Data Views

Data views control how the data ingested into a CJA Connection is to be interpreted. They specify all of the dimensions and metrics which will be available for reporting within Analysis Workspace and which columns those dimensions and metrics obtain their data from. Data views are defined in preparation for reporting in Analysis Workspace. Each connection can have multiple Data views.

In this exercise you'll learn:

First, use the solution switcher to open Customer Journey Analytics

Browse to the Data views tab. Click to Create new data view.

Set the connection to use CID release 5 (Nov 15 - Jan 15 2024). This controls what data will be available. Give your data view a unique name to distinguish it eg. [your initials - HOL Data View]

Set the Timezone and click Save and Continue.

The next step is to add metrics and dimensions to your data view. There are some default dimensions and metrics already loaded. CJA supports three types of data, profile data (attributes about your customer such as loyalty tier, NPS scores, address and age), event data (coming from multiple channels) and lookup data.

This is where the design of your XDM schemas is important. Search for Productid and look at the details of the Event datasets -> Product ID field. You can see that this attribute is found in multiple datasets - this allows the same dimension to be reported on consistently across multiple channels.

Drag the ProductID field into the dimensions.

Product ID is a good example of a field that is likely to have a lookup table associated with it to provide user friendly values for reporting. You can see multiple Lookup dataset attributes available in this connection, there are two specific for the Travel industry. Drag the Travel Hotel Product ID and the Travel Flight Product ID Lookup fields into the list of available dimensions.

Metrics are anything that can be counted. For example search for Call and you will find the Call Center Calls attribute from the call center dataset, this is a long type value which will store the value 1 for every call.

Drag it into the metrics list to add it as an available metric. Update the component name on the right hands side to Calls.

This is great, but what if we forgot to add a specific event field for the metric we want to report on? Customer Journey Analytics let's you create new metrics from dimensions. For example if we know that the call reason "callreasonid:259051" means it was a complaint we can use this to create a new metric. Drag the call_reason field into the metrics, update the component name to Complaints. Under the component settings scroll down to INCLUDE EXCLUDE VALUES and set the metric to include only values that equal callreasonid:259051. We now have a new metric to report complaints separately from other call reasons.

For some dimensions we want to persist their values across multiple events, previously in Adobe Analytics this persistence needed to be configured upfront and would be applied at ingestion time. So modifying this after the data has loaded was not an option. In Customer Journey Analytics we set persistence in the dataview and this is applied at run time, allowing changes to be applied retroactively.

Search for the Marketing Channel attribute and pull this into your dimensions. Scroll to the bottom of the dimension properties and set the persistence to Most Recent for the session.

One of the most powerful features of Customer Journey Analytics is Derived fields. These allow you to instantly and retroactively apply complex data changes on-the-fly, without the need to rewrite and re-ingest data. Historically this type of data update in Adobe Analytics would incur significant cost and take time reducing your ability to generate insights quickly.

Imagine the website team made an error when coding the data layer for the mobile website, and now all of the pageNames coming from this version of the site are pre-fixed with "mobile web".

But you want to report on category pages across all versions of the website. We can quickly fix this using derived fields. Click to create a derived field.

You can see there are a number of functions available. For this use case, we're going to use the regex_replace function to create a new pagename field that removes "mobile web" from the start of any value. Drag the regex_replace function into the canvas.

Select the PageName attribute from your Event schemas.

Set the regex pattern to (mobile web\:)(.*) and the output format to $2.

Give your new field a name that's unique to you, eg. gillies - pagename derived. (derived fields are applied to the connection itself not specifically the data view, so we can't all create the same derived field on this connection). Click to Save.

Lastly, drag your newly created field into your dimensions list.

Click to Save and Continue. This will take you to the data view settings page. Here you can specify any filters that you want applied to your data across the entire connection. As well as the session time out period. For now we can leave this at 30 mins.



Click Save and finish