Quick Tip: Grouping Items in Analysis Workspace

Recently, I was working with a client who needed to group a bunch of dimension items for an analysis. While this would seem like an easy thing to do in Analysis Workspace, it isn’t as easy as you’d think. Therefore, I am going to share a tip I used to help this client in case it helps any of you out there.

Scenario & Options

Let’s imagine that you have a situation in which a dimension (eVar) has thousands of values and you want to see a grouping of say 25 of those values. The 25 could be based upon the text values of the dimension items or it could be completely random. There are several ways to do this in Adobe Analytics:

Option 1 – SAINT Classifications

One option is to have your Adobe Analytics team use SAINT to classify the values you want into one specific value. If you do that, you can then use the classification value in your reports and that one value will encompass all 25 items that you care about. Unfortunately, this may require work to be done by another team and at large organizations, this can take a while or require approvals.

Option 2 – Manually Build Segment

The second option is to manually build a segment that has the 25 values that you need. Once you have a segment, you can easily see metrics for that segment, which serves as an aggregation of the 25 values you desire. This can be done using the operators available in the segment builder like this:

This method works best if you can use text values to narrow down the values you want. For example, you might want all blog posts that “contain” the phrase “workspace” to be included. Unfortunately, the contains function can produce some false-positives that you might not want to be included in the segment. It also doesn’t allow you to easily pick one-offs that you might want to include. Therefore, this option is good, but not perfect.

Option 3 – Fallout

Another option for grouping dimension items is the fallout report. You can create a blank fallout report that looks like this:

Next, you can use the dimension chevron in the left navigation to view the dimension items and search for the items you want:

Unfortunately, you can only do a basic text search here, which is why I don’t love this option. But if you can isolate the items you want, you can multi-select them and drag them as a group onto the fallout report:

Lastly, you can right-click to build a segment from them grouping you just added to the fallout:

Option 4 – Dimension Filtering

The fourth approach is the one that I tend to use most often. There are great filtering capabilities available for dimensions in Freeform tables in Analysis Workspace. This filtering can be leveraged to aggregate the exact values you want. This approach provides the benefits of options #2 & 3, but offers a bit more flexibility.

To demonstrate, let’s continue with the example that I want to pick a bunch of dimension items (in this example, blog post names) and see aggregate numbers for that grouping of items. To start, I can add the dimension to a Freeform table with Occurrences as the metric to see all values:

Next, you can use the filter function in the dimension header to open the advanced filter option:

From here, you can add any criteria that will help narrow down the items. At this step, be sure to err on the side of including too many values so you don’t accidentally exclude dimension items that you might want. In this case, let’s filter for blog posts written by me (Adam) and that contain the words “workspace,” “eVar,” “training” or “campaign:”

This produces a bunch of dimension items:

If I am happy with all of these items, I can select all of them and right-click to build a segment for these specific items:

However, I could have done that with option #2 above in the segment builder. The advantage of this option is that I now have the ability to hand-pick the items that I want to group. In this case, I can manually select the items I want and again right-click to create a new segment:

After clicking, you will be taken to the segment builder with the selected items added to the segment for you:

After saving the segment, you can use it anywhere in Adobe Analytics. For example, you can view any metrics you want for that grouping of dimension items:

You could also use the new segment to create a “derived” calculated metric:

Summary

Above are a few different options for seeing groupings of items in Adobe Analytics Analysis Workspace. You may end up using all three options in different situations, but if SAINT is not an option, consider the two different ways to create segments for groupings of dimension items