Using Builders Visibility in Adobe Analytics

Recently, while working on a client implementation, I came across something I hadn’t seen before in Adobe Analytics. For me, that is quite unusual! While in the administration console, I saw a new option under the success event visibility settings called “Builders” as shown here:

A quick check in the documentation showed this:

Therefore, the new Builders setting for success events is meant for cases in which you want to capture data and use it in components (i.e. Calculated Metrics, Segments, etc.), but not necessarily expose it in the interface. While I am not convinced that this functionality is all that useful, in this post, I will share some uses that I thought of related to the feature.

Using Builders in Calculated Metrics

One example of how you could use the Builders visibility is when you want to create a calculated metric, but don’t necessarily care about one of the elements contained in the calculated metric formula as a standalone metric. To illustrate this, I will reference an old blog post I wrote about calculating the average internal search position clicked. In that post, I suggested that you capture the search result position clicked in a numeric success event, so that it could be divided by the number of search result clicks to calculate the average search position. For example, if a user conducts two searches and clicks on the 4th and 6th results respectively, you would pass the values of 4 and 6 to the numeric success event and divide it by the number of search result clicks (6+4/2=5.0). Once you do that, you will see a report that looks like this:

In this situation, the Search Position column is being used to calculate the Average Search Position, but by itself, the Search Position metric is pretty useless. There aren’t many cases in which someone would want to view the Search Position metric by itself. It is simply a means to an end. Therefore, this may be a situation in which you, as the Adobe Analytics administrator, may choose to use the Builders functionality to hide this metric from the reporting interface and Analysis Workspace, only exposing it when it comes to building calculated metrics and segments. This allows you to remove a bit of the clutter from your implementation and can be done by simply checking the box in the visibility column and using the Builders option as shown here:

As I stated earlier, this feature will not solve world peace, but I guess it can be handy in situations like this.

Using Builders in Segments

In addition to using “Builders” Success Events in calculated metrics, you can also use them when building segments. Continuing the preceding internal search position example, there may be cases in which you want to use the Search Position metric in a segment like the one shown here:

Make Builder Metrics Selectively Visible

One other thing to note with Builders has to do with calculated metrics. If you choose to hide an element from the interface, but one of your advanced users wants to view it, keep in mind that they still can by leveraging calculated metrics. Since the element set to Builders visibility is available in the calculated metrics builder, there is nothing stopping you or your users from creating a calculated metric that is equal to the hidden success event. They can do this by simply dragging over the metric and saving it as a new calculated metric as shown here:

This will be the same as having the success event visible, but by using a calculated metric, your users can determine who they want to share the resulting metric with at the organization.