Trended Fallout with Adobe Report Builder

From the depths of the mail bag comes a question on how to create a trended fallout report in Adobe Report Builder. Here it is:

I am trying to automate a daily fallout funnel using Report Builder; however, the issue is that Report Builder will not allow me to separate the fallout funnel by day, only by aggregate.
 
My question is, what is the best way to automate a daily fallout report using Report Builder?
 
Any help is appreciated, thanks! 

And this person probably needed the answer to this last week for a report that was going to keep him from getting fired. Sorry about that Mr. <name omitted>!

Have you run into this, too? The image below is how building this request typically looks when you are on the first step of the RB request wizard. The orange arrow indicates how you can reach the Page Fallout report and, lo, notice the granularity dropdown (highlighted in red) is now fixed to the “Aggregate” option which just gives you the total for the time period.

Not a problem, though! Here’s a way to work through it that I regularly show in my Report Builder trainings. Basically we’ll just make a ton of side-by-side fallout reports, one for each day. The technique you use for this is especially important, though, since no one likes repeating the same thing over and over. This approach makes it pretty easy!

Step 1: Prepare Your Dates

Place dates in cells so that you have a From and To date spelled out for each unit of granularity that you want in your report. In this case I’m doing daily for the last 30 days. Since it is daily I could just use a single date for the From and To date but separating the two like this tends to be a more flexible setup (in case I want to switch this to a weekly granularity in the future).

Step 2: Insert Your First Fallout Request

Now throw in a request that generates the fallout report for the first day. Use the “Dates From Cell” option on step 1 of the request wizard to select the dates you created.

On step 2 of the request wizard do the normal process of dragging your metric over (red arrow), select the checkpoints to include in the fallout (green arrow), and pick an inset location for the request (orange arrow)

Click finish and once the data is refreshed you should see something like this image which is your fallout for day one:

Step 3: Copy and Modify Request Two

Now we are going to copy the day-one request over in a certain way. Start this by right clicking the first request to make a copy (notice how I have highlighted the request in the background):

…and paste the copy so that the rows line up nicely next to each other.

Here’s how it should look at this point:

Now right click and edit the new request so that it references the second day and hide the page names.

On step 1 is where you modify the dates:

On step 2 is where you hide the names of the pages:

Press finish and you should now have day two next to day one like so:

Step 4: Copy Like a Pro

This is where the magic happens. Copy the second request:

Highlight all remaining columns that you want a fallout report for and paste selecting “Use Relative Input Cell”:

Now this is when your breath is taken away and you maybe cry a little realizing that you didn’t have to create each of those many reports manually. But don’t stop there! Notice that all the data in the cells is a temporary copy of day two. Just refresh your worksheet to get the actual data for each day. With that done you should have something like in the next image which is many days of single-day fallouts:

Step 5: Make it Perdy!

Oh man, now my fingers are tired! I’m going to end this post here but hopefully that gets you past the “give me my freakin’ data” stage. Next steps would include:

• Calculate the fallout or conversion from step to step for each day.
• Apply a nice trend visualization for each step and overall. Maybe something like what Tim describes in the “Creating the Visualization” section of this post.
• Hide everything we just did on a hidden tab or bury it in the backyard somewhere. Because, while awesome, I’d much rather look at the visualizations.

That’s It!

Yep, that’s it. Running into troubles? Are there other reports in RB you are having difficulty creating? Feel free to ask in the comment below!