Ask Me Anything on January 15 with Adobe Analytics Champion Achaia Walton: Mastering Event-Based Reporting & Content Groups

Love this question @seanrobinson! Content groups are really just segments or segment containers, but we refer to them as that way because there are different types of segments in our org. This is a special type of segment where we look at the big picture of what content interests our audience or that our stakeholders find valuable, and organize them so we can pull cumulative insights about these topics.

It would also seem to me, that even evergreen content groups can "all of a sudden" provide opportunities to have them break out into brand new groups, based on new trends and events happening in the news.  Just like jargon and colloquialisms change, I'm sure content groups get updated and need to adapt.

Hi @zhannamc,

There is no really set AMA series, but it's tentatively going to be quarterly to start. There should be a formal process stating soon to get these events better advertised. The first place will always be posted here in the community, but there will be an attempt at making an email distribution list to get these types of events in the future... stay tuned for more details.

As for learning the backend of Adobe, you can of course always ask people here on the forum for specific questions, but there are a lot of resources available to you.

There are User Groups that you can join:

https://analytics-augs.adobe.com/chapters/

(Feel free to join chapters not in your timezone so that you can at least get notifications of upcoming events)

And also, you can watch the recordings of their past sessions:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQOHnCs7KZgsuFHVzwboQuA 

There is also the official Adobe Analytics YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/@adobeanalytics3740 

There are also various blogs, some may be dated (given how long AA has been around), but there is always good insights to understanding the history of tracking.

Hi @katieburke797 - thank you for joining us! I would either come up with a list of topics that are consistently used by your organization or ask certain stakeholders for input. Once you have that list, I would outline them into more granular topics so each topic can have their own segment container. In our case, we also have to account for different translations of the topic within the segment container if you support different languages. Once you have those topics and segments setup, I would build related components that make sense for what your stakeholders would want to know about these topics. The most common being annotations for related events or dates where these content groups might see a spike.

I would definitely keep segment containers as granular as possible. Especially when you include other languages, you want to keep it to one keyword as much as possible. This way, you can keep that segment container versatile for future uses. You can either come up with a list based on popular content, user top tasks, or stakeholder input, and start from there. 

It depends on what kind of industry you have. News is probably the hardest in terms of setting cadence because you cannot predict what topics will come about or when they are needed. We news analyts live on the edge like that; amirite, @jennifer_dungan? But for more evergreen content, I would suggest coming up with a list of consistent topics that users are interested in and a content calendar of potential milestones where these content groups may spike in interest (Black Friday, sales, specific events in the year). This can help you get a lay of what segment containers to build and when to pay attention to them (this is where annotations play an important role).

@mikea1 Great question! A big lesson learned from the early stages of developing content groups was thinking about topics as different buckets. For example, instead of just creating a segment for Paris Olympics, you have to think of it as Paris in one bucket (or segment container) and Olympics in another. This way, I can always reuse either for future events. The great way about pulling these segment containers into a new segment is the ability to tweak it for your specific use, so if you had to pull data for Paris in a different context, you can reuse that segment container instead of starting from scratch.

Content groups came to be when we were asked for cumulative data and insights for our coverage of a specific event (I talked about the Paris Olympics in the Perspective). We realized that as we get these requests more often that we had to come up with a sustainable system, which is how content groups came to be.

The chat is the session! This is chat-based, in-forum AMA. Basically this is a live post a question and get a response event.