Leveraging Data Anomalies — Prospects & Competitors
A few weeks ago, I shared a new tool called Alarmduck that helps detect data anomalies in Adobe Analytics and posts these to Slack. This data anomaly tool is pretty handy if you want to keep tabs on your data or be notified when something of interest pops-up. Unlike other Slack integrations, Alarmduck doesn’t use the out-of-box Adobe Analytics anomaly detection, but rather, has its own proprietary method for identifying data anomalies. In this post, I will demonstrate a few examples of how I use the Alarmduck tool in my daily Adobe Analytics usage.
Identifying Hot Prospects
As I have demonstrated in the past, I use a great tool called DemandBase to see which companies are visiting my blog. This helps me see which companies might one day be interested in my Adobe Analytics consulting services. Sometimes, I will notice a huge spike in visits from a particular company, which may indicate that I should reach out to them to see if they need my help (“strike while the iron is hot” as they say). However, it is a pain for me to check daily or weekly to see if there are companies that are hitting my blog more than normal, but this is a great use for Alarmduck.
To do this, I would create a new Alarmduck report (see instructions in previous post) that looks for anomalies using the DemandBase eVar which contains the Company Name by selecting the correct eVar in the Dimension drop-down box:
In this case, I am also going to narrow down my data to a rolling 14 days, US companies only and exclude any of my competitors (which I track as a SAINT Classification of the DemandBase Company eVar):
Once I set this up, I will be notified if there are any known companies that hit my blog over a rolling 14-day period that cause a noticeable increase of decrease. This way, I can go about my daily business and know that I will automatically be notified in Slack if something happens that requires my attention. For example, the other day, I sat down to work in the morning and saw this notification in Slack:
It is cool that Alarmduck can show graphs of data right within Slack! However, if I want to dig deeper, I can click on the link above the graph to see the same report in Adobe Analytics and, for example, see which of my blog posts this company was viewing:
Eventually, if I wanted to, I could reach out to the analytics team of this company and see if they need my help.
Competitor Spikes
From time to time, I like to check out what some of my “competitors” (more like others who provide analytics consulting) are reading on our website or my blog. This is something that can also be done using DemandBase. In my case, I have picked a bunch of companies and classified them using SAINT. This allows me to create a “Competitors” segment and see what activity is taking place on our website from these companies. Just as was done above, I can create a new Alarmduck report and use a segment (Competitors in this case) and then choose the Demandbase Company Dimension and select the metrics I want to use (Page Views and Visits in this case):
Once this is created, I will start receiving alerts (and graphs!) in Slack if there are any spikes by my competition like this:
In this case, there were two companies that had unusually high Page Views on our website. If I want to, I can click on the “Link to Web Report” link within Slack to see the report in Adobe Analytics:
Once in Adobe Analytics, I can do any normal type of analysis, like viewing what specific pages on our website this competitor viewed:
In most cases, this is just something I would view out of curiosity, but it is a fun use-case for how to leverage anomaly detection in Adobe Analytics via Alarmduck.
Summary
These are just two simple examples of how you can let bots like Alarmduck do the work for you and use more of your time on more value-added activities, knowing that you will be alerted if there is something you need to take action upon. If you want to try Alarmduck for free with your Adobe Analytics implementation, click here.
