Adobe Analysis Workspace is a new “ad hoc tool” inside Adobe Analytics. Sounds like it is eventually going to replace older Ad Hoc Analysis tool (or who would want to use that tool when there is much better available inside Adobe Marketing Cloud). Workspace has gotten lots of praises among Adobe Analytics users and at least I have gotten very positive feedback from non-AA users too when I have shown the tool.

Directly from Adobe:
Analysis Workspace removes all of the typical limitations of a single Analytics report. It provides a robust, flexible canvas for building custom analysis projects. Drag-and-drop any number of data tables, visualizations, and components (dimensions, metrics, segments, and time granularities) to a project. Instantly create breakdowns and segments, create cohorts for analysis, and curate reports for sharing with anyone in your business.

Back to my boring insightful and amazing comments.

Adobe Analytics contains amazing features starting from comprehensive dashboards to calculated metrics and all the way to segments builder etc. However, the biggest “pitfall” has always been default report interface. It is quite static and there aren’t many settings available to play around, e.g. you can get maximum amount of 5 dimensions to same trend line or you can breakdown dimensions only once. Compared to quite dynamic Google Analytics there are lots of things that should be easier with Adobe.

But now Adobe is building workspace and it looks to be real game-changer to many Analysts. I also like the concept behind Workspace. Adobe surely has own visions and roadmap how to make great analytics tool. They could easily duplicate Google Analytics, but no. I’m sure there are going to be great features in Google Analytics too in the future that you don’t find in Adobe Analytics or in Workspace, starting from great integrations. I don’t like to fight which one is better, just wanted to give some context. I like the idea that we have different kinds of analytics tools. Glad to see Adobe is doing something different.

What is exactly Workspace? It is an empty board where there are no rules, and you as an analyst, can paint the board and tell a story. That sounded like a great slogan for the tool, I invented that myself. 🙂 What I really meant by that was the fact that project/board is really empty and you drag and drop different segments, time ranges, dimensions and events. Every tool has a learning curve and some nice “hidden” features, but when you really start to do analysis you quickly understand the power. There is so much different kind of data that you can now see with one view compared to normal report view. I have had so many great moments with the tool “oh, I was able to do that… oh, that was quick…. oh, how smoothly I can add new segments and metrics”. Probably first time when I have also gotten feedback from business owners “oh, how did you manage to do that analysis so quickly and keep all the data in so small area compared the 10-page pdf report you sent last week”. One of the benefits of Workspace is that it can handle large amounts of data very quickly and you don’t have to wait long period of times when it calculates and adds new data to project.

Although, that is not the whole story of Workspace. One of the key concepts behind the Workspace is curation. You can curate projects and share only meaningful data variables (dimensions, segments, events etc) to product owners who can then easily play around with the data that matters only to them. I’m still little skeptical is this something I start do more in the future, hopefully, because I understand the frustration of business owners when they want to take the first step to start to use analytics tool and when searching e.g. “form submission” metric they get 10 different metrics that I have made for me with different segments and who knows what. If they could only be able to access that one form submission metric that matters, I’m sure they would start to make analysis more often when I have to say “sorry, I don’t have time to do analysis about the new product page today”.

Workspace is not anymore in beta mode but there are lots features in the roadmap and the tool is far from being ready. There also might be some bugs, but Adobe is fixing those monthly. The latest update added also scheduling option and that’s why I personally have started to use Workspace more and probably in the future I won’t be using default report view at all. Well, there are some single metrics that you could check easier with the default search in default report view.

At this point there are 5 features that I’m waiting very eagerly, and I’m sure these are in the roadmap. Want to share anyway.

• Pathing visualization/reporting
• Funnel visualization/reporting
• Setting to enable automatic comparison data
  (if you add event X for last week, I would then like to see automatically comparison number and change % for 2 weeks ago or last week year ago etc)
• Dimension breakdown for future weeks
  (when you add breakdowns and schedule report, it doesn’t automatically add same breakdowns to dimensions for the new weeks)
• Possibility to add data from different analytics account to the same workspace project
  (Usually I want to use same account with project, but there are situations where CEO or someone wants only KPI number from different domains/accounts, and now I would need to send many pdf projects to him which doesn’t make sense)

Ps. there are lots of other cool ideas too in Adobe’s idea exchange for Workspace, check and follow.

This was just my small intro and tribute to very cool analytics tool. Want to learn more? Adobe Analysis Workspace Product Documentation can be found in here:
https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/analytics/analysis-workspace/. It also contains links to help forum and some cool video materials for Workspace.

You should also follow Twitter with hashtags like #AdobeAnalytics, #AnalysisWorkspace, #AdobeWorkspace and #Workspace. Twitter is the place to be to hear the latest news about Adobe Analysis Workspace and other Adobe Analytics related stuff.

On my next blog post I’m going to share my few learnings (tips & tricks) about Workspace, hopefully soon…