Year on Year Change in Analysis Workspace

[#1]

Starting a new thread since the previous one here fizzled out.

Fellow Adobe users and adobe product team.  Here is a suggestion that stemmed from an embarrassing situation that cropped up today!  

For context - we have broad Adobe instrumentation in at Chegg - however we are still in the process of driving adoption of Analysis Workspace - since for so many things it is a really quick tool and avoid the need for complex data processes and things like Tableau dashboards - which end up being a source of technical debt.  My team have been working hard with business partners to move them over to a new Analysis Workspace report from a legacy Tableau report that runs off legacy web logs.  I cannot understate how the adoption of this report would have been a huge step forward as we try and drive deeper adoption of Adobe in my organization. 

So what happened?  Well unfortunately they were tripped up on a very minor detail - that seems like a huge gap in the Analysis Workspace tool and make me have serious doubts as to whether it is really a tool that other organizations are actually using for web analytics.  My team needed to include in the report a Year on Year comparison – so that they can show the %Year on Year change.  So, as an example, in the report below they would like to compare the values in the two columns and display it as a % change on the chart.

Sounds so simple – but they cannot do it and have told me that there is no known workaround.  We have since verified this with Adobe Analysis Workspace Engineering management who said " We disallow right-click > compare time period when the rows are time". 

The problem this causes is it creates the impression that we cannot use Adobe Analysis Workspace as a fully functioning tool – this undermines our effort to drive adoption – and I have already had senior execs stop me in the hallways saying “oh Matt – it turns out we cannot use Adobe since it does not do YoY reporting”.

Given the advanced features in Analysis Workspace I find it very surprising that this is not possible.   We are now faced with an ugly decision to use Excel Report Builder to get this and email out reports - or to use Tableau or Domo our BI tools.  This is like one step forward (adoption and trust of Adobe) only to take two steps back (to a world of Excel and BI tools that our partners cannot adjust).

For me this is a P0 issue affecting Adobe Adoption / Perception / NPS in my organization. 

Would love you to upvote this if you are also affected by this product gap.

[#2]

Hi Matt. Thank you for submitting this request. We agree, this is something we should add to the product in the future. We’ll keep an eye on votes and comments, always great to understand your needs more fully. We’ll also work with our Engineering team to see what can be done. I can’t offer an ETA, but we do appreciate you taking the time to document this so thoroughly, and we’ll do our best.

[#3]

Firstly, I just wanted to say I agree this should be much easier to produce a YoY report.

In order to do this I think what you need is a variable that represents day and month but not year.

On this basis using the out of the box "Day of year" variable down the left hand side instead of "day" might produce the report you were after... although it will look horrible as "Day of year" is a number value (e.g. 212) not plain English (e.g. Jul 31).

Given 'day of year' already exists out of the box, I do wonder whether it would be an easy fix for Adobe to create an equivalent with a nicer format e.g. "Jul 31"?

Or have I completely got the wrong end of the stick?!

[#4]

Day of year will work for strict date comparison (1/1/2017 vs 1/1/2018), however, the problem we're running into is that we want to look at YoY by day of the week.  For instance  compare the first Monday in Jan 2017 which falls on 1/2/2018  to the first Monday in Jan 2018 which is on 1/1/2018

[#5]

I also wonder if Sensei already knows what last year was to do anomaly detection :-)

[#6]

Yes, very good point about trying to align weekdays year to year.

I have attempted to do this in the past by writing date into a custom prop and classify it - but it's far from ideal and if you've not set it up from day 1 you've got to wait at least a year before you can start using the prop!

[#7]

Interesting approach, Andrew.   While not ideal, we have browser dates in an evar.  Will try out

[#8]

Running into this same problem. Would really like to see yoy by week.

[#9]

We have a backlogged project to add a "Week of Year" dimension to Workspace. This will behave like our other timeparting dimensions (day of week, day of year, etc), which allow for YoY comparisons to be added. We will update this ticket once that work is completed.

[#10]

Is there a rough ETA?

[#11]

It is possible is you create new Time ranges like I have done here:

April, 2, 2018 - End of Last Week, Last Year

April, 1, 2019 - End of Last Week