Segmenting by classifications in Data Warehouse

Today I’d like to draw some atten­tion to (and explain) one of my favorite new fea­tures in Site­Cat­a­lyst v14.9: seg­men­ta­tion by clas­si­fi­ca­tions in Data Ware­house. Gone are the days of adding dozens of raw cam­paign track­ing codes to a seg­ment in Data Ware­house so you can iso­late data per­tain­ing to a par­tic­u­lar cam­paign. This may seem like a minor change, but for many of our users this will save many hours of seg­ment cre­ation, allow­ing them to run reports more quickly and spend more time doing real analysis.

In short, as of Site­Cat­a­lyst v14.9 (which was released in Octo­ber), all of your SAINT clas­si­fi­ca­tions are avail­able as seg­men­ta­tion options:

(Bonus: You will notice in the screen shot above that we put the variable/report which serves as the basis of the clas­si­fi­ca­tion in paren­the­sis, so you can eas­ily tell which clas­si­fi­ca­tion you are select­ing. As you can see, I have two clas­si­fi­ca­tions called “Author Login,” one based on eVar7 and another based on prop7. In some cases I may care whether I am using the eVar or the prop, so Data Ware­house tells me right then and there which one I am choosing.)

SAINT has always been a great way to aggre­gate your raw val­ues into log­i­cal, action­able groups. For exam­ple, you can put prod­ucts into cat­e­gories and then cat­e­gories into depart­ments or busi­ness units; or, you can group inter­nal search key­words by prod­uct type, author, etc. The pos­si­bil­i­ties are numer­ous to say the least. Adding the abil­ity to seg­ment by these groups quickly is a huge time-saver for those of you who run Data Ware­house reports fre­quently. (See my pre­vi­ous post for more infor­ma­tion on Data Ware­house seg­men­ta­tion itself.)

For exam­ple, let’s say I have a clas­si­fi­ca­tion on Track­ing Code called “Cam­paign Owner,” and I want to see top pages viewed and rev­enue per visit for cus­tomers acquired only via the cam­paigns that my col­league, Eliza, cre­ated and pub­lished. This isn’t dif­fi­cult con­cep­tu­ally; I would cre­ate a seg­ment for “All Vis­i­tors where Eliza was the cam­paign owner.” Set­ting up the seg­ment is where we’ve improved in leaps and bounds with this lat­est release. In the past, I would have to add each indi­vid­ual track­ing code to the seg­ment, cre­at­ing some­thing that looks like this:

Now let’s hope Eliza didn’t have 40,000 track­ing codes tied to her cam­paigns. (If she did, let’s hope we set a sep­a­rate eVar to a con­sis­tent value every time some­one clicked through one of her cam­paigns.) As you can see, this was time-consuming in many cases.

Con­trast that with seg­ment­ing by Eliza’s cam­paigns in Data Ware­house today:

Per­son­ally, I would rather type five let­ters and be done with it, and on to my next project.

So, there you have it. We hope you take advan­tage of seg­men­ta­tion by clas­si­fi­ca­tions, and that they make your lives as ana­lysts eas­ier than they had been before. We’re con­fi­dent that it will. Inci­den­tally, this is one idea that we real­ized needed atten­tion when it quickly gar­nered votes on the Idea Exchange after it was sub­mit­ted on day one by Adam Greco. Keep sub­mit­ting ideas, and keep vot­ing! This is a per­fect exam­ple of how you can directly help bring about the fea­tures that you need.

As always, if you have any ques­tions about any­thing in this post, or about any­thing else related to the Adobe Online Mar­ket­ing Suite, please leave a com­ment here or con­tact me on Twit­ter and I’ll do my best to get you the infor­ma­tion that you need.