4 Insights To Master Your Analytics in 2019
Last month, we were extremely excited to host the inaugural Australian Adobe Analytics Insider event in Melbourne and Sydney. With a packed half-day session of tips & tricks, plus a competition to find Australia’s next Analytics Rockstar, it was hardly a surprise that we had standing room only.
Anyone familiar with Adobe Analytics will know of our Group Product Manager, Ben Gaines. Ben is a well-respected Adobe Analytics/Omniture veteran with more than 12 years’ experience contributing to the product that you know & use today. Ben fired up the audience with a jam packed session of Analytics Tips & Tricks which you can find in its full form here.
So, what happens when you bring together 150 of Australia’s top Adobe Analytics professionals?
Aside from some heavy dialogue about calculated metrics, data layers and attribution methodologies, it becomes incredibly clear that there are a handful of analytics features & techniques that set the leaders apart from everyone else.
Let’s dive into our four key takeaways from the event:
1. Step up your viz game
We all know that a well-designed visual has the ability to communicate a complex subject with more impact and clarity than data tables and prose. In Analysis Workspace there are a ton of powerful visualisations that you may be frequently using today, however the real power lies just beneath the surface (tip: try right-clicking on just about anything in Analysis Workspace for additional options such as copy, paste and to explore the underlying data).
Audience pick:
Leveraging side-by-side comparisons for visualisations is where you can really bring your workspaces to life. All you need to do is create your panel visualisation, hit copy and position the new panel alongside. This allows you to quickly uncover differences between key metrics or segments.
Also worth a look:
Time-based trends such as day-part and time-part can be brought to life incredibly well by leveraging Time Part dimensions with conditional formatting. This creates a heatmap-style visualisation that uncovers trends for any metric you need to look at more closely!
2. Empower the non-analysts
As we’ve continued to develop Analysis Workspace, we want it to serve the expert analysts as well as your broader business stakeholders. Increasing analytics adoption in your business is one of the most important goals for an analytics team and helps foster a data-driven operating model. You may be sharing your Analysis Workspace projects today, however features such as templates, tutorials and curation can really help you to take user adoption to the next level.
Whilst there were a couple of features that really got our audience engaged, the real value actually lies in a combination of features that we’ve built to help you enable new users with Adobe Analytics. We highly recommend you take 15 mins to review these 6 must-do’s and help your users become much more self-sufficient!
Audience picks:
Colour palettes: I’ve never seen an Adobe Analytics audience audibly “gasp” before, until we showed how you can now tailor your projects with a custom colour palette! To make your Analytics projects much more relevant to your brand, simply pick an existing colour palette or customise with your brand’s very own hex colours!
Text & links: Analysis Workspace also supports rich text summaries and hyperlinks that unlock a range of uses within your analysis projects. As well as providing summaries, how-to guides and other commentary, you can design a Table of Contents (see below) to act as your dashboard entry point. These TOC’s make it incredibly easy for your users to navigate through your workspaces and link deeper to visualisations or even any other HTTP link outside of Adobe Analytics (it could be an internal tool, wiki page or other analysis platform). To include links to other Analysis Workspace panels or visualisations, simply right-click on the project panels or visualisations and copy the link. If you’re linking to another Analysis Workspace project, then you can link the link under the “share” menu.
3. Harness the power of calculated metrics
Calculated metrics have long been a feature that sets Adobe Analytics apart from other analytics tools, especially because they allow you a high level of customisation without always needing to change your physical implementation. Despite this, it’s odd that Calculated Metrics is a feature that is often under-utilised by most users! Here are some ways to get started:
Don’t overlook the basics:
As well as some of the more obvious functions such as add, subtract, divide and multiply, there are two really useful features you should be using today:
- Statistical functions: there are a wide range of these stats and math functions such as max or min value, averages, percentile and count that provide a huge amount of flexibility. A particular mention goes to the Approximate Count Distinct function that can be used to count number of unique items within a dimension, such as # of search terms. See Tip 8 on this link for more information.
- Nesting: this offers the ability to place other calculated metrics and segments into new calculated metrics for a much higher degree of flexibility. For example, you could create a metric to define your unique viewers who initiate at least one video play, then nest this “unique video visitors” metric into further calculated metrics that measure other aspects of your unique video visitors such as an average number of videos that are consumed or time spent watching video.
Moving beyond digital metrics:
Customer Lifetime Value is a gold standard in measuring your customer’s ongoing business value and enabling you to see the bigger picture. Most often, we find our customers ingesting this metric from a customer system such as their data warehouse or CRM which leads to additional integration overhead and internal coordination. During his Attribution Revolution presentation, John Bates, Director of Product for Adobe Analytics, shared a method to approximate your CLV by using Calculated Metrics. To make things a little more digestible, John provided a simple and advanced method!
4. Finally, there’s nothing shameless about self promotion
As we wrapped up the Analytics Insider series, I was reminded of the raw passion and innovation occurring in the Analytics sector today. I would argue that Adobe’s technology features are just an enabler – the real value is driven by how analysts & CX specialists are applying this technology within their businesses.
This is exactly why we created and brought the Analytics Rockstar competition to Australia: to expose your innovation and provide analysts with a platform to showcase their craft. Globally, data & analytics is being elevated through programmes such as RBS’s Superstar DJ’s or Adobe’s own Analytics Challenge where we offer US$60,000 to up-and-coming analytics talent from universities to solve real-world business challenges.
We hosted the Analytics Rockstar competition in Melbourne and Sydney with 5 finalists battling to win a ticket (plus airfares & accommodation) to Adobe Summit 2019, where they will have the chance to present at the final global round of Analytics Rockstar. It was an incredible success and featured analyst presentations from companies such as Foxtel, Swinburne University, ING, Suncorp and HESTA. We’d like to extend a huge thanks to all the entrants for their effort and willingness to take part.
So what should you be doing to promote analytics innovation and a love of data in your own business?
- If you’re a business leader, then make sure you’re making time to listen to your analysts. Perhaps give them a regular spot to showcase their top 3 insights at a monthly all-hands, or find time to integrate them into your leadership forums and challenge them to answer the important business questions. Get in front of the grass-roots analysts as well as middle management as this is where the raw insight often comes from.
- If you’re an analyst, then simply try be more visible. Yes, we’ve all cringed at the “raise your profile” comment from a manger in a performance review, but there is some value & truth in this recommendation. If your management aren’t asking for more face time then force it upon them: create a regular (but
- <u>very</u>
- succinct) update to showcase your top innovations and insights (tip: invest time in the design and format of these updates, perhaps creating a short video or infographic that will appeal to the “time poor” executives). Also consider centralising your findings, best practices and thought leadership in a central place (here is some inspiration for you from company blogs and Medium). Take a risk, step out of your comfort zone. You might just find yourself on a plane to Vegas with Rockstar status.
Become an Adobe Analytics Insider
Firstly, a warm congratulations to our Analytics Rockstar winner Kateryna Shandro from ING in Sydney, who will be heading to Adobe Summit 2019 to join the global event! The Adobe Insider programme is something we are incredibly excited to continue in 2019, both across Analytics and other Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. If you’re not already part of the programme, then sign up here to stay updated on future events.
Check out the links below for more Adobe Analytics tips and tricks: