Adobe Analytics is getting updates monthly. There are always some minor changes, bug fixes and usually couple of totally new features or options to play with. Not going to share useful tips and tricks, hopefully later, but just want write small summary for the biggest new features/options and share few comments. I write this blog mainly for myself as I have said many times… when you write things down, you will remember those so much better and that is the reason to write these “not so insightful” status updates.

Time-parting dimensions in Analysis Workspace

Bye bye getTimeParting plugin and custom hacks, we welcome “out of the box” time-parting dimensions. I know, not a final death for getTimeParting plugin and other custom hacks, because these new dimensions are currently working only in Analysis Workspace. I’m confident that Adobe will make these available for data warehouse (and raw data) feeds and it will save work for data scientists who are getting these data feeds to play around and the first thing to do is to filter data by day/date/hour etc.

I’m so happy about this feature. There have been millions of times when I have got questions could we get to see how are visits divided by hours or weekdays etc. I know, pretty basic stuff, but will make life so much easier and don’t need to hazzle with plugins and custom codes, at least after dimensions are available for data feeds too.

Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.

My wish list:
– Make dimensions available for the whole AA product (data feeds, report builder…).
– We could make this ourselves using tags (in Workspace search field), but would be great to have out of the box filter for time-parting dimensions for the search.

Manage multiple columns at once (in freeform tables)

Antti makes a wish, Adobe delivers… New slogan for Adobe Analytics? 😉 Well, in my dreams at least. Anyway, this was one of my most wanted features so big shout out for AA product developer team for making this available! When you have lots of metrics in the same freeform table it was very time-consuming to change settings for every metric/column. Now you can choose multiple columns at once and change settings. Wonderful, one new option to make your analysis and reports even quicker. Sweeeeet!
Discussions about this: https://forums.adobe.com/ideas/8369

Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.

My wish list:
– When you add new metric to the table it should have automatically same settings as other metrics/columns already have.
– Or even better would be to have editable default setting for whole Workspace or for Workspace project and this way users or at least admins could change default settings, usually I don’t use percentages etc.

Flow: inter-dimensional labeling

An inter-dimensional flow lets you examine user paths across various dimensions and will give your flow some additional understanding.

Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section.

My wish list:
– I believe flow visualizations are still containing all the hits aka reloads and that’s why it is frustrating that it shows flows like this “homepage” -> “homepage”. Give us option to exclude browser reloads.
In idea exchange: https://forums.adobe.com/ideas/5710

Histogram hit counting method

You can now use a third counting method, “Hit”, as a segment container. “Occurrences” is used as the y-axis metric in the freeform table.

Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.

My wish list:
Damn, I can’t think anything… It’s a wrap!

Workspace – Getting better every month, but “few” more wishes…

I still have few more “most wanted” ideas on my list, but I guess one by one my wishes comes true. 🙂 I would want to have ability to add data from different report suites to the same Workspace project, Workspace search could have more options and better logic and curation is great idea but execution is too difficult time-consuming. Anyway, Workspace is still a young product so lets give it a time to grow and love it that Adobe’s product team is definitely hearing us hardcore users when making decisions for Workspace features. You can read all my feature wishes in here, but please note that links might not work since Adobe made a new forum for ideas too.

Ps. you can read all the updated and fixes in here for September 2017.