Send survey data to Adobe Analytics?

[curtis_pond]

Hi Community Friends!

Just had a conversation with a developer who was curious if Adobe Analytics can consume feedback widget data. The widget would appear on roughly 1K technical content AEM pages.

Feedback Widget

Did you find this content helpful? Yes/No

Please tell us how we can improve: string (300 characters)

AA is preferable to store the data because many content team members already use AA.

Has anyone implemented something like this (either in or outside of AEM) and pushed the data to AA? Are there extensions that do this, or something else you recommend? 

I think regular tagging could help (tracking Yes/No events), but curious if an eVar is a good method to hold text data (although max is 255 bytes).

Thanks!

Curtis

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

Are you trying to store the results of the feedback widget in Adobe Analytics? Including the "how can we improve"?

You should be aware that eVars can hold a maximum of 255 characters... so if you allow people to type in answers 300 characters long (unless you are planning on splitting the text into two eVars and concatenating them later, you will be losing some of what people are typing.)

Whether the survey is coming from AEM or somewhere else, you should be able to capture data... is it the right tool? Not sure... it sounds like a simple enough form... but remember, users who block analytics will have their answers go nowhere....  Generally a feedback survey is tied to a specific database, rather than to a web analytics tool... 

Similar to tracking purchases... your analytics data will always be different than what your database of orders says.... in analytics you are generally more interested in trends then in "actuals".

Also, Analytics is more of a "what is happening now" tool, then a tool for aggregate data... which means that if this survey runs for 5 years, and you have 2 year retention policy on your data, you will only be able to see your survey results for 2 years.. not the entire time the form has been around (unless you are extracting the data into a Data Lake)

These are things you need to consider as you make your decision... generally, if this question came up for our needs, I would say "I can do it if you want, but it wouldn't be my recommendation... " and list the reasons why. Similar to when I was asked to track "Follow Author" actions... I can easily report on who is following or unfollowing each author in a specific  time range, but I can't say that right now, X people are following a specific Author.... that is the task of a user preferences Database... to store the users who are following an author...  analytics is good at showing the recent actions.

[curtis_pond]

Thank you, @Jennifer_Dungan ! Great points all around. Appreciate the thoughtful answer!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You're welcome.. I mean.. if your upper management accept those risks, and says "do it anyway".. you can... with some custom code you can extract the form values and pass them with a form submit action

[curtis_pond]

Hey @Jennifer_Dungan 

Yep, that's exactly right on "accepting those risks." I think going the DB route makes sense as I've come to learn a couple of more things. Since I posted, there is another requirement to combine all data with a "content quality score" coming from another application. We have a data warehouse with an existing AA page usage integration. We can integrate all the data, join on page_id or something like that, and probably give our stakeholders a comprehensive, easy to use view in Tableau. I think a meeting with stakeholders, decision makers, dev, and analytics is really the first order of action to get clarification Thanks again!