Automating report creation for microsites

[m_alcantara]

Use-case: We have one report suite that collects data for about 1,500+ microsites.

For example, https://www.mysite.com/somefolder/bob-reilly, https://www.mysite.com/somefolder/mary-smith and so on, and there are abut 1,500 of them (all different names). There is data collected in the hits that help us to distinguish these sites from all other pages. We can already have a Workspace Report that lists them and the metrics we need, e.g. a table listing the URL or page name and the metrics we need like page views, visits, etc.

However, we are looking to create individual reports for each microsite and distribute it to the "owner". For example, have a report with data about https://www.mysite.com/somefolder/bob-reilly only and send it to Bob once a month. Create Mary's report and send it to her. The idea is that we're trying to avoid sending everyone a report with everyone else's data.

Is there a way to do it? How?

Thanks!

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

This likely won't be pretty to be honest...

I too use a global suite for about 30 properties... I had to set up 30 segments (one for each property), I did set up Virtual Suites (but I wouldn't recommend that in your case), and I created 30 separate reports (you can use either the segment or VRS)... but either way, there doesn't seem to be a way at this time to programmatically send the "same" report with a different segment.

You could probably use the API to create clones of the reports and configure with the correct segment for each site.. but it's still not great...

No matter what tool I can think of in the Adobe infrastructure, they all rely on using segments (Workspace, Report Builder, APIs, etc)

There is also the possibility of setting up Raw Data Feeds, and your own Data Lake, and building reports outside of Adobe; but that is a huge overhead to set up as well... and learning how to to process the information properly to match what is in Adobe.. that will all take a lot of effort...

I know there was an idea posted a while ago about being able to pass a value via query string to a Workspace report and have it work like a segment... but I haven't seen any signs of that having any traction....

You may well be stuck setting up 1500 segments, and 1500 reports, and scheduling them... and be aware you can't schedule for more than a year now... so you will have to extend the schedule for all reports every year....  

[m_alcantara]

Thank you, Jennifer. It's a difficult request. Another possibility is to use Data Warehouse to dump all the data into a csv, then use external tools (Tableau, Python, etc) to create individual reports and email them out to each "owner". It might need a lot of maintenance though to update the email addresses of the people getting the individual reports when they change. I don't think there's an easy solution.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Yes, Data Warehouse could be used as well... but just be aware, if you need to provide data like Visits or Unique Visitors (metrics that "stack"), you might accidentally send inflated numbers...

So let's use this Example:

Visit 1:

• Page A
• Page B
• Page C

Visit 2:

• Page A
• Page D

In Adobe, this would show:

		Page Views	Visits	Unique Visitors
Pages		5	2	1
	Page A	2	2	1
	Page B	1	1	1
	Page C	1	1	1
	Page D	1	1	1

Each row shows a Visit and a Unique Visitor, but the totals are de-duplicated (i.e. 2 Visits and 1 Unique Visitor overall).

However, Data Warehouse exports don't provide total, and certainly not de-duplications.. and if you export a FULL data export, to split to different microsites, you won't be able to get de-duplicates per site either.... 

	Page Views	Visits	Unique Visitors
Page A	2	2	1
Page B	1	1	1
Page C	1	1	1
Page D	1	1	1

If you just saw this, you would be tempted to sum the columns, resulting in 5 PVs, 5 Vs and 4 UVs... which isn't correct....