Community Manager

I am Achaia Walton, Director of analytics at Voice of America. AMA on Mastering Event-Based Reporting & Content Groups.

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
December 20, 2024
12 replies
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January 15th, 2025

We are happy to welcome Achaia Walton, Director of Analytics at Voice of America for an AMA session about Mastering Event-Based Reporting & Content Groups.

Our guest expert Achaia is an Adobe Analytics Champion and a leading voice in event‑based reporting. She recently authored a Perspectives article exploring the challenges of categorizing content for analysis and how content groups can streamline this process in Adobe Analytics. In her work, Achaia breaks down the importance of content groups, offers a clear step‑by‑step guide for setting them up, and demonstrates how to use Analysis Workspace visualizations to integrate content group data into broader analysis strategies.

How this AMA works:

This thread will open on Wednesday, January 15, for you to start submitting your questions.
Reply to this post with any questions you have for our expert, Achaia and Achaia will reply to as many of your questions as possible.
After the AMA is over, the thread will be locked for new replies, but it will remain visible as a resource.

kayawalton

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Hi everyone! Welcome to our first AMA on the Analytics Community, and we are so excited to have you here. Please feel free to post your questions in this space.

If you have not checked out my Perspective on Content Groups, please check it out here: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/perspectives/measuring-content-groups-in-adobe-analytics

Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Yay, looking forward to the session @kayawalton! I am also here to help do back-end support for this AMA, so I will also be occasionally posting as well.

K

kjhart1963

How do I get into this session? I registered for it but received no links?

seanrobinson

Adobe Employee

You're in the session now! Ask your questions here to get them answered by Achaia.

A

AanalBh

How do I get into the Session? I am only able to see the chat

Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

The chat is the session! This is chat-based, in-forum AMA. Basically this is a live post a question and get a response event.

Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Let me kick this off, how did "Content Groups" come into existence in your organization? What needs or problems affected your team that lead to this?

kayawalton

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Content groups came to be when we were asked for cumulative data and insights for our coverage of a specific event (I talked about the Paris Olympics in the Perspective). We realized that as we get these requests more often that we had to come up with a sustainable system, which is how content groups came to be.

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MikeA1

Level 1

What are some common mistakes organizations make when setting up or analyzing content groups, and how can these be avoided before we falll into a troublesome situation?

kayawalton

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

@mikea1 Great question! A big lesson learned from the early stages of developing content groups was thinking about topics as different buckets. For example, instead of just creating a segment for Paris Olympics, you have to think of it as Paris in one bucket (or segment container) and Olympics in another. This way, I can always reuse either for future events. The great way about pulling these segment containers into a new segment is the ability to tweak it for your specific use, so if you had to pull data for Paris in a different context, you can reuse that segment container instead of starting from scratch.

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MikeA1

Level 1

That’s great, thank you. When reusing segment containers like Paris and Olympics from your example, what strategies or naming conventions do you recommend to keep things organized and easy to find, all while the container grows?

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nooooooooope

Level 1

Thank you for doing this session! I would love to know your thoughts on scalability in terms of maintaining content group segments, and if there is a recommended cadence for updating them as new content goes live.

kayawalton

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

It depends on what kind of industry you have. News is probably the hardest in terms of setting cadence because you cannot predict what topics will come about or when they are needed. We news analyts live on the edge like that; amirite, @jennifer_dungan? But for more evergreen content, I would suggest coming up with a list of consistent topics that users are interested in and a content calendar of potential milestones where these content groups may spike in interest (Black Friday, sales, specific events in the year). This can help you get a lay of what segment containers to build and when to pay attention to them (this is where annotations play an important role).

Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

This also really depends on how well your teams tag and categorize the content... some content groups may be really simple... whereas others you may have to continually modify your groups to ensure all the content is included.

Don't be afraid to also schedule some time with your various teams... like in my case, I try to make sure that everyone understands how what I do can help them, and show them how they can make things easier and more reliable for everyone.

Isha Gupta

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Thanks for the amazing article and this session kayawalton!

If you could please share some ideas on different types of content groups examples across other industries such as maybe telco? What considerations you would take into account for ideating the concept of content groups for various industries?

kayawalton

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

I would definitely keep segment containers as granular as possible. Especially when you include other languages, you want to keep it to one keyword as much as possible. This way, you can keep that segment container versatile for future uses. You can either come up with a list based on popular content, user top tasks, or stakeholder input, and start from there.

Isha Gupta

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Thanks! This is very helpful.

K

katieburke797

Level 1

Thank you for this and your article Achia. You mentioned that setting up content groups requires planning and forward-thinking to build a solid infrastructure. Could you elaborate on what specific steps or considerations are involved in this planning phase to ensure the content groups are both flexible and scalable for future use?

kayawalton

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Hi @katieburke797 - thank you for joining us! I would either come up with a list of topics that are consistently used by your organization or ask certain stakeholders for input. Once you have that list, I would outline them into more granular topics so each topic can have their own segment container. In our case, we also have to account for different translations of the topic within the segment container if you support different languages. Once you have those topics and segments setup, I would build related components that make sense for what your stakeholders would want to know about these topics. The most common being annotations for related events or dates where these content groups might see a spike.

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ZhannaMc

Level 1

Hi there! Do you have any recommended videos for me and the team to watch to better understand the backed system of Adobe Analytics for beginners and intermediates?

Also, how often will these AMA sessions occur? And how can we sign up for the reoccurring series?

Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Hi @zhannamc,

There is no really set AMA series, but it's tentatively going to be quarterly to start. There should be a formal process stating soon to get these events better advertised. The first place will always be posted here in the community, but there will be an attempt at making an email distribution list to get these types of events in the future... stay tuned for more details.

As for learning the backend of Adobe, you can of course always ask people here on the forum for specific questions, but there are a lot of resources available to you.

There are User Groups that you can join:

https://analytics-augs.adobe.com/chapters/

(Feel free to join chapters not in your timezone so that you can at least get notifications of upcoming events)

And also, you can watch the recordings of their past sessions:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQOHnCs7KZgsuFHVzwboQuA

There is also the official Adobe Analytics YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@adobeanalytics3740

There are also various blogs, some may be dated (given how long AA has been around), but there is always good insights to understanding the history of tracking.

kayawalton

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Folks have been asking about timing and cadence, and it really depends on specific milestones for your organization. If you are in a less predictable industry like news, I would do a lot of preparation ahead of time. (But based on experience, there is so much you can do to prepare.) I would also suggest setting up alerts just in case you get a surge for a content group that you or your organization have not anticipated. (You would be surprised how quickly evergreen content can go viral.)

jeff_bloomer

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

It would also seem to me, that even evergreen content groups can "all of a sudden" provide opportunities to have them break out into brand new groups, based on new trends and events happening in the news. Just like jargon and colloquialisms change, I'm sure content groups get updated and need to adapt.

kayawalton

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Absolutely! This is a great point and why keeping segments for content groups as granular as possible is important. I like to keep these terms in separate segment containers (that I can always combine for cumulative data), so I can also see the trends on whether these terms are being used together or whether one jargon or colloquialism surpassed another. Understanding those trends can help folks understand how to reach their audiences more effectively based on the language they use.

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