Tuesday Tech Bytes - Customer Journey Analytics - Week 2 - Tips & Tricks

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Last week we looked at several CJA Golden Nuggets.  This week we'll look at three tips & tricks that can streamline your workflows.  Through my work with CJA for multiple clients, watching various webinars, reading blog posts, and studying for my CJA Expert Certification, I’ve seen many different approaches.  These are some of the best tips & tricks I've encountered for CJA.  I'd love to hear your favorites as well!  Add them in the comments below!

Modifying multiple component settings

When managing components, many settings can be managed for multiple components all at once.  For example, a general best practice is using lowercase for dimension values.  When lowercase is enabled, values such as Homepage and homepage will be reported together.  Without this setting, each version of capitalization will be reported on a unique row.

Data view search and settings make it easy to enable the lowercase setting to many components at once.  I’ll give an example from a demo sandbox.

First, I’ll click the column icon to show the lowercase column and hide some other columns.

Next, I’ll click the lowercase column header to sort the values so those without the setting enabled are on top.

Now I can select multiple components at once by clicking on the first, holding shift, and clicking on the last.  The component settings section now shows that I have 6 components selected.

Checking the lowercase box in the behavior section will apply the lowercase setting to all selected components.

After saving the data view, all values will be consistent with lowercase.

Some settings must be set individually, and you’ll notice these are not available in the settings section with multiple components selected.  Settings may also not be available based upon components selected.  For lowercase, all components selected should be strings.  If any selected components are another data type, the lowercase option will not be available.

Swapping components in place

I learned this very cool tip on a webinar and it can come in very handy as implementations evolve.

As mentioned last week, Workspace Projects, APIs, and Report Builder reference components using the Component ID.  This trick allows you to modify or upgrade a component that will automatically be replaced anywhere it’s in use.

Let’s say for example that you initially used a page_name Component ID that was based on an event parameter.  Later, either due to an update in the implementation or something that was initially missed, you realize that the page_name value is only set for web.  Mobile apps have a different screen_name parameter, but the information is essentially the same.  Using a merge derived field, you can return the first non-null value of page_name or screen_name.  Since you know the page_name component is used in a number of projects, it would be nice to upgrade the component to show the values from your new, derived field.

CJA makes this much easier than it’s been in the past.  Once you’ve validated your new component, a few easy steps will automatically replace the old component with the new one.

First, if you hover your mouse next to your old component name, a pencil icon will appear.

Clicking this icon will allow you to change your Component Name.  Add “_archive” to the end and save the new ID.  You’ll now also need to save your changes to the data view.

Next, you’ll use the same method to update the Component ID of your derived field to match your old Component ID, page_name, in this example. 

The next time projects are opened or refreshed, the new component will be returned.  It’s important to ensure that you communicate changes as appropriate to users.  It might also make sense to hide the individual page name and screen name components to avoid confusion.

BI Extension tool, deduplication

While the BI Extension tool provides a great enhancement for exporting data from CJA, it’s important to be aware of how duplication works in the tool. 

For example, let’s say you build a table of People by day.  If you use the BI tools sum feature, the total will not be deduplicated.  Instead, it will simply sum up the rows for each day.  Many of us are likely to expect this when using the tool.

I was surprised to find, however, that removing the day dimension doesn’t deduplicate the value.  It’s still just a sum of each day’s total.  However, replacing the day dimension with another dimension such as year should result in your People count being deduplicated and matching what you’d see in a Workspace freeform table.

Being aware of how the BI Extension handles deduplication can allow you to validate values appear as intended before finalizing your analysis.