Adobe Analytics laboratory is my (imaginary) place to be when I have question about Adobe Analytics and no direct answers. Sometimes it’s good to write down your question and that way you could understand more about the issue you are struggling with. Of course you can always ask from Adobe’s clientcare, write to help forums, tweet it, whatever… but if I take the time to make the screenshots etc, then why shouldn’t I write a blog post. I’ll start series of blog posts and get my hands dirty in Adobe Analytics laboratory. So you’re welcome, here comes my first question or should I say “mind map of my thoughts” for certain issue.

My first question: I would like to get ranked comparision stats with eVars to my scheduled monthly report. Custom eVars could be any content as form names. In my example, I want to follow how our pdf files has been opened last month vs. two months ago. I believe this is not going to work correctly because there can be different amount of days in months and if the rolling settings can be only “daily” then there could be some months that stat for “two months ago” is not exactly the certain month. Difficult to explain, so let’s dive to screenshots:

1) Let’s go to the right stats and choose “compare dates” from the date panel. I’ll choose August and September.

2) Looks nice. This is exactly what I wanted to look and analyze.

Side note: if I would have pdf file X watched 3 times in September, but on August 0 times then it wouldn’t have shown the X filename at the list at all. But it would been counted for the total number of watched pdf files so not really an problem, but good to know how the comparison goes = always compares the first month’s data to the new one.

3) And here maybe comes the problem. This is so coooool and important thing to follow, so I should add to my monthly (scheduled) dashboard. See the date range, why is there only rolling daily available, and not monthly? Ok. let’s continue.

4) The screenshot below is from my scheduled dashboard. Ok, the date range is ok again at this point.

Side note: why is the change metric (in percent) not visible/available on every row!? Strange, but has something to do with the dashboard and Adobe’s default settings or something…

5) I can click “August 2014” to get the date panel open again in the dashboard. The “view by” was “daily” for some reason and I updated it to “month”. But again the rolling settings for the data is again daily, and I can’t change that. The rolling monthly would be available if I was looking only one month’s stat and not doing comparison. Am I trying to do the impossible? Let’s test and see what happens when the month changes…

I have also done one detour test for this one. I splitted the stats for two different sets and that why I can’t get the out of the box “change comparison metric”, but maybe I could live without it. Still sceptical that is the stat for two months ago going to be exactly the right month in the future…

Side note (again): On the preset date selection we have “last 4 week” and then it goes to “last 53week”. Come on, why couldn’t there be something from the middle, maybe “last 12 weeks”? 🙂 Yes, of course I can choose myself the date range for 12 weeks, but would be nice to get preset for that.

If you have a insight or direct answer to my question, please comment and share it. If no one has any answers, then hopefully in the future I’ll be able to answer my own questions after the testing or getting answer from another source. The laboratory is on!