I feel so stupid that I had to make a blog post about this small new feature. There was update on Thursday for Adobe Marketing Cloud and release notes said that we are going to be able to breakdown by position. Directly from Adobes notes: You can perform breakdowns based on a fixed location in a Freeform table. Somehow I was able to understand that totally wrong.
Without any testing I started a discussion on Slack:
Glad to see we can now do breakdowns by position in Workspace. To be honest, I probably assumed that breakdowns were always automatically breakdown by position when time moved on, but that was not the case. This setting is disabled by default and we have to remember to click it every time. I don’t understand why this isn’t enabled by default. Aren’t we “always” trying to breakdown by position, to me it sounds it should be the default way. If I want to breakdown by e.g. certain page I can always then filter that. What do you think about this? I guess this goes again to discussion about should every user have the option to change DEFAULT settings for whole project. Any comments?
Do you know what was the common response to my question? It was silence, it was like Depeche Mode song “Enjoy the silence”. No comments, none, njet, zero… Luckily, it was Friday so probably everyone I assumed I was drunk at work or something like that and no one wanted to start a fight.
The *light bulb* moment
Thanks to Ben Gaines and his great Workspace videos, see the “breakdown by position feature” video in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DPY__RMnvc and with the help of that I realized “AH! It meant that and now I get it why it is disabled by default, makes totally sense!”
Seek and destroy choose the right setting icon
Even after watching Ben’s video and testing it myself, I though there was something wrong because it didn’t work as expected. Soon I realized I was clicking wrong icon. I’ll share screenshot and this way it is easier to explain.
I always wanted to breakdown by position 8 for page name variable. At first I tried to enable this setting in the row 8 and using that last touch channel dimension, but it would work only for that dimension. If I wanted the breakdown for page name to work, then I had to click the setting icon at the top. So be accurate what dimension you need to enable and choose the right setting icon.
At first, I thought this new feature would somehow affect (in my example) to that last touch channel dimension and that wouldn’t automatically update when date is changed, but that surely was not the case and thank God for that. So, also in the future every breakdown ITSELF is always automatically updated based on the (top) data. Just a stupid user mistake, well not a mistake, just can’t read? Nothing new, let’s move on and fail fast in the future too…
Adobe offers more detailed information about this feature, just read properly. 😉
https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/analytics/analysis-workspace/table-settings.html
Hopefylly this blog post gets lots of “Amused” clicks on the below.
