Page Summary Report in Workspace
While I spend 99% of the time I use Adobe Analytics in Analysis Workspace, there are still a few things that haven’t migrated over from the old interface. One of them is the Page Summary Report. While I can’t believe that I still use a report that was around in version 9.x, at times, it is handy to get an overview of a specific web page. Here is what it looks like:
As you can see, there is a lot of information packed into a small space and it offers links as launching off points for several key reports.
Unfortunately, there is really no equivalent to this report in Analysis Workspace. Therefore, I decided to see if I could re-create it. While I was able to do most of it, it wasn’t as straightforward as I thought it would be (though it did spawn a few Workspace feature requests!). While “the juice may not be worth the squeeze” in this case, in the name of science, the following will show you how I did it…
Creating the Page Summary Report in Workspace
The first step is to create a trended view of the page you want to focus on. To do this, you can create a table that shows Page Views and use Time components to view this month, last month and last year like this:
You will notice that I have six columns of data here instead of three. This is because you can look at the data for the current month or a past month. In this case, I am looking at May 2019 data but I am currently in the month of June. To view last’s month’s page summary data, I highlight the left three columns. If I were still in May, I would highlight the right three columns. Regardless of which month I am interested in, the next step would be to add a chart for the three highlighted columns like this:
Next, you can apply a page filter with a bunch of pages like this (remember to hold down the Shift key!):
Next, you can pick the page you want to focus on from the list and your table and chart will be filtered for that page:
Once you have this, you can hide the table that underlies the chart to save room in your project.
Next, we have to add a Flow visualization to see where people are going before and after the page of interest. Unfortunately, we can’t add a Flow visualization to our existing Workspace panel because that is being filtered for only hits where the Page equals our page of interest (the default nature of filters). Therefore, we need to add a new panel and add the Flow visualization to it and drag over the page we care about as the focus of the Flow visualization. In this case, that page is the Adobe Analytics Expert Council Page:
To view that we are on the right track, we can compare the old Page Summary Report to the Workspace one to see how we are doing so far…Here we can see that our chart looks pretty similar (the old page summary report shifts dates slightly to line up days of the week):
And we can see that our flow looks similar as well:
Next to tackle is a list of detailed metrics that the old Page Summary report provides that looks like this:
To replicate this, we need to make some summary metrics in Workspace, which means that we need a table that has the metrics we need with a filter for the page we are focused upon:
A few things I discovered when doing this include:
- Page Views and Occurrences are the same, so you can use whichever you prefer
- Single Page Visits only matches the old page summary report number if repeat instances are on for your Workspace project
- There is no “Clicks to Page” metric in Workspace, but I found that this is really just Average Page Depth. Therefore, you can use that or do what I have done and created a new Calculated Metric called Clicks to Page that has Average Page Depth as the formula.
- Workspace shows Time Spent in seconds vs. the minutes version shown on the old page summary report. You can create a new calculated metric to divide by 60 if you’d like as shown above. However, I am finding that the numbers for this metric don’t always match perfectly (but who really cares about time spent right?)
The only metric we are missing from the old page summary report is the percentage of all page views. This one is a bit tricky due to the fact that you cannot divide metrics from different Workspace tables by each other or divide Summary Metrics (please vote for this here!). To view this, we will create a new calculated metric that divides Page Views of our focus page by the total Page Views for the time period. To do this, we create a “derived” metric that looks like this:
This can all be done from within the calculated metric builder like this:
Once we have our new metric, we create a new table that looks like this:
From here we can add some Summary Numbers using the totals of the columns in our two new tables:
You will see that these numbers match what is found on the old Page Summary report:
As you can see, these numbers are spot on with the old page summary report.
Viewing Page Summary for Another Page
Unfortunately, when you want to focus on a different page, this Page Summary Workspace project will not auto-update by simply changing the page name in the top filter area. There are a few changes you need to make due to the fact that you cannot currently link segments/filters in Workspace projects (here is my idea suggestion on how to make this a bit easier). Until then, I have added a text box at the top of the project that explains the instructions for changing to a new page:
While this may seem cumbersome, here is a short video of me changing the entire project to use a new page (in under one minute!):
When this is done, the summary metrics look like this:
And the Page Summary report looks like this:
So other than the time spent metric being a bit off, the rest of the numbers are an exact match!
Finally, when you are finished, you can clean-up the project a bit by hiding data table and curating so the end result looks something like this: