Summary Change - date change requires rebuild

[tobymathews]

In a workspace I have a bunch of Summary Change components at the top.

My understanding is that these display how a metric has change - so I can display how the site Visits metric has changed in, say, "Last month" compared to the month before - have I got that right?

My issue is that if I change the reporting date range those comparisons break - if I click the little pencil icon on any of them, the dialogue tells me,

"Configuration is out of sync

Your configuration is out of sync with the freeform table. To override your existing table and restore this key metric summary configuration, click build."

Is this expected? It makes the component quite a bit less useful if this is how it works, so I feel like maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Summary Change is based on having two cells selected.. the order or selection will determine which way the + or - goes....

Here I selected Nov and then Dec cells:

Now, to make sure my summary doesn't break when I deselect these cells, I am going to "lock" the visualization:

So long as I choose a date range that still allows me to have at least two rows of data, my Summary should continue to work:

If I choose only a single month, or a single day, (or a range within a single month), my table is broken out by month and therefore won't work:

There is now only one cell, and nothing to compare... 

I can at least swap out Month for Day here, and the Summary Change will work again:

But since the Summary Change must be calculated based on two selected cells, there will be breakage if you choose a range that doesn't work with your tables...

Or are you talking about the Key Metric Summary visualization?

If I change to Oct, 2023, then yes, the summary is now broken...

I think this is a bug... 

I can see the Panel date is Oct 2023... and if I dig into the "Prior Month" it's clearly showing Sept...

But the panel is still showing Oct:

So it should work....  but it doesn't...  It's not just you... 

This should definitely be a ticket to Client Care!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

If you are looking for an alternative (for now), I am still using an "old school" way of doing this (from before the Key Metric Summary was a thing)

I use the regular Summary Change visualization (and some custom date ranges), and I have a separate line graph visualization if needed. 

If you turn on "Make date range components relative to panel calendar" in the panel's date settings

You should be able to use "This Month" and "Last Month" date ranges which should now be relative to the selected month (i.e. if you have Oct 2023 selected "This Month" should be Oct, and "Last Month" should be Sept - as in they are relative to the panel not to "today") and I build out the multiple blocks like so:

My reports build a PDF, so I don't have to worry about changing the panel range, but with a few tweaks, this should work for you.. at least until the one Adobe made works properly...

[tobymathews]

Thank you so much for your replies.

I realise now - sorry! - that I named the wrong component. It is indeed the Key Metric Summary I'm using, so thank you for confirming that it's not just me. I wiill see if I can get your Summary Change suggestion to do what I want.

Thanks again!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You're welcome... and no worries, the names are very similar..

I started with the Summary Change, but there is no pencil "edit" icon. I figured it was the second, but I kept both details in place as a good reference for anyone else.. but, yeah, that bug is rather annoying

My solution takes up a bit more space, and takes a little longer to set up... but it should at least work... 

[tobymathews]

Thanks again for this, I got your summary change method working, after a fashion.

Am I right in thinking you are limited to set date ranges (This Week, Last Month etc), and for that reason you can't really do things like look at the last 7 days and compare to whatever the preceding period of the same length was?

Toby

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You should be able to do any custom date range, since you can build them into your tables and select the cells for comparison.

So for "previous 7 days to selected", you can use this as your date definition:

If you use the "make date range component relative to the panel calendar" feature, you can even tell people to select the "week" of their choice, and have custom date ranges set to use the "current" 7 days and previous 7 days, if you so choose.

You will need to change your custom date range  to work with "relative dates".. as in the relative dates are relative to the first selected day in the calendar range, so you can use:

or if you were to select an older range:

Note that when you use "Relative Date Ranges", the actual dates returned are appended to the name of your custom range automatically.

And you can still create your summary change based on your table:

I hope this helps

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Just note, that if you have people selecting their own ranges, you should warn them to specifically choose a range that is 7 days... if they choose a month, you will end up with:

While it looks like there are dates here (albeit overlapped), the values outside the 7 day range will be 0:

So your summary change will be pretty invalid... I suppose you could set both columns up with custom date ranges to ensure 7 days selected, but that could also mean they accidentally have future dates selected if they only choose "today" in the calendar....

[tobymathews]

This is really helpful, thank you so much.

Is it possible to also use a Summary Change to compare a figure calculated from a date range (eg. last 7 days) to an unchanging figure, like average visits for the previous calendar year, or something like that?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You should be able to do that... I think a fixed date range should be unaffected by the "relative date range" setting, unless there's a bug (but you may not need relative settings enabled for that anyway...

If you do a fixed date range of an average calculation (something like PV/V as an example), and then compare to a column that is for the selected range, that should work... just make sure that 0s aren't included in the average to be safe.

[Jennifer_Dungan · Accepted solution]

@tobymathews It looks like the issue has been fixed (as of Jan 17th)

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/release-notes/latest.html?lang=en

[tobymathews]

Thank you Jennifer, it does seem to work as expected now!