How to best configure for one or more values in an evar for Adobe Dashboard?

[YohanKh1]

I'm working with a variable in Adobe Analytics that captures multiple values separated by hyphens. I'm looking for the best way to visualize this data in a heatmap. The goal is to split these delimited values into individual components and represent their frequency or intensity visually, allowing for easy analysis of patterns or trends. Any advice on how to achieve this effectively would be appreciated.

Dimension X captures: 

• Equity Compensation-Retirement Planning-Executive Financial Planning-Financial Education-Nonqualified Deferred Compensation
• Executive Financial Planning-Financial Education-Nonqualified Deferred Compensation
• Retirement Planning
• Retirement Planning-Financial Education

I would like to see my dashboard show each value independently and provide counts of how many instances it showed up. For example: 

• Retirement Planning = 3
• Equity Compensation = 1
• Executive Financial Planning = 2

Is it possible to do this without using a list.var?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Hi, 

A few questions about the values.

• Do you have a defined list of all the potential values? (i.e. you have 10 possible values, so you can create 10 classifications)
• Is there any chance a value might be repeated in the list?

Technically, you should be able to create regex rules to look for specific values, and if a match, then populate into the specific classification:

However, if there are repeated values, this won't work

[YohanKh1]

There are 300+ individual values & there can be one or more that are tagged and the certain keywords may repeat. If it was the case where there were <25 items - classification rule builder with regex / or even a segment for each item would have worked (albite it would be manual). 

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Ouch... 

Yes, you can use Classification Lists... but you would still need to set up a Classification for each value (that isn't sustainable).

The repeated keyword is going to be the biggest issues.

If it weren't for that, I would say use a list variable, so that you don't need classifications for each.

When you say "the certain keywords may repeat" do you mean the total value, as in "Executive Financial Planning" might appear twice in the list:

"Executive Financial Planning-Executive Financial Planning-Financial Education"

Or do you mean that the word "Financial" may repeat in different values:

"Executive Financial Planning-Financial Education"

If something like "Executive Financial Planning" could appear multiple times in the same list of items, then a List variable isn't going to work... values will be de-duplicated. If it's just part of the value (like the word "Financial") as long as you are splitting the value on the delimiter you should be fine.

In the fully repeated scenario, there is only one option... using your ProductsList with merchandising events.

If you are already using Products, then this is going to be a major change to your tagging and reporting.

I use Products for multiple purposes, including purchases. I use the category (in the product notation) to denote the use.

So for something like this, I would set the category to something like "topic", then I would pass each value as the product, then I would set up a numeric event and use this in the notation:

s.products = "topic;Executive Financial Planning;;;event1=2,topic;Financial Education;;;event1=1";

s.events = "event1";

Using a numeric event, I can pass the appropriate "repetitions" of a value to count.. so in this example, Executive Financial Planning counts as 2 whereas Financial Education only counts as 1.

This is the only way to get around the default de-duplication, it has to be in products because this is the only dimension that allows for explicitly related events that won't cross contaminate the other values.

Now, all the values will be available as a product (with the category of "topic") and the event1 is the metric you would use to get the proper counts.