Adobe added new feature called “component curation” in the fall 2017 release for Adobe Analytics. Oh boy, I have waited this since I saw curation feature for Workspace projects. I really like the concept of curation which to me means something like “you get only data that matters”.

Want to see how it really works? Here is Adobe’s short video about this cool new feature: component curation in virtual report suites and there you can get the idea how it works. You can also read other details through Adobe’s help section for virtual report suite components. Anyway, I want to write own blog post just for this feature and share few of my thoughts why this is so meaningful feature.

Project curation vs. component curation in virtual report suites

What is the difference between component curation and this new way of doing curation? I guess project curation was the MVP of curation, however, it didn’t really work in a real life. It was really time-consuming to do inside a project and I never had patience to do it to the end and that’s why we have never used curated project. Second problem was that curation was just for one Workspace project and that’s why it wasn’t scalable for many users.

Component curation in virtual report suites tackles both of these problems and now we have a really working version of curation. BOOM! Let’s recap:

1) It is easy to set-up and manageable.
2) It is on a report suite level and can be easily used by many users with different projects.

But why?

Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics and other analytics tools are designed for about 9,352,458 different businesses. That number is actually stolen from Simo’s presentation where he talks about meaningful data. I would have said over billion, but lets use Simo’s prediction. 😉 Anyway, you got the point? There is nothing wrong about this from Adobe’s or Google’s perspective, because they can’t personalize tools for different companies. However, they should offer features and options to companies to make the personalization by themselves. There are segmentation, naming process, tags and many other small options to get meaningful data and of course companies can control custom tagging process to get custom data that matters.

I believe those basic features aren’t enough. You can’t easily control out of the box data that comes through basic script / data collection. There might be dozens of variables that doesn’t matter to your business, but you still get that data to your analytics account and then you have to sort out all the data that matters. This is why curation is the real solution to get meaningful data to your company’s users. Sure, curation is still a manual process, but now this is million times easier to do than before. I believe this curation concept is a real game-changer for Adobe Analytics or maybe even “industry-changer” or does other tools have something similar?

Lets take solid examples:

1) There are out of the box metrics that you can hide and this way you get only meaningful data to make your analysis.

2) Curation is especially useful for non-analysts / hardcore users. We analysts like to implement all kind of variables and maybe collect 4 kind of versions for pagenames and use different kind of variables (props, eVars etc). This is the number one problem for normal users when they want to use Adobe and they start to search data:
pageName (prop1), pageName (eVar1), pages, pageName (list1), channel+pageName etc.
Might be useful for analysts but very confusing for marketers and users that are not part of the implementation process. Now we could curate virtual report suite for marketers and give only one pageName variable that matters -> More users will use data. This was just a small example, but you got the idea of this concept?

But to whom?

Are you “one man army” for analytics and this way you know everything and control data by yourself? Ok, maybe in this kind of curation is not needed if you don’t mind having so much “nice to know” dimensions on your data set.

This is especially great for companies that can’t change their analytics implementation very often and with the help of curation they could hide dimensions and metrics that are not valid anymore. You could disable custom dimensions, but you can’t disable out of the box components and that’s why curation rocks.

This is also great for companies that need to grant access to multiple people to use Adobe Analytics, but there might be users that aren’t so into analytics and they might have difficulties to understand and find dimensions and metrics that matters. You as a hardcore analyst can make their life so much easier by curation report suite and leave only meaningful data. You can even rename components for better understanding.

Or you might have some analytics users that are developing just one section of the site or are IT people working on a site speed etc, you could curate different virtual report suites for different projects and give them meaningful data.

Summary

Nothing to add at this point. Excellent work Adobe Analytics team, bravo!