Tim already wrote, “Adobe Analytics derived metrics are calculated metrics, on steroids”. Haha, nicely said but I wanted to make my headline even more powerful. 😉 So let’s cook… some cool derived metrics with Adobe Analytics. Sorry, I’ll stop right now my breaking bad parables and just put the focus on the real thing.
Since you are reading my blog, I’m sure you already now what Adobe’s calculated metrics are, and on June Adobe introduced awesome new capabilities called derived metrics. The first time I heard about these was on Adobe Summit in London last spring and I was amazed. I’m surely not going to write blog post with all the small details, but wanted anyway to give my praise for these new features with this blog post and also share some of my favorite features! You can find all the details in Adobe’s help sections and you should also read these blog posts around this topic:
- Transform Self-Serve Analysis with New Metrics Capabilities in Adobe Analytics by Bret Gundersen
- Say Hello to On-Demand Metrics in Adobe Analytics by Brent Dykes
- Derived metrics – what is this sorcery you speak of? by Tim Elleston
- Engagement Scoring + Adobe Analytics Derived Metrics by Adam Greco
- Adobe Analytics: No Need to “Break Down” Thanks to Revamped Calculated Metrics by Lukas Oldenburg
And here are some comments and top features by myself:
- Well, love the whole “new” metric builder and even without derived metrics there has been lots of improvements, starting from preview window.
- It’s now possible to add metrics inside segments and this of course changes the game and for me is the most needed feature. Sure we have had always possibility to find out all kinds of data, e.g. how many form submission we get with return visits by traffic sources, but before we have had only possibility to look one complicated metric at on by one, because we had to always change the segments. Now we can make calculated metric where we choose “returning visit” segment and the event is of course form submission. Now we have cool new metric that we can look by itself and no need to add segment anymore when we look at the report in Adobe Analytics. So we could do many more of these complicated metrics and then choose “last touch channel” report with these new cool metrics and just with one report we could see everything and won’t have to choose any segments and look only one metric per report like before.
- Related to the above tip, there are much more advanced metrics we can now build using derived metrics, the great example is Tim’s and Adam’s engagement metrics.
- There are also possibility to add pre-configured functions to build metrics or there are some useful functions that can be used alone. One of my favorite stand alone function is “row count”:
And it will show quickly how many different rows (=unique values!) you have on your variable, e.g. how many unique search terms you had last week. Another favorite function is the “mean” function which can tell the average number of the chosen metric. Adobe has listed all the functions with small description:
https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/analytics/calcmetrics/cm_functions.html
https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/analytics/calcmetrics/cm_adv_functions.html
Blaah, maybe too blame content especially compared to my headline? 🙂 Anyway, big shout to Bret, Ben and the whole Adobe Analytics product team for breaking bad with calculated metrics builder, great features! This was just a small scratch what we can do with Adobe’s new metric builder and derived metrics. Hopefully, Adobe and all the users will share new ideas what kind of cool metrics we can use in the future…
