When would you recommend a virtual report suite to segment Adobe data versus having separate report suites?

[alchan]

Curious what situations it's recommended to use a virtual report suite versus a separate one to segment out data. And, if it's possible to combine report suites + their data together?

[bjoern__koth]

Hi @alchan 

There is no right or wrong, it depends on your needs.

If you are having a huge website that has traffic flowing back and forth between your main website www.yourdomain.com and subdomains sub1.yourdomain.com, sub2.yourdomain.com, and your company stakeholders are interested in tracking this flow to get a holistic view on the user behavior, it makes perfect sense to have one single report suite. But then again, you have one big bucket of data and your stakeholder of sub1 might only be interested in his traffic. In that case, it's super to just create a virtual report suite for him, based on his subdomain.

On the other hand, if you have two completely separate websites or sections of the website where no traffic is flowing in between, then having your dedicated report suite may be your weapon of choice.

Hope that helps

Cheers

[abhinavbalooni]

Hey @alchan 

As @bjoern__koth mentioned, there is no right or wrong method here. Depends on the business requirements you are trying to solve for.

There are exhaustive pointers on this link which talk about when you can look at virtual RS and multi-suite tagging.

https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-analytics-questions/when-would-you-recommend-...

Let us know if you have futher queries once you've had a look at above.

Cheers,

Abhinav

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Adding my 2 cents on this one as well, though it also aligns with @bjoern__koth and @abhinavbalooni.

The best solution is always the one that works for you. Only you know what your needs are.... now, if you have a set of websites that all do much the same thing (like in our case, we have 30 newspaper sites, and they are based on the same code base), and you need to report on them as a whole and as separate entities, than a single global suite with multiple virtual suites is probably a good idea... It's always easier to segment out sites than to try and add them together (especially if you have traffic that traverses between sites often, then your UVs will be de-duplicated within the global suite if configured correctly). As the others said, this is also very helpful for subdomains (tracking the domain as a single entity and splitting based on the sub-domains. (In my case, each of those 30 news sites have at least 4 sub-domains for related classifieds, obituaries, etc; and three of those sites have mobile apps - so my virtual suite configuration allows me to pull in many combinations of data from Core Site X, to Site Y plus all external). This also allows me to create a single report with dropdowns that allow people to choose the combination of sites, platforms and content to get the specifics of what they need... but again, this comes down to if this is something you want or need.

Now on the other hand, if you have a set of unrelated sites, it may not make sense to combine them into one... from a UV and cross site perspective it might be nice (and again this comes down to your needs), but if the tracking profiles are fundamentally different you will have to reserve dimensions and events that only pertain to some of the sites so that you don't have data from two completely different things in the same reserved components... some of the main "global" dimensions/metrics can be shared, but this could make your tracking design more difficult (but not impossible).. so if you feel this is something you want and can keep it straight, by all means proceed with that approach.

One other consideration you should be aware of is that each dimension has a "unique value per month" threshold (within Workspace), so the more different values you collect, the sooner you can potentially hit the "(Low Traffic)" bucket... however, the limit was raised earlier this year from 50,000 to 2,000,000 so this may not constitute a problem for you, but its a good idea to take into consideration when making your decision.

[PD10]

so suppose, if we have 2 markets i.e., Europe and UK and have 8 different brands for Europe and 7 for UK. If we have same workflow, you are suggesting to have one Global report suite and later on divide it using VRS and have different market wise data and again to have more granularity create another VRS' to have brand related data segmented for ease of use?

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Yeah, so it sounds like you have 15 brands across two markets...

One global suite can be used to bucket everything together, then you could create the following VRSs:

- All Europe Brands (not including UK) (8 brands)

- UK Brands (7 brands)

- one VRS for each individual brand (15 in total)

- you might even want to create separate "timezone" VRS (using the timezone definition to shift from the main Global Suite timezone)

- If you also have mobile apps, make an "All Mobile Apps", "All Websites", "Europe Mobile Apps", "Europe Websites", "UK Mobile Apps", "UK Websites", etc...

Basically you can create as many VRSs as you need, or will be handy for common reporting. 

Personally, I almost always just use my Global Suite (or rather my "Clean Filtered Global VRS", where I can fix potential data issues, all my VRS use the same "clean" segment on top of the specific breakdowns), and I use a series of drop downs so that I only have to make one report that uses can choose the combinations they want to show... but the VRSs allow them to easily make simple reports without having to remember what segments to apply.