All I want for Christmas is 10 new Adobe Analytics features (for the standard version of AA!). It’s time to make my letter for Santa Claus and wish new Adobe Analytics features that I have dreamed most this year. I know Adobe Santa Claus can’t make all my wishes to come true, but the fun part is just write the “letter”. Please comment if my wishes are good, bad, impossible/stupid to fullfill or maybe these features are already possible to make and I just don’t know how…

(Note! It’s possible that idea exchange links don’t work if you are not logged-in to Adobe Marketing Cloud)

I know, Adobe’s idea exchange is the place to write ideas for Adobe Analytics and Adobe is not making any changes in this critical Christmas time, but wish is always…hmmm… a wish! 🙂 Let’s see if my ideas gets any recommendations by readers of my blog, and afterwards I could write the best ideas to the official idea exchange.

1) More “last X week” options when choosing preset filter for dates

Now there is big gap between “last 4 weeks” and “last 53 weeks”. Would be nice to get also “last 8/12/24 weeks” or something. Or would the best and simplest option be to make empty field for “last <empty_field> weeks” and there user could write the number he/she wants to use. There is actually wish for 8 weeks in idea exchange, and I have promoted it too. (And yes, of course you can manually choose 8 or whatever weeks, but choosing manually is time-consuming. Every second matters.)

2) New rule type for processing rules

I love “poor man’s tag management”. Say what? Of course I mean processing rules. Not sure is Adobe going to invest so much development work for processing rules anymore since there is DTM available. Anyway, my wish is for the rules that fires processing rules. I have noticed that sometimes would be great to fire rules based on events, e.g. “if eventX is populated then do something”. Not possible for now.

3) More custom variables and/or better options

I really love to use “once per visit” option for events. Makes data much more reliable when you have only one unique goal/KPI to track. However, there are many times when I use two events for same action. One with “always record” and the other one with “once per visit” setting, and sometimes this feels like I’m wasting events. Would love to see if we would get these “once per visit events” as out of the box when enabling new “always record event”. I mean just as user can enable “particition events” etc. Ok, I see that for some users this could be quite complicated if in the metrics menu you would always see also “always record event” and user would have to know when to look “opv event” from the dropdown menu etc.

So eventually my wish could be that free all the custom variables and give the user ability to choose from 250 variables what type they want to use (prop, eVar or event). I have never heard that someone had used all the props, but eVars and events are needed much more. Again, there is already same kind of idea in the idea exchange for this one too.

 4) Make the search more visible

Love the new internal search, so easy to find metrics. Even users not famialiar with Adobe Analytics are liking the search and finding metrics quite easily, even though they aren’t responsible for the implementations and not knowing the exact names for variables. However, these users are sometimes asking “where the heck was the search field!? Is it missing!?” I can understand the question. If you want to use search, it’s not obvious that you would then have to click “view all reports” text in the navigation. The search should be somehow more visible in the interface. Usually in any tool/website the search field is always visible to user and not even one click away.

Offtopic: new quick links on the left below “frequently viewed” and “Report History” are supergreat, use those all the times. Easier than to use search.

 5) Scheduled reports for mobile services

Lots of cool data and graphics (eye candy!) in the new interface, but no way to make (scheduled) reports. Of course you can do reports from the old/normal interface, but there is the same old “boring” data available. Or maybe the answer would be to just redesign dashboards and make more options available (including application data) for the users.

6) Automated calculation for unique values

Could there be some kind of “unique values” report type? Product owners are always asking how many unique loginID’s we had last week and other same kind of info about unique values. Manually I can go to page 999999 in ranked report and look how many rows we have, or I can export data to Excel, or maybe SAINT would help etc. However, would be cool to (get out of the box and) make inside AA a trended view how many unique values we have had e.g. last 53 week and it would then show only one number per week based on the unique values we have on eVar X.

7) Better unique visitor handling

This is a bit difficult. Don’t know what to excactly wish, but somehow related to wish number six. If our service is possible to use only with login credentials and we save random loginID numbers to Adobe Analytics then it would be useful if we could somehow make a setting for AA that count the out of the box unique visitors based on the amount of unique login ID’s we have. Does this make any sense or does anyone have any detours? Ok, of course there is possibility to influence on the default visitorID Adobe gives, but Adobe says officially that it’s not recommend at all. And again, I hate detours so some kind of out of the box solution would be better. This would make data more accurate starting from segmentation, right? (If I remember right, Adam Greco has some blog posts about influencing visitor count or sending only loginID data to own specific report suite etc. Anyway, I leave my wish as this and maybe wiser people are going to comment this wish and give better insights or something)

8) Data inspector and/or alerts for custom variables (on one admin page)

Love my custom variables. One day we redesigned one of our site and I needed to clean/free lots of custom variables. Our site was very old and I knew we had many variables enabled but not tracking data anymore. It was time-consuming process to check many events and eVars, if those had any data last 2 years etc. So after this I got idea, would be great if the variables page (in the admin console) would somehow show if variable X have data from last X days or weeks. Or could be green and red light if the variable included data from last week or something… and this way this would also be some kind of alert system and you would easily see in one look that do you have enabled variables that aren’t collecting data. I guess Adobe could redesign this based on my thoughts, but you get the basic idea?

UPDATE: I got great comment about this. Not exactly what I wish, but nice detour and document by Adobe Consulting: “See this dashboard provided by consulting. It was shared by consulting during the US SUMIT, so I would say yes you can share it, if you say it was shared by Adobe consulting.” You download the “Analytics health dashboard” in here: Analytics Health Dashboard v1.3 share

9) Calculated metrics to data warehouse

Just recently I realized that calculated metrics aren’t available in data warehouse. Whaaat? Why? Aren’t we in year 2014? There is a detour for this one and you can export (and even schedule) calculated metrics data directly from the normal interface (send -> advanced options), but this way you can only get one calculated metric and sftp isn’t possible.

UPDATE: I got great comment why this isn’t possible. Should have realized this myself: “Data Warehouse return the raw data. Calculated metrics are created after processing and not present in data base.” So I’m only hoping SFTP support for the normal reports.

10) Copy & paste for report suite settings

Adobe Analytics true power is the ability to customize lots of things. However, sometimes it’s very time-consuming to make all the report suite settings how you like it. You can automatically copy settings from another suite if you make new new report suite, cool. Marketing channel settings are one of the most critical settings and last week I decided to make new settings… added few channels, did some new rules etc. This is just fine for the first time, but usually we have many other sites that need to use same kind of marketing channel settings. It would be so useful if user could easily copy/transfer different settings (especially marketing channels!) from report suite to another suite. This would save lots of time and grey hairs.
EDIT: Oh man, just call to my mind… you can choose many report suites from the list and then start to make settings (and you have to choose master template if you wan to edit marketing channels) so maybe this is already possible!? Anyone tested this? Not want to test it myself if something goes wrong. 🙂

UPDATE: I got comment that this is possible and tested: “As you said use master report suite template works fine tested”

Some other cool ideas I noticed in the idea exchange. Please promote if you agree.

• http://ideas.omniture.com/t5/Idea-Exchange-for-Adobe/modern-dashboards/idi-p/13090
• http://ideas.omniture.com/t5/Idea-Exchange-for-Adobe/Page-Load-Speed-Should-Be-A-Default-Metric/idi-p/11700
• http://ideas.omniture.com/t5/Idea-Exchange-for-Adobe/GA-like-attribution-modeling/idi-p/12796
• http://ideas.omniture.com/t5/Idea-Exchange-for-Adobe/Add-Search-Boxes-to-DW-Variable-lists/idi-p/13152

HO HO HO! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

Ps. How many times did I use the word “love”!? Well, it’s Christmas and I guess love is in the air…