[Mentor Jennifer Dungan] Adobe Analytics Community Mentorship Program 2024

Woohoo! Thank you for this discussion thread. Nice to meet you, Jennifer and fellow team members. My name is Tanu Tiwari and I am leading the Data & Analytics team for Products & Technology Marketing team at PwC. I am based in SF Bay, California. I have been working with Adobe Analytics for about 2 years but not very extensively. I am looking forward to getting certified so I could utilize AA to its full potential and implement reporting improvements for our team.

Hello Everyone,

It's a pleasure to meet everyone and I look forward to making this a successful program!

A little bit about me:

I work for Torstar, which is a newspaper company located in Toronto, Canada. I've been with the company for about 17 years, where I started as a web developer, moved into QA, then finally just took over all the analytics. I've used Adobe Analytics at all stages of my career here, but I also am in charge of the Google Analytics and Parse.ly Analytics.

While this will obviously focus on Adobe, if any of you are coming from a GA background, let me know and I can try to frame content / answers as parallels between the two programs if that will help to solidify the concepts we are going to cover.

Hello Everyone & @jennifer_dungan ,

Pleasure e-meeting everyone & excited to be part of this team.

My name is Abhishek Dubey. I have accumulated 7 years of experience in the digital marketing domain, taking on various roles and responsibilities. My career began as a web developer, a role I held for one year. Subsequently, I had the opportunity to join Accenture as an AEM Author, where I spent three years before progressing to a more senior role as an AEM SME.

Over two years ago, I advanced to the position of Team Lead and Web Operations Consultant (Development, SEO, Accessibility, Automation, and Analytics). Although Adobe Analytics was part of my daily responsibilities as one of my KPI included finding opportunities in user experience optimizations for the client backed by data which can then be utilized for personalizations using Adobe Target however my focus was divided among other areas due to the role. This led me to take a leap of faith and fully immerse myself in Adobe Analytics.

For the past year, I have been working with PlanNet Technest India as a full-time Digital Analyst Consultant. In this role, I am primarily responsible a System Administrator (which allows me to delve into Data Warehouse/Feeds, User Management, Report Suite Creations, Classifications, and API Management etc) along with Reporting-dashboarding. I have recently started to get my hands dirty on Launch implementations as well.

I am hoping to learn a lot, improve as well as expand my understanding about Analytics and complete my certification and to be honest I am super excited to be your mentee @jennifer_dungan (you have some amazing acomplishments & level of knowledge which are clearly depicted with all badges earned, questions answered, ideas added etc)

Hi everyone, I'm Sean (the guy you saw in the kickoff meeting last week). I'll be joining all of you in this group as a learner, and I'm really excited to work towards my certification! 

I'm in Salt Lake City, Utah, with a MA in art history and an MBA, and currently work at Adobe. I use Analytics regularly for my job, but I'm far from a power user, so I'm keen to learn more and get certified. Thanks for leading us here @jennifer_dungan, we're all very lucky to have you guiding us on this experience! Looking forward to connecting more with everyone else here.

Hello All,

Just in case you missed it, all the learning materials for this mentorship program will be available through the Exam Prep Guide, linked from the Certificate Details page (https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/certification/program/technical-certifications/aa/aa-professional/aa-p-business)

This is an interactive course, which I will be reviewing myself so that I can stay in line with what you all will be learning, and so that we can have discussions on the same page. However, since this is an interactive course, and not a "module posted by me" per week, we'll likely be sitting at slightly different steps from one another.

For those of you that wish, by all means, go through the whole course up front, and then you can re-review those sections as we get into our Quizzes and Discussions; but I also understand the reality of having a busy life and that sometimes other stuff takes priority.

If you feel like you are falling behind, don't worry, I will be here for you when you are ready, to ensure you get the most out of this program!

In a nutshell, the course is broken into four main sections:

1. Section 1: Business analysis (34%)
   • Given a business need/question, identify an appropriate reporting strategy to perform an analysis
   • Analyze data to answer business questions
   • Identify conversion funnels (as a concept to understand business analysis)
   • Consult the Solution Design Reference (SDR) to determine what data is available in reports
   • Analyze report data to summarize and draw conclusions
   • Recognize outliers and anomalies in reports
2. Section 2: Reporting and dashboarding for projects (38%)
   • Consider the advantages of using specific visualizations based on a given scenario
   • Compare fallout and flow visualization
   • Apply the process to schedule and share Projects for different users and/or groups
   • Apply the process to look up and combine dimensions, metrics, date ranges, and segments
   • Apply the process to create a visualization
   • Given a scenario, determine the appropriate item to use
   • Report on marketing campaign performance
3. Section 3: Segmentation and calculated metrics (19%)
   • Determine how to develop and configure basic segments using best practices
   • Apply the process to share segments with others in the organization
   • Apply segments to Projects and Components
   • Apply the process to generate basic calculated and/or segmented metrics
4. Section 4: General tool knowledge and troubleshooting (9%) 
   • Understand different types of dimensions and parameters existing in Adobe Analytics (eVars, props, and events)
   • Determine how to export data from Adobe Analytics

Section 1: Business analysis (34%)

I am going to try and keep threads of discussions organized by each of the main modules. Reply to this thread directly with questions, concerns, or discussion points relative to this section.

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I've only just started reviewing the course material myself, and I would like to flag that the first thing it seems to cover is Data Workbench... which is somewhat ironic, given this product was sunset last December:

There is also a section near the end of the first module for Reports and Analytics, another sunset feature:

That said, since I don't know exactly what might be covered in the final exam, it's probably in your best interest to review the tool, even if only to understand the historical progression of the Adobe Tools.

Analysis Workspace is the current primary interface for accessing your reporting data, which, while not listed directly, is essentially the tool used in the primary visualizations within the module. Another valuable tool which seems to be absent is Report Builder, which is an Excel add-on which allows you to pull data directly from Adobe into Excel (windows only at this time I am afraid... we are all hoping for a new release of this tool similar to the one made for CJA which can work on PC and Mac, and has a cleaner, more updated interface.... ). 

While there is no guarantee that Report Builder will be covered in the course / exam, it would be silly for us to overlook it. While it may not help you pass your certifications, if your goal is to really understand the tools and what is available to you, I would be happy to spend some time reviewing this interface and why it's still relevant to use today. Let me know if this is of interest to you, as I want to be sure my time is well spent before diving into this.

Section 2: Reporting and dashboarding for projects (38%)

Reply to this thread directly with questions, concerns, or discussion points relative to section 2.

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Like in section 1, the we seem to be presented with some out of date information:

This is an interesting one... while the legacy Scheduled Reports is sunset, the Scheduled Projects is certainly alive and well, and if you are familiar with Report Builder, you know that those scheduled reports used to sit inside the Scheduled Reports area.... don't worry, this still exists, it's just been moved to it's own dedicated area: ARB Scheduled Reports (which is slightly inconvenient to get to: Components > All Components, then found under "Project & Reports")

Analysis Workspace makes an appearance in this module (I guess it had to show up somewhere.... though in place of the sunset tool would have made a lot more sense).

Section 3: Segmentation and calculated metrics (19%)

Reply to this thread directly with questions, concerns, or discussion points relative to section 3.

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Looks like Section 3 is all current and relevant information at a first pass, so I have nothing of note to flag at this time; but we will dig into details as everyone is ready to jump into the module.

Quiz 1: Which of these report would help you see users (group of users) sharing common characteristics over a specified period?

A. Fallout
B. Flow report
C. Cohort Analysis
D. Segment Comparison

Post your reply with answers as A,B,C or D.

Bonus thought exercise, explain your answer and why (this won't be a part of certification, but it helps with building a knowledge base for the tools).