[AA Community Q&A Coffee Break] 04/05/23, 10am PT: Come ask questions on analytics, best practices, and tips & tricks with Ben Gaines, Director of Product Management for Adobe Analytics

[seanrobinson]

Join us for the next Adobe Analytics Community Q&A Coffee Break 

taking place Wednesday, April 5th, 2023 @ 10am PT - 11am PT 

Register Here

We will be joined by Ben Gaines (@BenjaminGaines), Director of Product Management for Adobe Analytics, who will be signed in to the Adobe Analytics Community to chat directly with you on this thread about Customer Journey Analytics, Analysis Workspace, all things product, and the big announcements from Summit 2023.

Bring any and ALL of your questions here, on this thread, on Wednesday, April 5th at 10am PT for comprehensive insights, deeper explanations, and strategic suggestions for your unique use cases ~ DIRECTLY from the Adobe Analytics Director of Product Management!

Vani Bhemarasetty (aka @VaniBhemarasetty), Technical Consultant for Adobe Analytics will also be joining to provide additional insights and answers to your questions.

REQUIREMENTS TO PARTICIPATE 

• Must be signed in to the Community during the 1-hour period 
• Must post a Question about Adobe Analytics
• THAT'S IT!  *(think of this as the Adobe Analytics Community equivalent of an AMA, (“Ask Me Anything”), and bring your best speed-typing game) 

INSTRUCTIONS 

• Log in to the community and return to this post.
• Click the blue “Reply” button at the bottom right corner of this post to create a question thread which our expert will directly reply to.
• Register Here

Ben Gaines is a Director of Product Management for Customer Journey Analytics, part of Adobe Analytics. In this role, he works closely with Adobe customers to understand their needs around cross-channel data and insights, helps guide the product strategy and roadmap, and mentors a team of product managers and technical writers. Along with Blair Reeves, he is the co-author of Building Products for the Enterprise: Product Management in Enterprise Software, available now from O’Reilly Media. In his spare time, he loves basketball, sushi, and running a Mastodon server. He lives near Salt Lake City, Utah, with his wife and four children.

Curious about what an Adobe Analytics Community Q&A Coffee Break looks like? Check out the thread from our latest 01/30/23 Adobe Analytics Coffee Break. 

[davidl55903031]

Hi Sean -
I'm working on our Product classifications for Analytics. I started doing it ad-hoc for my business unit, and got recruited by the Analytics team to help wrangle the data enterprise-wide. We have ~240,000 rows in the full set, and there's a lot of gaps and dirty data in there. I'd like to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good and get it uploaded soon with a light cleaning, and improve it as we go, but I see the Classification Importer UI allows a max of 50k rows to export. Obviously we'll keep the data offline too, but it'd be nice in the future to be able to drag it all out and see what we have in there. Is there a way to do it using the developer API or ...?

Also to the cleaning point, we have a lot of catalog #s from our ERP that are not visible on the web, so I could try to remove those before uploading, although they would do no harm assuming that having a very large classification file won't cause a performance hit in Analysis Workspace. Is there a recommended maximum size?

Thanks, Dave

[BenjaminGaines]

Hi David. Yes, there absolutely is a way to do this using the API, and in fact if you don't mind setting up some API calls it is a much faster and more scalable way to get classifications data both into and out of Adobe Analytics. There are still limits to the export via API (I believe it is actually lower—25,000 rows?—though not 100% sure), but the advantage is that you can easily "paginate" through multiple API calls, so you can get rows 1-25,000 with your first call, 25,001-50,000 with your second call, and so on and so forth. 

Regarding your question on maximum size: you're right up to a point that keys that haven't actually appeared in your data are fine. I think we generally want to stay below 500,000 rows for a classification table; it is possible to go well beyond that, but there can be some performance degradation at that point. I'm checking with a colleague on that 500,000 number and will confirm. 

[davidl55903031]

Awesome, thanks. We used FTP for large uploads previously but just started dabbling with the API.

[Gkaur104]

I have a ASP dotnet project with angular JS which is wrapped in xamrin wrapper. I integrated adobe analytics to it. In web and mobile browser it is working fine. But in application that is in Xamrin wrapper, it can’t access the url. We could see SSL error in xamrin logs. 
We haven’t done any whitelisting for web for adobe script. Do I need to make any changes to Xamrin wrapper, so it can pick analytics script. 
Thanks

Gurpreet

[BenjaminGaines]

Hi Gurpreet. To be totally honest with you, it has been probably 10 years since I did implementation work and I have never worked with Xamarin. I don't know how well we can support Xamarin in terms of answering specific questions about it—I'm not sure we have Xamarin expertise on the team, since they are a third party—but I'm hoping another member of the community might have experience with it. If anyone out there has implemented Adobe Analytics using Xamarin, please weigh in to help Gurpreet! (Also, you might have better luck submitting this as its own forum thread, so it isn't buried on this massive page of content.) 

[ckdigital21]

My organization currently saves unique customer IDs as a hit-based evar. I would love to count Unique Visitors in Analytics Workspace based on those IDs instead of the Adobe ID.

• I believe that CJA would be a perfect solution for this, but widespread implementation of CJA at this org might be a year+ away 
• Are there any other workable ways to use internal customer IDs in the interim?
  • Using a Distinct Count calc metric on the customer-ID evar has a cardinality problem - comparing its results to a Data Warehouse export for a small subset of users (5% of total) is only 50% accurate
  • Someone suggested using Audience Manager to stitch user IDs together, much as you might do to unify a user across different devices. They weren't sure if cardiality would be an issue.
  • I vaguely remember Customer Attributes when it was released - am I correct in remembering this would still count Uniques based on the Adobe ID, not any customer ID that is included with the upload?
• Are there any other ways to consider? 

[BenjaminGaines]

• I believe that CJA would be a perfect solution for this, but widespread implementation of CJA at this org might be a year+ away 

You're right—this is a great use case for CJA. But I understand that it's going to take some time to get there. 

• Are there any other workable ways to use internal customer IDs in the interim?
  • Using a Distinct Count calc metric on the customer-ID evar has a cardinality problem - comparing its results to a Data Warehouse export for a small subset of users (5% of total) is only 50% accurate

This was going to be my first suggestion, but you're right that it is estimated distinct count. The estimates do degrade with high-cardinality dimensions.  

• Someone suggested using Audience Manager to stitch user IDs together, much as you might do to unify a user across different devices. They weren't sure if cardiality would be an issue.

This is an interesting idea—what I'm not sure of is how you would feed those IDs back into Adobe Analytics. Would this essentially be a classification of device IDs into customer IDs? Would have to know more about the data to guess whether cardinality would be an issue. 

• I vaguely remember Customer Attributes when it was released - am I correct in remembering this would still count Uniques based on the Adobe ID, not any customer ID that is included with the upload?

That's correct, unfortunately—Customer Attributes describes the customer ID but it does not change how the IDs get counted as UVs. 

• Are there any other ways to consider? 

Do you know whether you are using Adobe Analytics Ultimate and, if so, have you considered Cross-Device Analytics as a way of having a bit more control over this? That's where I think I would start. Unless I'm missing something, Analytics Ultimate should let you stitch profiles together on a field (like an eVar). Doing it "at the source" (on the page/app) wouldn't work because you wouldn't have the ability to stitch anonymous traffic to known traffic post-login. Those are the only ideas I've got at the moment. 

[ckdigital21]

Thank you - very helpful!

• about the Audience Manager method - I'm not sure exactly how that proposal would work. 
• I suspect (hope) we do have Ultimate, but will need to find out. Taking your suggestion, I'm reading up on Cross-Device - https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/cda/overview.html?lang=en
• This sounds like it could be a fantastic solution, since the virtual report suite method would be "instant gratification" with backwards compatibility for historical data! 
• So... both quicker to implement and more useful than trying to add something new during data collection! (I guess "at data collection" would be important for real-time targeting, but there are other methods to accomplish that, and my need is more accurate analysis)
• I actually tested the device map method years ago at a different org - the fielded-data & virtual report suite is new since then, and sounds very promising
• If I'm reading the implementation page correctly, the CDA option would not currently be self-evident to someone looking at virtual-report-suite setup, right? You first need to make a request to Customer Care.. (https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/components/cda/setup.html?lang=en)
• Any idea when / if A4T integration is on the roadmap (FAQ says not now). Would A4T be valid after the 1-week "replay" data reconciliation?
• Anyway, thanks again - I need to explain the CJA opportunity to my part of the organization, and it's great to have a second, potentially easier option at the same time!

[BenjaminGaines]

My pleasure! Yeah, it's definitely worth exploring the AAM option a little more with someone who knows AAM inside and out. . . which isn't me, unfortunately. 

>> If I'm reading the implementation page correctly, the CDA option would not

>> currently be self-evident to someone looking at virtual-report-suite setup, right? 

Yes, that's right. It has to be provisioned by Adobe before it shows up.

>> Any idea when / if A4T integration is on the roadmap (FAQ says not now).

>> Would A4T be valid after the 1-week "replay" data reconciliation?

I don't think it would, but let me check. Not sure if/when full support for A4T is coming, and I will try to find out. (If it helps your CJA case, full "CJA4T" support—including on stitched datasets—is coming in a month or two.)

[ckdigital21]

If you're still fielding follow-up questions on these:

Do you know if the Cross-Device virtual-report-suite method is limited to 1 data field per virtual report suite, or 1 per original report suite, or 1 per account ? Or is this an "ask your account manager" item? 

Happily, I think we are an Ultimate customer, based on the number of evars I'm seeing...

[BenjaminGaines]

When you say "one data field" do you mean "one field for the purpose of stitching?" As in, you can designate an eVar that contains the ID but not two fields that contain IDs? 

[ckdigital21]

Hmmm... the documentation seems to say you can stitch on only 1 field per virtual report suite (i.e., cannot mix data from 2 different fields, which makes sense for efficiency). 

We have 1 type of customer ID in evarX, and 2nd type of customer ID in evarY, and probably another in evarZ that I don't know about. I'm wondering if you can have 2 virtual report suites for CDA, with each using a different evar for stitching. If it's only 1 per account, then we'd have to decide which one to use (i.e., more people and deeper thinking for a decision, which might slow things down)

[BenjaminGaines]

Confirmed that for now you can only use do one VRS. This problem is solved in CJA, where you can do multiple stitching methods for different views of your data. 

[ckdigital21]

thanks - this helps me move forward!

[jc608]

What is the best way to track activity to vanity URLs?

[davidl55903031]

Encode a campaign tag in them!

[jc608]

That is what we are planning on doing! Glad to know we are headed down the right track. Thanks!

[BenjaminGaines]

My name is Ben Gaines and I endorse this message! 

[jc608]

If we were to transition to CJA from AA, what is the implantation process like? Is it an easy transition? 

[BenjaminGaines]

Great question. The answer (as always) is: it depends! We've actually got a decision tree to help you figure out the best approach. Most CJA customers send the data they're already collecting in Adobe Analytics over to AEP. We make that really easy, and we give you tools so you can do some data transformations along the way, including (importantly) aligning dimensions and metrics across report suites so they land in the same bucket in CJA. (So if you have multiple report suites with differing implementations, you can get a true global view in CJA without touching code on your pages/apps.) From there, it's just a matter of telling CJA which datasets you want to bring in, and then configuring how you want to view them in what we call Data Views (which are sort of like Virtual Report Suites for CJA, only with a LOT more control over the data—attribution settings, creating new dimensions out existing ones—that sort of thing).

I won't say it's a totally painless process. You do have to configure a lot of things, both in AEP (XDM, etc.) and in CJA (Connections, Data Views). But at least you don't have to go through the hassle of re-tagging. 

Now, some customers do choose to re-tag, typically using the AEP SDKs (web & mobile), which have a bunch of advantages and a few disadvantages. The advantages are one Adobe tag to rule them all, and an easier integration with Adobe's Real-Time CDP. The disadvantages are that there are a few remaining fields that the AEP SDKs don't capture, such as some of the Device and Technology dimensions—but we're rapidly adding support for those. 

If you choose to use the AEP SDKs, your implementation journey is similar once you've got data flowing in to AEP. 

The next big big BIG step is bringing in other sources of data—CRM, call center, email, point-of-sale, whatever—and in many cases AEP makes that easy with pre-built connectors. In other cases, you'd need to ETL that data into AEP yourself and map it to XDM before bringing it into CJA and merging it with your digital data (which we do make easy—just tell us which field is the customer ID and which field is the timestamp, and we do the rest to re-key and re-sequence all of your data for you). And then you can do amazing things like see the impact of a point-of-sale marketing campaign on your online retention and vice versa. 

This is a HUGE topic and I highly recommend checking out some of the CJA implementation content on Experience League to help answer it further. A member of my team put this together a couple of months ago: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics-platform/using/cja-data-ingestion/data-ingestion.h...