Introduction
In this Experience League blog post, we'll review the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) to Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) foundation and explore key features of Analysis Workspace within CJA. We'll examine how CJA enhances your analytical approach, offering valuable insights into customer behavior across various touchpoints.
This crash course will demonstrate how Analysis Workspace deepens your understanding of the customer journey. You'll learn how its capabilities and report-time data processing empower analysts to uncover patterns, identify key trends, and make data-informed decisions. These insights can significantly influence your business performance reviews and shape your strategies.
This guide builds upon and expands several existing Experience League resources focused on Analysis Workspace in CJA. These resources provide a solid foundation for understanding and leveraging CJA's powerful analytical capabilities. Key resources include:
- Navigating the Learning Path of Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, providing a learning roadmap for mastering CJA's features and functionalities.
- Adobe Customer Journey Analytics Essentials: A Breakdown of the Five Core Concepts, providing an in-depth exploration of the fundamental principles that form the foundation of CJA.
- An Exploration of the Adobe Customer Journey Analytics Interface, providing a comprehensive walkthrough of the CJA user interface and its elements.
- The Guide to Projects and Analysis Workspace in Customer Journey Analytics, offering an in-depth look at creating and managing projects within the CJA environment.
- A collection of Best Practices for Maximizing Your Analysis with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, sharing tips and strategies for leveraging CJA to its fullest potential.
These resources serve as excellent companions to this guide, offering additional context and depth to enhance your understanding of CJA's Analysis Workspace and its features.
CJA administrators play a crucial role in setting up and maintaining the foundational elements of your CJA environment. CJA analysts must partner closely with their administrator counterparts to ensure optimal configuration and utilization of the platform. This collaboration is essential for aligning analytical capabilities with business objectives and technical constraints.
To foster this partnership, CJA analysts should familiarize themselves with the administrative aspects of CJA. An excellent resource for this is the Adobe Experience Platform Crash Course for Adobe Customer Journey Analytics Product Administrators. Though primarily aimed at administrators, this resource helps analysts grasp the backend processes, data management practices, and configuration options that influence their analytical work.
By bridging the gap between analysis and administration, CJA analysts can more effectively communicate their needs, understand system limitations, and collaborate on solutions that maximize CJA's value for their organization. This synergy between analysts and administrators is key to unlocking the full potential of CJA.
While these resources offer comprehensive guidance, our crash course provides a more focused approach—helping you leverage Analysis Workspace's capabilities for immediate impact on your analytical processes.
The Adobe Experience Platform to Customer Journey Analytics Infrastructure: Understanding Analysis Workspace Projects
Analysis Workspace Projects in CJA are built on a framework of interconnected Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC) elements. These range from AEP schemas and datasets to CJA Connections and Data Views, culminating in the components that form the analytical building blocks of Analysis Workspace. Together, these elements create a comprehensive analytical ecosystem. By leveraging this integrated framework, analysts using CJA Analysis Workspace can uncover powerful insights and gain a holistic understanding of the customer journey across various touchpoints, platforms, and channels.
The synergy among these elements forms the core of CJA's analytical capabilities, transforming raw AEP data into actionable CJA insights. Let's explore how these crucial components work in concert to provide a comprehensive view of customer interactions:
1. Adobe Experience Platform
At the heart of the CJA ecosystem, AEP serves as a curated, centralized data repository—designed to support the delivery of specific use cases. AEP is crucial in collecting and unifying customer data from diverse sources, such as web and mobile app telemetry, in-store purchases, and customer service interactions. This consolidation is facilitated by AEP's robust schema and dataset capabilities. Schemas define the structure and format of data, ensuring consistency across various sources, while datasets organize and store the actual data within AEP. This structured approach creates a comprehensive, multifaceted customer view, offering insights into individual interactions across various touchpoints and channels. By aggregating and harmonizing this wealth of data through well-defined schemas and datasets, AEP empowers CJA Analysts to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, preferences, and patterns—ultimately enabling more informed decision-making and personalized customer experiences.
2. Customer Journey Analytics: Connections
Connections serve as the vital link between your AEP datasets and CJA. These Connections ingest and utilize AEP schemas and datasets, playing a crucial role in defining and determining which specific data from AEP will be accessible for analysis within CJA at a Connection-level. By establishing these Connections, you gain the ability to incorporate and analyze relevant customer data spanning across multiple channels and touchpoints, providing a comprehensive view of the customer journey. This integration allows for a more holistic analysis, enabling you to uncover insights that might otherwise be missed when examining datasets in isolation, while maintaining the structural integrity and relationships defined in the original AEP schemas.
3. Customer Journey Analytics: Data Views
Data Views function as a customizable lens through which you interpret and analyze your connected datasets within the CJA ecosystem. These views offer a high degree of flexibility, allowing you to tailor how your data is presented and structured in Analysis Workspace to align with your specific analytical objectives. Data Views include global settings that affect the entire Data View, such as time zone configuration and session timeout definitions. By leveraging Data Views, you can define and customize various components crucial to your analysis, including:
- Dimensions: Descriptive attributes that provide context to your metrics
- Metrics: Quantifiable measurements that track specific aspects of performance
- Global Filter Settings: Segmentation criteria used to refine and focus your Data View
- Session Settings: Define the duration of inactivity between events before a session ends and a new one begin
This level of customization allows you to create a data environment tailored to your specific use cases, precisely matching your analytical needs. It facilitates more accurate and relevant insights into customer behavior and journey patterns. By fine-tuning these elements, you ensure that the data presented in Analysis Workspace aligns perfectly with your business questions and strategic goals.
4. Customer Journey Analytics: Analysis Workspace
Analysis Workspace in CJA is built on the Data View configured components that form the canvas of your analytical efforts. These components work together to create a framework for producing meaningful and insightful analyses. By mastering these components, you can harness the full potential of CJA Analysis Workspace and extract valuable insights to guide informed decision-making:
- Dimensions: These are qualitative attributes of your data that provide context and categorization. Examples include page names, product categories, customer types, geographic locations, or device types. Dimensions allow you to segment and organize your data in ways that reveal patterns and trends across different aspects of the customer journey.
- Metrics: These quantitative measurements represent specific actions, events, or values in your data. Common examples include people, sessions, events, orders, units, and revenue. Metrics form the numerical foundation for measuring performance, tracking progress, and pinpointing areas for improvement in your customer experience measurement strategy.
- Calculated Metrics: These custom metrics are derived from existing metrics using mathematical formulas or functions. Calculated metrics enable you to create tailored ratio and rate performance indicators that align with your specific business needs. For instance, you could create a "Revenue per Session" metric by dividing total revenue by the number of sessions. These bespoke calculated metrics facilitate more sophisticated analysis, helping you uncover deeper insights into customer behavior and business performance.
- Filters: These are customized subsets of your data based on specific segment criteria or conditions. Filters allow you to focus on particular groups of customers, behaviors, or interactions that are relevant to your analysis. By creating and applying filters, you can drill down into specific aspects of the customer experience, compare different user groups, and uncover insights that might be obscured in the broader dataset.
- Date Ranges: These define the specific time periods for your analysis, allowing you to examine data within relevant timeframes. Date ranges can be preset (e.g., last 30 days, current month) or custom-defined to align with your specific analytical needs. They enable you to track performance over time, identify seasonal trends, and measure the impact of marketing initiatives or other time-sensitive factors. Be aware that in CJA, due to Person (Reporting Window) logic involving the lookback window, you may occasionally notice dimension items attributed to dates outside your specified reporting window.
Key Capabilities of Analysis Workspace in Customer Journey Analytics
Analysis Workspace is the primary interface in the CJA Analyst's toolkit, offering an environment for data exploration and insight generation. Analysis Workspace blends flexibility with intuitive design, allowing analysts to navigate complex customer data landscapes with precision. Through its comprehensive set of features and visualizations, Analysis Workspace empowers users to extract actionable insights—all of which can drive strategic decision-making.
The platform's intuitive interface belies its powerful capabilities, enabling analysts of all skill levels to harness its full potential. From its drag-and-drop reporting functionality to attribution, Analysis Workspace accommodates a wide spectrum of analytical needs. This versatility fosters effective collaboration among CJA Analyst teams, allowing them to share insights and build upon each other's work—ultimately creating a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey.
As we explore the features and benefits of Analysis Workspace, you'll discover how this tool can transform your approach to customer data analysis, enabling you to:
- Perform in-depth data breakdowns and analyses
- Create custom metrics and filters
- Conduct sophisticated attribution analysis and detect anomalies
- Visualize intricate data relationships with clarity
- Generate interactive, shareable reports for other analysts and stakeholders
How to Navigate to Analysis Workspace in Customer Journey Analytics:
- In Customer Journey Analytics, select Workspace.
- In the left panel, choose Projects, then click Create project.
- Select Blank Workspace project to create your project using a browser. For creating a Mobile scorecard project to share with stakeholders via a mobile app, refer to Blank mobile scorecard. To explore various options for creating a guided analysis project, see Guided analysis.
- Click Create.
Let's explore the key features that make Analysis Workspace an indispensable tool for data analysis. In the following sections, we'll delve into each of these capabilities, demonstrating how they facilitate more effective, efficient, and insightful data exploration:
1. Unified Cross-Dataset Analysis
Analysis Workspace in CJA integrates data from diverse channels, platforms, and touchpoints, offering a comprehensive view of the customer journey—provided there's a unifying person identifier. This holistic approach allows you to synthesize information from various sources, creating a unified canvas of customer interactions, behaviors, and metadata. By breaking down data silos, you can uncover insights that might remain hidden when examining data in isolation. This all-encompassing analysis enables you to identify cross-channel patterns, understand the interplay between different touchpoints, and gain a deeper appreciation for the intricacies of the customer experience. Ultimately, this unified approach equips you with the knowledge to make more informed decisions, optimize customer interactions across all channels, and craft more effective marketing strategies. CJA enables you to analyze data at the individual person, session, or event level. Without sampling, CJA's architecture supports both broad overviews and granular examinations, offering maneuverability in your data exploration.
2. Report-Time Data Processing
Analysis Workspace in CJA extensively utilizes report-time data processing, a powerful feature that processes data when you generate a report, rather than during initial data collection. This innovative approach offers numerous benefits that significantly enhance the analytical capabilities and efficiency of CJA Analysts:
- Enhanced Flexibility: This feature enables on-the-fly modifications of variables and metrics without reprocessing historical data. Analysts can quickly adapt to changing analytical needs, exploring various data perspectives effortlessly. It also streamlines implementations—rather than creating multiple explicit dimensions to apply different persistence to a variable, you can simply create a new dimension and apply different settings using report-time processing.
- Customization: Analysts gain maximum flexibility by applying various retroactive attribution models, creating calculated metrics, or using filters without altering the underlying data. This enables the exploration of different analytical scenarios and hypotheses while preserving data integrity.
- Data Exploration: Analysts can test diverse hypotheses and investigate data relationships without the constraints of data reprocessing wait times. This fosters a more exploratory and iterative approach to data analysis, potentially uncovering unexpected insights.
These capabilities empower analysts to adopt a more dynamic and responsive approach to data analysis. They facilitate rapid adaptation to evolving business questions, enable data exploration from multiple perspectives, and eliminate many technical limitations traditionally associated with data processing. As a result, CJA Analysts can dive deeper into the intricacies of customer behavior, uncover hidden patterns, and generate more actionable insights to drive business success.
3. Drag-and-Drop Flexibility
Analysis Workspace's intuitive drag-and-drop interface empowers analysts to craft custom reports, apply dimensional context, and create compelling visualizations. This user-friendly approach streamlines the process of transforming complex data into actionable insights. This user-friendly approach democratizes data analysis, enabling users to rapidly construct sophisticated dashboards and reports. The inherent flexibility of this drag-and-drop functionality facilitates swift iteration and data exploration, fostering a more agile and responsive analytical process. CJA Analysts can quickly test hypotheses, experiment with various data combinations, and adjust their approach on the fly—leading to faster insights and more dynamic decision-making. Moreover, this intuitive interface lowers the barrier to entry for new users, encouraging wider adoption of data-driven practices across organizations and enhancing team collaboration on analytical projects.
4. Attribution & Filtering
Adobe CJA offers powerful attribution and filtering capabilities. These features allow analysts to dissect data in numerous ways "on-the-fly" and perform various analyses quickly, building a broader perspective on success factors. The attribution feature enables you to assign credit for conversions or other key events across various touchpoints in the customer journey. This helps in understanding which channels, campaigns, or interactions are most effective in driving desired outcomes.
Filtering in CJA is equally powerful, allowing you to create complex segments based on various criteria such as user behavior, attributes, or sequential actions. These sophisticated filters can be applied to isolate specific customer groups or journeys, providing granular insights into user patterns and preferences. By combining attribution models with advanced filtering, analysts can gain a deeper understanding of how different customer segments interact with your brand across multiple touchpoints, leading to more targeted and effective marketing strategies.
5. Visualizations
Analysis Workspace in CJA offers an array of visualization options that transform complex data into clear, actionable insights. These powerful visual tools enable analysts to present data in compelling and easily digestible formats, facilitating better understanding and decision-making. Key visualization types in Analysis Workspace include:
- Freeform Tables: Highly customizable tables that allow for flexible data exploration and comparison across multiple dimensions and metrics.
- Cohort Tables: These visualizations help in understanding user retention and churn over time, crucial for analyzing customer lifecycle and engagement.
- Flow and Fallout Diagrams: These visualizations help analyze customer paths and identify where users drop off in their journey, providing insights into user behavior and potential areas for improvement.
- Venn Diagrams: Useful for visualizing overlaps between different filters and one metric, providing insights into shared characteristics or behaviors.
- Experimentation Panel: Enables organizations to analyze and interpret results from A/B tests and multivariate experiments, comparing different user experiences, marketing strategies, or messaging variations directly within CJA.
- Journey Canvas: This powerful visualization tool empowers analysts to craft, examine, and extract insights from customer journeys. By leveraging any combination of events, dimension items, filters, and date ranges, analysts can construct intricate journey nodes, painting a picture of the customer's path.
These visualizations, coupled with the drag-and-drop interface, empower analysts to create dynamic, interactive dashboards that bring data to life. By leveraging these tools, CJA users can effectively communicate complex insights to stakeholders, driving data-informed decision-making across the organization. The ability to quickly switch between different visualization types also allows for rapid exploration of data from multiple angles, uncovering insights that might be missed in traditional tabular formats.
Conclusion
In this crash course, we've explored the AEP to CJA foundation and highlighted the powerful capabilities of Analysis Workspace within CJA. We've discovered how CJA transforms raw data into actionable insights, offering a comprehensive view of the customer journey across multiple touchpoints.
We've covered the key elements that form the foundation of CJA, including AEP, CJA Connections, and Data Views. We've also reviewed the core elements of Analysis Workspace itself, such as dimensions, metrics, calculated metrics, filters, and date ranges.
The key capabilities we've explored—unified person-level cross-dataset analysis, report-time data processing, drag-and-drop flexibility, attribution and filtering, and visualizations—showcase how Analysis Workspace empowers analysts to uncover deep insights with ease and efficiency.
By mastering these tools and features, CJA Analysts can:
- Gain a holistic view of customer interactions across all platforms, channels, and touchpoints
- Create custom, flexible reports without extensive technical knowledge
- Perform complex analyses with speed and agility
- Adapt quickly to changing business questions and requirements
- Uncover hidden patterns and trends in customer behavior
- Share insights effectively with colleagues and stakeholders using interactive, visually compelling dashboards and reports
As you explore deeper into Analysis Workspace in CJA, remember that its strength lies in transforming complex data into clear, actionable insights on a person, session, or event basis. Analysis Workspace not only streamlines the analytical process but also unlocks new avenues for understanding and optimizing the customer journey. Through consistent practice and exploration, you'll harness the full potential of Analysis Workspace, driving data-informed decisions and strategies that elevate the customer experience and propel business success.
