Adobe released big update for Adobe Analytics including some superior new features. This was not normal monthly update, because it was called fall 2017 update. Usually there are monthly updates and at least 2 bigger updates within one year. There are lots of new options, fixes and features which you can see in here, but please note that this link will always include latest updates so content will change after month. Let’s make a small summary for the biggest and coolest updates:
Virtual report suites for mobile applications
To be honest, did’t even realize that you couldn’t use virtual report suites for Adobe’s mobile services which is totally separate reporting UI for mobile application (SDK) tracking. Good to have it available and I’m sure I’m going to use it. There are some things to notice when using these, but better to read directly from Adobe’s own documentation.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section.
Enhanced integration between Audience Manager (AAM) and Analytics
It is the first productized integration between a Data Management Platform (DMP) and an analytics engine in the marketplace. Segments are shared from AAM to Analytics in real time, to inform audience discovery, segmentation, and optimization. Sounds great for Audience Manager users.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.
Server-Side Forwarding Improvements
Server-side forwarding is designed for customers who want to share data from Analytics to other Experience Cloud Solutions in real time and you no longer need to call Adobe Customer Care to set it up.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.
Report Time Processing
Report Time Processing in virtual report suites provides contextual sessionization by changing how Adobe Analytics calculates mobile visits. Talking about “hacking your data”, another powerful feature to influence on your analysis.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.
Component Curation
Virtual Report Suites can be curated to include and exclude components in Workspace. I wasn’t sure before the video was this the thing I had hoped so much, and yes it is! Bravo! This is a real game-changer and you can give people “data that matters”. I’m going to write own blog post about this feature in the near future.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.
Contribution Analysis Tokens
All customers with Analysis Workspace entitlement can now run full Contribution Analysis a limited number of times per month. This is a great feature and you can automate your analysis and “error hunting” etc. However, this was useless if you didn’t have the full access, now let the analyzing begin! Of course you have limited amounts of tokens to use, so be careful when you want to use this “little” virtual helper.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section.
Map Visualization
You can visualize location data via IP address (for non-mobile data sets) or you can bring latitude and longitude data (for customers using the Mobile SDK) to life in Analysis Workspace. Oh the eye candy, but still very insightful. Works or should I say gives more insights if you are a global company/brand. Anyway, probably the first feature to show your boss “look at this heat map!”.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.
Granularity selector for trended visualizations
You can now easily toggle between time granularities when the dimension in the data source is a time dimension. You can switch granularities from a drop-down in the visualization settings. I know very basic stuff to be included on analytics tool, but somehow this was the missing part for the line visualizations and very important one.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.
Full dimensions & events in segment drop zone
You can now drop a full dimension or event into the segment drop zone. In both cases, Analysis Workspace will create “exists” hit segments. Bravo, again great feature to make your analysis much faster without the need to a separate segment
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.
Connected visualizations listed in Data Source Settings
If there are visualizations connected to a freeform or cohort table, the top left dot (Data Source Settings) will now list the connected visualizations. Hovering will highlight the linked visualization, and clicking it will take you to it.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section. Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.
Event# added to left-rail event names
Finally! Not a real feature, I would say a bug that is now fixed. If you searched “eVar2” or “prop5” you got search results including those variables, but you if you searched events as “event1” you didn’t get any results. Anyway, now fixed and hopefully I don’t get questions anymore about why there aren’t any events. 🙂
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section.
Reserved dimensions sorted in logical order by default
The default sort order for some out-of-the-box dimensions has been updated.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section.
Option to allow confidence interval from re-scaling a chart
The Anomaly Detection Confidence interval does not automatically scale the y-axis of a visualization to potentially make the chart more legible. You now have the option to allow the confidence interval to scale the chart.
Learn more:
Read more from Adobe’s help section.
UI Improvements
Lots of small, however, super useful improvements for the user interface in Workspace. Workspace is powerful tool when you learn to use it and start to understand drag and drop logic, however, for new users this so called “zero state” aka blank interface might be weird and not sure where to start. With the help of these new highlights and gif animated guidance Workspace makes much more sense for new users too. We hardcore users are always shouting “we want more cool features”, but luckily Adobe is not forgetting new users and this way we get more users to work with Workspace. Awesome!
Learn more:
Watch Adobe’s video about this feature.
Summary
Absolutely great features to speed up your analysis and important improvements for the usability, something for all types of users. I have had several ideas how to improve Workspace and this year many of those ideas and wishes have came true. If I try to think features that I’m still missing, there are 4 that comes to my mind:
1) Option to add data from multiple report suites to same Workspace project
2) Make search relevance (exact results etc) better when searching components (dimensions, events etc).
3) Option to exclude reloads from flow report (I believe this is still an issue)
4) Option to share Workspace projects/dashboards publicly -> Users without AA account would be able to see data on a specific url, this would be a bit different than sending email reports.
Ps. I haven’t used older reports and analytics interface for looooong time, to me Workspace is nowadays same thing as Adobe Analytics. I just love the idea of Workspace, analysis with full speed.
