Content Freshness [Adobe Analytics]
Recently, I had a client ask me about content freshness on their site. In this case, the client wanted to know if the content on their site was going stale after a few days or weeks so they could determine when to pull it off the site. While the best way to use what I will show is on a site that has a LOT of content and new content on a regular basis (like a news site), in this post, I will demonstrate the concept using our blog, which is all I can share publicly.
Step 1 – Set Dates
The first step in seeing how long it takes your users to interact with your content is to capture the number of days between the content publish date and the view date. To do this, you can add an eVar that subtracts the current date from the content publish date. For example, if I look at one of my old blog posts today, I can see in eVar10 the number of days after it was posted that I am viewing it:
In this case, the value of “13” is being passed to the eVar, which tells Adobe Analytics that the post being viewed is 13 days old. Once you have done this, you will see a report like this in Adobe Analytics:
If I break down the “13” row, I will see that it represents the previously shown blog post and if any other posts were published on the same date, they would appear also:
Step 2 – Classify Dates
However, the above report is pretty ugly and way too granular for analysis! Therefore, you can then apply SAINT Classifications to the number of days and make the report a bit more readable. Here is an example of the SAINT file that I used:
Keep in mind that you can pre-classify the number of days ahead of time (I went up to 20,000 to be safe) so that you only have to upload this once.
Next, you can open the classification report and see this, which is much more manageable and can be trended:
Step 3 – Reporting
In this case, I decided to create a data block in Adobe ReportBuilder to see data on a daily/trended basis. Here is what the data block looked like:
This produced a report like this:
Which I then graphed like this:
using Excel pivot tables, you can group the data any way you’d like once you have the data in Excel.
Lastly, you can also use the Cohort Analysis feature of Analysis Workspace to get a different view on how your content is being used:
