New Calculated Metrics in Adobe Discover

You have always been able to use segments and calculated metrics in Adobe Discover but now you can include segments WITHIN your calculated metrics! This greatly increases the flexibility of your metrics and will enable you to do more comparison work within Discover which historically has been very difficult.

As we walk through this feature let’s use an example. Assume that you are interested in understanding the mobile vs non-mobile breakdown of your campaigns. Previously you could segment to get the same data but now we can build out metrics that make this easier and help to differentiate mobile from everything else. This is useful since, by default, there is only one mobile-specific metric in Discover–mobile views.

To start, access the new metric builder by going to the Metrics pane on the left-hand side, select the options icon, and then select “Calculated Metric Builder”:

You will then see the Metric Builder which allows you to drag metrics and operators over to the formula field. Below is how you would build a simple Order Conversion metric:

Adding Segments to Your Discover Metrics

Now we can make it really fun by adding segments to the mix. The segments are hiding behind the metric tab on the top left. For our mobile example, let’s say that we want to build a metric that gives us the percentage of visits that were from a mobile device. To do this you would drag over and divide two visits metrics, apply a “Visits from Mobile Devices” segment to the numerator (as shown in the screenshot below), and adjust your metric name and formatting as needed:

After you save this metric you can then include it in your campaigns report to see the percentage of the campaign that came from mobile. You can also sort by this metric to see what campaign has the highest percentage of mobile usage.

Include Calculated Metrics in Other Calculated Metrics

After you start building your calculated metrics you may want to include an existing calculation in another metric. The new builder lets you do that as well. Once you create a metric, as we did with our “% Visits from Mobile” metric it will appear in your metric list with a small chart-looking icon next to it. We will build on this to get the percentage of traffic NOT from mobile. We do this by entering a number field of “1” (red arrow in screenshot below) and then subtract the previously-created “% Visits from Mobile” metric as shown here.

Other metrics you could build for our mobile report may include:

Mobile Conversion 

Non Mobile Conversion (you have to make the Non Mobile segment first)

Tablet Visits as a percent of all Mobile Devices (you have to make the tablet segment first)

Return Mobile Visits as a percent of all Mobile Devices (you have to make the return mobile segment first)

You can go on an on but hopefully that gives you an idea of what you could do.

Comparisons using Metrics

If you think about comparison, they are just an extension of the new formulas that we can now make. All you have to do is create a metric that compares the data points you are interested in. To make this easier, Discover lets you select two columns that are already in your report and you can right click on the column header to select some of the quick calculation options. I wish it had an (A-B)/B option in the list but for now we will use an A/B Percent comparison to quickly see the percentage change between our Mobile and Non-Mobile Conversion metrics. Here is where you select the option:

This will then give you a new column with the comparison as shown here:

That makes for an easy comparison. If you would like to tweak the comparison you can right click on the column header and select edit. I would then modify the comparison as follows to get an (A-B)/B comparison instead of just A/B.

Be careful to keep track of what is in your comparison and use meaningful names since the metric doesn’t dynamically reference the columns that it was built from. If you were to switch out one of the original metrics the comparison would not automatically update. That would be a cool feature, though.

Final Thoughts

While this functionality has been in tools like Adobe Insight for a long time I am happy to see it available in Discover. It provides much more flexibility in creating metrics and comparisons. I had a client once in the theme park business that liked to segment their orders by the many different checkout types they had. They could use this to create specific metrics for each type without having to burn up a lot of events. Hopefully this makes its way into SiteCatalyst.