Getting Started

Transcript

Hello everybody, welcome to the Skill Exchange. This is Ashok Gaurabadi, 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 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 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 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 are 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 will let 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. 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 pathing 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 are 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 Reports section is a really handy shortcut to actual reporting and 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 to be 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. 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.

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. 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’d 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’d 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. But I just wanted to list all the different panels you can use to lend structure and definition to your project. Seven times out of ten, 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 four, 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’d have a lot of fun dragging and dropping your way to glory.

Step five, 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, do 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 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 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 will 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. And 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 and what I’m looking at are those page views and the top pages that can be attributed to mobile customers.

And 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 training tutorial, you should be 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.

Hey, thanks Ashok. That was awesome. And welcome to our Q&A session. Glad to be here, Doug.

Great. So we’ve got some questions, a few questions that have come in. So we’re going to jump right in. And our first question is going to be from Tobias. Thanks Tobias for putting that in. And Tobias said, my workspace does not mirror that of Ashok’s. I have no create project option. Instead I have to choose project new. Is this due to a version being provided by my enterprise? Oh, got it. Not really. Tobias, if you can navigate to the Workspace landing page, you should see a create project button or a tile show up on the top right corner of the screen. But if you are already in Workspace, then yeah, you won’t see the create project button. You will need to create a project using the project menu. So make sure you are on the landing page for Analysis Workspace and then look for the create project button. Hope that helps. Yeah, I like it. I like it. Okay, really, either way is okay, right? I mean, project new, you’re going to have a few different ways to start a new project, whether it’s the create project or the project new, it’s still going to give you a new project to start with.

Yeah, cool.

Excellent, excellent. Okay, our next question is this. Are there resources that everybody can go and look at other than Experience League videos or is there a training tutorial to get some hands-on experience with Analysis Workspace? Oh, yeah.

While I guess, yeah, YouTube is a great introductory resource and the training tutorial should help get you familiar with the features and concepts that the YouTube videos seek to explain. There’s also Experience League where you’d find curated learning courses that you can start and complete at your own pace. Those learning courses are a great complement for the videos and the training tutorial. And you’ll find hours of content there that are tailored to ensure that you gain familiarity and eventually expertise as you finish more of those courses. And I don’t know if there are any students among those that are dialed in today. If there are, there’s also the university sandbox environment that you can make full use of. We offer that via the Experience League as well. So the university sandbox will let you fill in a form and as soon as you do that, you would have your analytics account created and credential shared with you. You can use those credentials to access a full-fledged version of Adobe Analytics and Analysis Workspace as well as the training tutorial and all the YouTube videos and get some really hands-on experience with what Workspace is all about. There’s also, I don’t know if this is a sneak peek, but there is also a LinkedIn learning course that we are working on. So that would offer a demo environment as part of the LinkedIn learning course. But that is slated to be released sometime later this year or early next year. So yeah, stay on the lookout for those avenues as well.

Awesome. Okay, cool. Thanks. And that actually gives some opportunities. Like if you already have your own interface, you’re here and your company is already set up for Analysis Workspace, then of course that’s going to be the best place for you to goof around in, right? Because it has your data. But thanks. That is the best. I didn’t know a couple of those. Sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say test driving Workspace using your own data and trying to answer your business questions based off of your data is the absolute best way to learn Workspace. Cool. Yeah.

Awesome. Okay. That’s great. Thank you. Okay. We’ve got some coming in. We like it. Marie asked, how can you do a trend line in Workspace? I have a weekly report and we need a trend of last year’s week compared to this week’s, but I don’t see the option to do that. All right, Marie.

That’s a good question. So I won’t know until I saw the actual report, but Workspace does let you trend data from last year and compare that to data from this year. Marie, you may have to play around with the WIS type options and the data in selectors to get to the lens or the view that you’re trying to get to, but Workspace does offer a trend line and you can compare last year’s data with this year’s data. Yeah, exactly. I think if I’m not mistaken, we’re going to talk about that in a later session today here too. Oh, yeah. That is start to… We’ll do a date comparison and be able to put that right into visualizations. I think stay tuned for seeing some steps on how to do that. Thanks, Ashok. That was awesome.

Let’s see. Do you have suggestions for improving Workspace load and refresh times? In terms of suggestions, not really, but there are a few best practices that you can use to make sure your Workspace projects are performant, like making sure the date ranges that you select are curated to the view of the data that you’re looking for, that you don’t go back two or three years into the past and then try to compare that with current data. That would obviously tax the backend and performance might suffer just a little bit. But other than that, Workspace should be able to deal with whatever you throw at it. It’s different for every customer based on the data they’re trying to visualize within a single Workspace project. If a single Workspace project is buckling under the pressure that you place on it, then I guess the recommendation would be to separate your analysis into maybe multiple projects or use breakdowns as much as you can instead of building segments onto projects. There are a ton of things that you could do to improve the performance of Workspace, but more or less it should be able to deal with the kind of load that you would impose on it.

Yeah, thank you. Those are good tips. I actually threw some really good tips in there for that. Yeah, I hope that you got some tips there for being able to get your data back fast. Okay, cool. We have another question from Rupali. How to export data metrics in PDF format? Oh, it’s as easy as it can get.

Once you’ve built your project, once you’re satisfied with the analysis that you’ve built into it, all you need to do is use the project menu to save the project as a PDF. Then what that will do is generate a PDF version and you can download it. Or you can schedule a recurring delivery of a PDF project on a daily, weekly or monthly basis as well. If that is a project that you want distributed to others on a frequent basis, that’s also something you can do. In addition to PDF versions, we also let you save versions of projects as CSV versions.

And like I said earlier, you can also schedule the recurring delivery of CSV versions on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. So there is a lot of flexibility in terms of how you can distribute data once you’ve built the analysis in Workspace.

Great. Yeah, thank you. Glad that we have some options there.

Okay, the next one. Great. Where can I find Adobe Analytics on Creative Cloud? When searching for the program, no apps show up. Is this available in Canada? So I guess maybe they’re on the… Oh, it says here… Oh, I missed my brain read. Read Creative Cloud and I thought Experience Cloud. So that’s an interesting question, right? Yeah, so you may need to navigate to experiencecloud.robi.com to be able to get to more information about Adobe Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics.

We may not be listing analytics on the Creative Cloud side of things because Experience Cloud is the umbrella that includes customer experience tools like analytics, journey optimizer, experience manager and tools like that. So those are slightly distinct from the Creative Cloud apps that you may be familiar with. So you may have to navigate to experiencecloud.robi.com instead of, I guess, look for them on the Creative Cloud side of things.

Yeah, great. Thank you.

Thanks. Okay, Abhi, what if we are unsure what questions we want Adobe data to answer? Usually I need to see the data first and then dig into why and what happened. This is a great question because as people are presented for the first time and everything, maybe they don’t know what questions they should ask and they should look for. What are your suggestions there as they get started with Analysis Workspace? Oh, yeah. That’s a really good question. So if you’re not in Workspace trying to answer a specific question, the best thing to do is get out there and get familiar with the data that you have within, say, a report suite. You never know what you have within a report suite until you have dragged and dropped components onto the project, broken down some components with some others, and then maybe something might click and you have your question you’re trying to answer. So the first step would be to go to town with Workspace, drag and drop components to your heart’s content, slice and dice your way until the system is ready to give up, I guess. But then you would be familiar with both the data as well as the features and tools and navigation that is available within Workspace. And then you can combine the familiarity and the expertise you have garnered to answer any future business questions you may run into. The familiarity is what’s important more than having a business question you are seeking an answer for.

Yeah, great. Thank you. Jumping into the deep end, see what you got. I like it. I might also mention that it’s good to talk to some of the stakeholders in the company and see what questions they might have. So there might be people around you that have some questions you can help answer as well. Yeah, cool. Okay, Tanu said, I created a project, turned it into a template, but I am not able to create multiple reports using the template with just a few variables changing.

How do I do that? Created a new template, but I’m not able to create multiple reports using the template, just a few variables changing.

Yeah, I don’t know if it’s specific to the template that you created, but you should have been able to save a project as a template so other people could use that template as a basis for the project that they themselves are creating. So you should be, by design, ideally be able to piggyback off of the template and create multiple versions. If you’re not, then I would look at maybe the permissions you have to create projects off of templates or the template that you started with.

The only thing I can think of is permissions. Maybe have somebody look up your permissions and see if you have all the right permissions set up to be able to create projects off of templates. That’s the only thing I can think of because templates do lend themselves to multiple versions of the project because that’s what they were designed for. So you should be able to do that. Yeah.

Okay, great.

Okay, looks like we have about time for maybe about one more here.

Let’s see. One question here is how do you export all of the data? This kind of goes maybe with a couple of things. I’m going to put two of them here together. M. Rashid Raza said, how do you download raw data from a report suite? And then I’ll also put in there, how do you export all the data? The max I can see exporting is 400 rows. So do you have a quick like exporting explanation here for these people? Yeah. So in terms of exporting raw data, I’m assuming you’re hoping to export all the data that is collected into a report suite.

You can do that using tools within the Adobe Analytics fold. There is data feeds. There are APIs that you could use to export data out of Adobe Analytics and into some other data processing or visualization tool. You could use those methods to export raw data. And in terms of exporting data out of workspace, yeah, so we do restrict people to 400 rows of data when exporting them out of workspace. But you can use some of these other tools to export more than that into whatever system of size you have. Okay. Well, that’s the time we have today. Ashok, thank you very much. Appreciate your time here answering these questions for our great customers. Appreciate it. Oh, glad to be here, Doug. Thank you so much.