Assurance for Mobile Analytics

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In a recent blog, we introduced using Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) Assurance for mobile apps, including steps for installation, connecting to session, and covering some of the helpful tools within Assurance. Assurance enables you to validate your mobile implementation by verifying events, shared states, extension versions, and more, ensuring your implementation is configured correctly and running smoothly. 

This post will focus on using Assurance to validate and troubleshoot your Adobe Analytics implementation. Using the new Analytics Events makes achieving data accuracy easier than ever. 

Getting Started 

Ensure that you are connected to an Assurance session and have Analytics Events enabled. If you don’t see Analytics Events in your navigation bar, you will need to configure the side bar to add it.  

Analytics Events

Once connected, you’ll start seeing your Analytics events flow into Assurance. In the Events tab, the Detail column will show the eventType for each of your events. The Analytics Event plugin will automatically detect if you are using the Adobe Analytics solution-specific extension, Edge Bridge extension, or Edge extension and toggle the Analytics view accordingly. Clicking on an event will open the processing chain, allowing you to inspect events from the time they are received to when they are processed by Analytics. 

Check each of the steps in the event flow to validate Analytics:  

1. Event Details: Check the original payload from the app, including data passed in the XDM or data objects.  
2. Edge Bridge Request: If using the Edge Bridge Extension, confirm the hit is routed correctly with context data mapped to the Analytics data object.  
3. Datastream: Ensure the correct datastreamId is being used and datastream details, including services enabled, report suite IDs, and additional properties are enabled. Alternatively, use the "Copy Data" option to copy the datastream details to more easily view them in any text file.  
4. Edge Hit Received: Confirm that Edge received the event.  
5. Edge Hit Processed: Confirm that Edge processed the hit.  
6. Analytics Hit: Verify the Analytics report suite IDs and field values, including the kvdata information. Remember that these are pre-processed values.  
7. Analytics Mapping: Check the status of Adobe Analytics automatic mappings. 
8. Analytics Responses: Check the Analytics response to confirm there are no errors.
9. Post-Processed Data: Review the final values of the Analytics fields, including your eVars, props, and events, ensuring your data is accurate and complete.

These steps will ensure data is captured and processed correctly and making it easier to identify any snags in the event processing. 

In addition to the Events tab, you can also use the Validation tab within Analytics Events to ensure your events have passed all checks. Here you can get a quick summary of the health of your implementation, checking for items including the consent status, extension configurations, and that the processing steps have passed correctly. This is an important check to identify errors in your implementation or gain confidence that events are being processed as expected.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

While the event processing flow described above is the “happy path” to sending Analytics data, you can use the Analytics Events to troubleshoot errors in your implementation. Here are some common scenarios to watch for and troubleshoot:  

• Missing Analytics fields: If you find Analytics fields are missing, check the original payload under Event Details to confirm that the intended data was passed correctly. Verify that the mappings step was successful for automatic mappings. 
• Event not processed: If you find that you’re missing the Post-Processed Data step, review the previous steps to find where the issue occurred. For example, check the Datastreams step to ensure that your datastream has Adobe Analytics enabled.  
• Edge hits not received or processed: If the Edge hits aren’t received, check the validations tab to ensure that your extensions are registered, and consent is set correctly.  

AEP Assurance is an invaluable tool for validating and troubleshooting your mobile Analytics implementation. The new Analytics Event feature enables you to gain even deeper insights into how Analytics events are processed, ensuring data accuracy and the ability to resolve issues quickly. The post-processed data is nearly real-time, which speeds up the process of verifying your data rather than waiting for data to show in Analytics reports. Whether you’re setting up a new implementation or validating an existing one, Assurance provides confidence in your data collection.  

Resources:  

Implementing the Adobe Experience Platform Assurance extension 

Validating the Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network to Analytics workflow with Assurance