How to automate breakdowns of dimensions in Adobe Workspace?

[Irene_Gould]

We currently break out campaign performance in a freeform table of an Adobe workspace and manually apply a campaign medium breakdown to each campaign. Is there a way to automate this so that for each campaign it can automatically be broken down by medium as new campaigns are added - without having to manually drag and drop medium onto campaign each time?

[FilipeFreitas]

Hi Irene,

As far as I'm aware, the best way to do this is by selecting the "Breakdown by position" checkbox. You'll find it in the gear icon menu at the top of the freeform table headers.

Please refer to the documentation: Breakdown by position.

All the best!

Filipe C. Freitas

[Irene_Gould]

Hi Filipe -

The documentation provided shares the following:
 Breakdown by position, always breaks down the top 3 items, regardless of what these items are

Is it possible to automatically breakdown all items in the table, not just the top three items displayed?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Hi @Irene_Gould see my comment below...

If you have only three items shown, and those are what you add breakdowns to, then next month only three items will have breakdowns.

This is why you have to initially get as many rows as possible when building your report (pull 2 years of data if you have to), break ALL of those down, then put your report back to the intended time frame. The report will remember that position 4 and 5 and 100, etc have breakdowns (if/when those rows show in the report)

[Irene_Gould]

Thanks Jennifer - a follow up question to this. If we are using a campaign dimension that updates with new fields over time (i.e  dec_2025_shopping, nov_2025_shopping, jan_2026_shopping) so that each month a new field is added to the list - will this strategy add the breakdowns to items that are newly added to the list?

I.e. if it is currently December and I use breakdown by position - in January when the jan_2026_shopping campaign populates will the jan_2026_shopping campaign also receive the breakdown as it is new (since I applied breakdown by position) to the list. 

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Yes!

Normal Breakdowns are based on the value, so if you breakdown "dec_2025" and that doesn't exist next month, there is no breakdown... but using "by position" tells Adobe to breakdown row 1, and row 2 and any other row... so no matter what the value is that month, there will be a breakdown.

Setting this up for all potential scenarios is a little more work upfront, as I said, pull out 1 or 2 years of data, make sure the table shows 400 rows... break ALL of the rows down. If you have multiple levels of breakdowns, you have to do the same thing... 

Once the structure is set, and you go back to your normal rolling "This Month", "Last Month" or "Last 30 Full Days", etc in your panel, all of those pre-defined breakdown by position will be retained. So as new values appear, they will show the breakdown.

[MandyGeorge]

If you're referring to breaking down new values that appear in a pre-existing freeform table, then the breakdown by position as described in the comment above is the best option.

If you're referring to creating new freeform tables, you can use the table builder to make it a bit faster, but it has a limit to how many rows it will break down that way. Alternatively, if you have the first dimension in the table, you can use control and select multiple rows, then dropping the breakdown dimension over one of the selected rows will auto break down all of the selected rows. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

There is another trick when building your own tables (that doesn't require the Table Builder).

Like @FilipeFreitas said, you can use the Breakdown by position, but there is one extra step (if the number of rows is variable)... Increase your time range temporarily to a large enough time frame to get as many rows to show as possible (hopefully the max of 400).

Now, use the "breakdown by Position" and breakdown all 400 (or as many as you can) rows... now that all those rows are set to breakdown, you can set your time frame back to what it needs to be, and as new months rollover with different data and rows, they should all have the proper breakdowns.