Analysis Workspace Drop-downs

Recently, the Adobe Analytics team added a new Analysis Workspace feature called “Drop-downs.” It has always been possible to add Adobe Analytics components like segments, metrics, dimensions and date ranges to the drop zone of Analysis Workspace projects. Adding these components allowed you to create “Hit” segments based upon what was brought over or, in the case of a segment, segment your data accordingly. Now, with the addition of drop-downs, this has been enhanced to allow you to add a set of individual elements to the filter area and then use a drop-down feature to selectively filter data. This functionality is akin to the Microsoft Excel Filter feature that lets you filter rows of a table. In this post, I will share some of the cool things you can do with this new functionality.

Filter on Dimension Values

One easy way to take advantage of this new feature is to drag over a few of your dimension values and see what it is like to filter on each. To do this, you simply find a dimension you care about in the left navigation and then click the right chevron to see its values like this:

Next you can use the control/shift key to pick the values you want (up to 50) and drag them over to the filter bar. Before you drop them, you must hold down the shift key to make it a drop-down:

When this is done, you can see your items in the drop-down like this:

Now you can select any item and all of your Workspace visualizations will be filtered. For example, if I select my name in the blog post author dimension, I will see only blog posts I have authored:

Of course, you can add as many dimensions as you’d like, such as Visit Number and/or Country. For example, if I wanted to narrow my data down to my blog posts viewed in the United States and the first visit, I might choose the following filters:

This approach is likely easier for your end-users to understand than building complex segments.

Other Filters

In addition to dimensions, you can create drop-downs for things like Metrics, Time Ranges and Segments. If you want to narrow your data down to cases in which a specific Metric was present, you can drag over the Metrics you care about and filter like this:

Similarly, you can filter on Data Ranges that you have created in your implementation (note that this will override whatever dates you have selected in the calendar portion of the project):

One of the coolest parts of this new feature is that you can also filter on Segments:

This means that instead of having multiple copies of the same Analysis Workspace project for different segments, you can consolidate down to one version and simply use the Segment drop-down to see the data you care about. This is similar to how you might use the report suite drop-down in the old Reports & Analytics interface. This should also help improve the performance times of your Analysis Workspace projects.

Example Use – Solution Design Project

Over the last few weeks, I have been posting about a concept of adding your business requirements and solution design to an Analysis Workspace project. In the final post of the series (I suggest reading all parts in order), I talked about how you could apply segmentation to the solution design project to see different completion percentages based upon attributes like status or priority (shown here):

Around this time, after reading my blog post, one of my old Omniture cohorts tweeted this teaser message:

At the time, I didn’t know what Brandon was referring to, but as usual, he was absolutely correct that the new drop-down feature would help with my proposed solution design project. Instead of having to constantly drag over different dimension/value combinations, the new drop-down feature allows any user to select the ways they want to filter the solution design project and, once they apply the filters, the overall project percentage completion rate (and all other elements) will dynamically change. Let’s see how this works through an example:

As shown in my previous post, I have a project that is 44.44% complete as shown above. Now I have added a few dimension filters to the project like this:

Now, if I choose to filter by “High” priority items, the percentage changes to 66.67% and only high priority requirements are shown:

Another cool side benefit of this is that the variable panel of the project now only shows variables that are associated with high priority requirements:

If I want to see how I am doing for all of Kevin’s high priority business requirements, I can simply select both high priority and then select Kevin in the requirement owner filter:

This is just a fun way to see how you can apply this new functionality to old Analysis Workspace projects into which you have invested time.

Future Wishlist Items

While this new feature is super-cool, I have already come up with a list of improvements that I’d like to eventually see:

• Ability to filter on multiple items in the list instead of just one item at a time
• Ability to clear the entire filter without having to remove each item individually
• Ability to click a button to turn currently selected items (across all filters) into a new Adobe Analytics Segment
• Ability to have drop-down list values generated dynamically based upon a search criteria (using the same functionality available when filtering values in a freeform table shown below)