Learn five practical ways to get more out of Adobe Analytics - from creating clearer visualizations and using calculated metrics with confidence to saving time with smart shortcuts, mastering custom date ranges, and organizing reports for easier insight. These tips help you work smarter, surface meaningful trends faster, and deliver reports your teams can understand at a glance.

Discover tips that help you save time, try out new features you may not be aware of, and become an Adobe Analytics pro!

In this article, I share how Adobe Analytics users can leverage features to improve visualizations, save time, organize reports, and start using those date and calculated metric components that may be intimidating today. These tips are tailored to intermediate-level users, but even seasoned pros can always pick up a tip or two too!

1. Improve your visualizations

Almost all my reports contain some sort of visualization. There are so many visualization features that I use daily, including those in the settings cog, right-click shortcuts, and user preferences. This video goes over my favorite and most used features and how to save time using them.

When visualizations are well used, they make your reports look simpler, sharper, and—most importantly—users understand them with ease.
This ultimately leads to fewer questions and less hand-holding for an analyst.

Trending data using a line chart is probably the most common visualization. There are three ways to do this, as shown in the video, and everyone has their favorite: what’s yours?

Next is the Settings cog, which has a ton of useful options. I go through many of these in the video, including:

• Hide titles

• Show or hide the data source

• Locking the selection

• Top vs. specific positions

• Renaming labels

• Creating trendlines

• Showing min/max values

• Granularity

• Using a dual-axis

• Using scale and anomalies to show variation or a bigger picture view

• Limiting max values

Knowing how to use everything effectively in this settings box will take your visualizations to the next level, and become second nature with time.

After you’ve mastered this, you’ll find that you can do the same things repeatedly. This is where user preferences come in handy. These save you time and frustration from not having to repeat the same redundant checks every time.

Right-click options are lifesavers in terms of helping you to easily duplicate one visualization and then tweak it, instead of rebuilding it from scratch.

As you get used to these visualization features, you find that they take minimal time to set up and make a large visual impact in your reports.

2. Don't be afraid to start using calculated metrics

I often see users being confused by calculated metrics. These can be very powerful, but also quite complex. Don’t let their amazing abilities daunt you! These are great for simple stuff too—you just need to get started and build on that momentum. In this video, I show you how to create a super simple calculated metric to get you started. Just to get over the first hump of creating one.

In a more complex use case, I show how leveraging distinct counts can help you to catch code issues early and fix them fast.

Distinct counts are a way to display how many unique values show up in a dimension.
It can show you the cardinality for each eVar, for example.

I then create alerts based on these distinct count metrics, which can tell me if there’s a certain drop in the number of values coming in, or more often, a sudden influx of values.

This is especially useful when a dev issue suddenly sends very granular values (like user IDs) into an eVar that normally tracks only a few simple values (like cart designs).

These alerts can be set up based on Adobe’s anomaly detection rules, or based on your criteria (by % change, upper/lower limits, etc.).

• Use tags to easily find these calculated metrics—they can also be very valuable in reporting.
• Having these in place means that you catch issues fast and can maybe reverse a release instead of finding a mess days or weeks later.

I’ve also found averages to be super useful: average downloads per week, average visitors per month, etc.

I show how you can build these easily using date dimensions within the calculated builder. These are especially useful when creating summary visualizations at the top of reports.

I hope this video helps you to get started with calculated metrics, but it’s just skimming the surface of what you can do. The best reference for calculated metrics is the Calculated Metrics Playbook from my fellow Champion, the one and only Mandy George.

3. Time savers

I love saving time—who doesn’t? Watch this video to learn some quick time savers and shortcuts—no AI knowledge needed!
Learn to use these daily and not recreate the wheel each time—it becomes second nature.

One thing I do again in Workspace is duplicate and rename. I do this for tables, graphs, visualizations, panels, reports, etc.
If you create something and add a lot of context to it (for example, a flow chart with a large description at the top about how to read it), don’t type that out again. Just steal it from one report and put it in another. Why waste time?

• Make use of those right-click shortcuts whenever you can.
• Make sure to teach your users this trick as well so that they can easily steal things from your reports for use in theirs.
• Don’t be stingy with your work!

Another great time saver is using the quick segment builder at the top of a panel as a hack to create segments that you can then pull into your report.
No need to open the segment builder each time. You can drag it in, and then even delete it from the top of the report if you want to.

The ‘edit preferences’ option in the Workspace homepage can be used to set all kinds of defaults you use frequently. This tailors Workspace to work for your needs.

Watch the video to learn these tips and start saving time today.

4. Fun with dates

Using custom date ranges can be almost as daunting as calculated metrics. Less complex by nature, but extremely helpful as well.
Let’s explore some use cases together in this video to get you started using custom date ranges.

If you type ‘#date ranges’ in the left search bar in Workspace, you see all the available out-of-the-box date ranges Adobe provides, as well as those created within your company and shared with you.
These are also available in the date box on the top-right of any panel, in the preset dropdown. Just start typing in there for them to show up.

You have the option to apply these to your panel or all panels in the report.

• When you pull a (purple) date range into your report, this overwrites the date being used for the report as a whole (defined on the top-right of the panel).
• In a table, right-clicking on a column filtered by a specific date range gives you compare options relative to the date range you selected.
• Workspace is even smart enough to know what length of time you are looking at by default. It offers the same comparison range as an option.
• Another column will also be created that gives you the % difference between the two and offers conditional formatting options for you to explore.

One of the date ranges I use the most is rolling date ranges. As time goes on, the rolling date range moves along with the current date.

• Use the ‘rolling dates’ checkbox at the bottom of the custom date range builder to see how these can be used, including how to freeze the start date, and play with current days, hours, or even down to the minute.
• These are useful when you need to set a launch date and time for your report or just want to report from one specific day going forward.
• Instead of creating new ones all the time, I usually edit an existing rolling date range and then click ‘save as’ after modifying it a bit.
• I tag all these as ‘rolling date range’ so that I can find them easily in Workspace or in Components when I need to share them out.

My next use case is fiscal date ranges, which used to be such a pain point for my company. Fiscal weeks, months, quarters, years are not available in Adobe Analytics. Unless your fiscal calendar lines up with calendar dates, this is going to be an issue.

I’ve alleviated this pain at my company by building these out at the start of each fiscal year, putting them in order using table builder, and creating a ‘fiscal week’ dashboard that everyone can use.

• Users can then right-click and ‘copy visualization’ to use in their reports without having to recreate the wheel each time.
• It is a lift once a year, but only I feel this pain as the admin—and not all my users.
• I also provide instructions at the top of the report on how to use a table builder. Without these instructions and the use of table builder, the order of the weeks will not be maintained, and will change according to the default metric being used.
• Don’t forget to use tags so that everyone can easily find fiscal weeks for a specific year, fiscal months, quarters and years.
• If you’re an admin, be nice and build these out for your users in advance. Create and share a dashboard that can save everyone else lots of time. We don’t all need to suffer!

5. Organize that report

For this last video, let’s make your reports pop! Watch this video to learn some tips that help you organize the content of your report.

Help users to understand data faster and with less effort, resulting in fewer questions and less time needed from you.

Have you used the Table of Contents yet? Use this feature to identify sections of your report and allow users to jump from section to section easily.

This can allow your users to understand the large guidelines of the report, which can be especially useful if it’s a bit long and overwhelming.

Section headers also help you to separate your content out, and these can be used in the Table of Contents as anchor links to jump around the report as needed as well.

Prior to those two features coming out, I used hyperlinks a lot to jump from section to section, and even from report to report. I still use these abundantly in my reports to add context and reference other data points.

Hyperlinks can be used in:

• Tables
• Report descriptions at the top
• Visualizations

Just right-click and select ‘edit description’ to create some text for a reference.
You can then highlight the specific text to link and select the link icon at the top to create a hyperlink/anchor link.

You can either use these as anchor links to get users to the right place in your report fast, but also to reference another report with related data.

Right-clicking and selecting the ‘get panel link,' ‘get visualization link.’ or using the share menu to get a link to a whole report can really create many links and references within a single report.

This way, you can offer up a wealth of other information to your users, making it available to them with just a simple click.

Keep in mind that clicking on one of these hyperlinks pops open the specific visualization by default, even if it’s collapsed—so they understand exactly where they’re being sent.

Just note that these hyperlinks can also be used in an email or a messaging service to send users exactly where you want within a report.

Bottom line, hyperlinks are a great way to add info directly within your report and make your data more relevant.

There are other great options to explore in the right-click ‘edit description’ option. You can add:

• Lists
• Images
• Colors

Leverage these to better explain what the data is showing.

If users understand your data more easily, this means less questions, less time, and fewer meetings for you!

Watch this video to learn the tips that make your data more relevant for your users and make data easier to ingest.

Mastering Adobe Analytics doesn’t have to be overwhelming—small, consistent improvements in how you visualize data, build metrics, save time, and organize reports can dramatically elevate both your workflow and the experience of your stakeholders.

By embracing these features and integrating them into your daily reporting habits, you create clearer insights, catch issues faster, work more efficiently, and empower others to explore data with confidence. Whether you’re leveling up as an intermediate user or refining your craft as an experienced analyst, these tips help you work smarter, share smarter, and ultimately become the kind of Adobe Analytics pro your organization can rely on.