The many issues I am having with Adobe Analytics

[nickh71700729]

Hello,

I am writing this after having gone through all of the googling one could possibly do to find the answers which unfortunately do not exist in the Adobe Analytics documentation.
I want to set up custom reports with custom metrics/variables for a Unity mobile app I am working on.

The Adobe Analytics documentation explains very well how to implement all the basic stuff, and send the basic analytic hits, whether it's a state or an action. The problem is there is nowhere in the Adobe Analytics documentation where it explains how we set up custom reports, custom variables and send hits to those specific variables. If there is such a place in the documentation it must be very well hidden because I've been looking all day. It would be very helpful if this was made a bit more clear by Adobe.

Here's an example of what I am trying to do:

Let's say I have a character customizer in the app/game, and I want to send an analytic hit for every customization action. So if the player picks green color for their character's hair, it would send an action hit with something like: Action name: "CharacterCustomization" param1: "HairColor" param2: "Green"

I have no idea how to make this happen in the SiteCatalyst. I know how to send this data through in the code, as contextData, but no clue on how to view reports and see this data. All I see on SiteCatalyst is the number of page views for every page being tracked.

I appreciate any help on this and apologize for being so direct with my opinions on Adobe Analytics. I feel like it could be much better if it was less bloated with useless features, and more clear on the features people use the most in analytics (such as custom variables). The SiteCatalyst interface is confusing and the reporting tools do not seem to have much depth, only being able to see the number of page views for every hit is not such a useful report.

[nikitaf2673776 · Accepted solution]

It sounds like you are trying to track app actions and add in context data. Basically when a user picks a hair color, you'd create an Context Data object with your params/values. Then you'd make the tracking call.

On Android this would look like this:

1. HashMap<String, Object> exampleContextData = new HashMap<String, Object>();

2. exampleContextData.put("myapp.character.HairColor", "Green");

3. Analytics.trackAction("myapp.CharacterCustomization", exampleContextData);

Reference:

Track App Actions - iOS

Track App Actions - Android

Edit: Oh and then in the Adobe Mobile Services UI in Manage App Settings, you'd map this action to an event, and the context data to an evar/sprop. For reporting I recommend the Workspace interface where you can drag and drop dimensions and metrics to create your custom report.