workspace report, the dashboard that you have created, so you can share that. And I’m not 100 percent sure if you can create. That’s what is called a project. I reckon if I’m not mistaken, but there is a folder now that you can create so we can double check on Experience League if the folder is shareable or not. But you can definitely share that particular dashboard that you have created with other users. OK, sure thing. Now, Adnan, it feels like you and I are totally aligned on the talk track because you’ve asked a perfect question. It’s going to lead us into what we’re going to finish up on today, which is about a few good resources to learn Adobe Analytics right from the basics. So keep with us and hopefully as we go through the next sessions, you’ll start to get a little bit more information on those. And then at the end today, I’m going to share with you a bunch of resources which are all free and are going to really set you up on that learning pathway. So hang around. Now, another couple of questions are coming through, just asking for a couple of links to certain things that you’ve touched on. So we’ll make sure when we’re when we’re kind of out of our Q&A that we’ll come back and just add those links where possible into the chat pod. So I’m going to we’re probably going to have to wrap up in just a minute, but I’ll ask one final one. As someone starting out on Adobe, is it possible to have a demo of analytics and how to kind of just bring all of this together to really understand it all? What’s your recommendation there? I would say, of course, like the analysis that we just talked about, right, like the end of the question, like start with understanding the total scale. Where are the audience coming from? What are they doing? But of course, Experience League is your best bet at the moment. And then you can there are some pretty good videos on YouTube as well. But in Experience League, you can look at other use cases that customers are doing. So we have like pretty good videos around how to get started, which use cases you should be thinking about, what type of questions we can probably answer from Adobe Analytics. And we have like really good case studies from other customers on Experience League publicly available. So that would be some of the good starting points, I would say. Brilliant. Thanks, Seva. You’re going to hear all about Experience League in a little bit as well. So thanks for the precursor. That’s all the time that we’ve got for this section. So I’m going to see you back again after our next segment. Thanks so much. Thank you. See you soon.