Digital Publishing Suite analytics tutorial

With tight integration between Digital Publishing Suite and Digital Marketing Suite, publishers have access to timely, actionable intelligence about how their audience is consuming digital content. No longer do publishers have to rely solely on market research, focus groups, online surveys, and other traditional measurement techniques to determine how readers engage with a publication. With the Digital Publishing Suite Analytics Service, customers can perform more frequent and timelier analyses in order to optimize content and drive business results.

This tutorial will walk you through the process of creating DPS apps that are instrumented for analytics, as well as running reports and interpreting your results. You will learn about the analytics provided as part of the standard, base reporting of Digital Publishing Suite, as well as the additional, advanced reporting available with an Adobe SiteCatalyst subscription (available as a separate purchase from Digital Publishing Suite).

The DPS Analytics Service provides more visibility into how users interact with digital content. Analyses are more frequent, timelier, and provide a greater level of detail than traditional measurement techniques. The payoff: businesses can make more informed decisions about their digital publishing initiatives, delivering greater return on investment (ROI).

Media companies, including magazine publishers developing tablet applications, can use these insights to improve the user experience in their digital editions for both editorial and advertising content. Better insights into editorial engagement allows publishers to fine-tune the content experience they provide to users—for example, by selecting editorial themes and interactivity types that demonstrably resonate with a publisher's audience. Similarly, better insights into how users are interacting with advertisements helps publishers identify the most engaging ad formats and placements—and establish premium pricing for those units.

For business publishers, the DPS Analytics Service enables marketing teams to perform in-depth analyses of how users are interacting with content in a digital catalog, product brochure, or training material. These types of actionable analytics can help publishers increase brand engagement and drive interaction with products and services.

The DPS Analytics Service helps marketing teams optimize the design and packaging of their corporate magazines, annual reports, merchandising applications, and other digital content. Because of the personalized nature of tablet devices, marketers can use analytics to customize and measure campaigns for select target audiences, both internal and external, to improve the effectiveness of corporate communications and branding programs.

Analytics can help DPS customers improve the performance of each new digital publication, but it can also be used to optimize existing content. For example, if analytics show that users are viewing a particular slide show heavily, the publication could be updated to add more images to that slide show.

In a merchandising application, marketers can measure how consumers interact with products featured in a contextual setting—for example, a couch positioned in a living room or an evening gown worn in a social setting—and determine which editorial treatments are most likely to drive a sale. The ability to tie exposure and awareness directly with sales or other conversions is the ultimate ROI metric for brands.

Baseline analytics are included in both the Professional and Enterprise editions of Digital Publishing Suite. Publishers with an Adobe SiteCatalyst subscription can access digital publishing data directly in SiteCatalyst for advanced analysis, leveraging the full suite of SiteCatalyst report categories. Also, Baseline provides pre-defined reports, while SiteCatalyst data views are configurable.

Table 1 provides an comparison of the metrics available in Baseline and SiteCatalyst analytics.

Table 1. Overview and comparison of Baseline and SiteCatalyst metrics

Configuring your DPS account for Baseline analytics differs depending on whether you are DPS Professional Edition customer or a DPS Enterprise Edition customer.

DPS Professional Edition

If you are a DPS Professional Edition customer without a SiteCatalyst subscription, you do not need to do anything to enable your DPS account or apps for baseline analytics.

DPS Enterprise Edition

If you are a DPS Enterprise customer without a SiteCatalyst subscription, use the Account Administration tool of the Digital Publishing Suite dashboard to configure your DPS account and app for baseline analytics.

When you sign up for a Digital Publishing Suite subscription (Professional or Enterprise), you are assigned a master account ID that lets you use the Account Administration tool of the Digital Publishing Suite dashboard. Use this tool to assign the "Application" role to the Adobe ID for your app. As part of that process, you provide the necessary information to enable SiteCatalyst analytics.

Analytics options appear in the Application Accounts section (Figure 1):

If you are a SiteCatalyst customer, then enter the "Company Name". If you are not a SiteCatalyst customer, then leave the "Company Name" field blank. If you are a DPS Enterprise customer, you must enter a desired report suite name for your app. There is one report suite per app, and the "Check Availability" button will make sure the report suite name you enter is unique in the system before you can proceed.

The report suite name you enter is converted into a report suite ID. Any spaces are converted to periods, and then prefixed with "dps." followed by "dl." or "sj." to indicate the data center in which they are created. For example, the report suite name "my new report suite" produces a report suite ID "dps.sj.my.new.report.suite". There is a limit to the length of the report suite ID. So, you get an error if you enter a string that is more than 33 characters long, including spaces.

Testing the Analytics Setup

To confirm that your analytics are actually working, at least in an initial application deployment, it's best to do some testing. If you haven't already, publish a folio using the same Adobe ID used as the Title ID when building the application. Install the developer app on a device. Open the app and download the folio. View the folio's contents for at least two minutes, while your device has an active internet connection. Wait two to six hours, then check the Base Analytics reports to ensure that your activity appears. The first time data is sent to a new report suite, the report suite's tables are built, so it could take four to six hours. If the report suite already exists with data, such as in the case of DPS Pro customers, the time for the data to appear should be in the range of one to two hours.

As soon as an application created with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite is accessed by a reader, the analytics function will begin collecting data immediately through the app—without manual tagging of content.

Viewing baseline analytics data

1. Sign in to the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Dashboard. Only an Adobe ID with the application role lets you view the Analytics page. To view analytics, use the Adobe ID used in the Folio Builder panel to upload content for your custom app.
2. Click Analytics. Reports for your custom app are loaded.
3. To analyze your data, do any of the following actions:
   1. View a different report: On the left side of the Analytics page, click a different report type, such as Individual Purchases or Ads.
   2. Some reports allow you to change the date range. Use the From and To calendar icons to specify a range of dates. Then click Update.
   3. Reports about folios allow you to specify which folio is shown in the graph: After you specify a date range, select the folio to view the data.
   4. Sort data: Click the column heading in any table to sort the data by that column. Click again to reverse direction, such as from A to Z or Z to A.

To get a quick video demonstration of DPS Baseline analytics, watch Colin Fleming's video.

Interpreting Baseline analytics reports

First time launches

This report shows the number of first time launches of the app (or a new version), as shown in Figure 2. Note: your app store will tell you how many installs of your app there has been. This metric only counts launches.

Launches

This report shows the number of times the app has been started AND used at least once after installation (Figure 3).

All Downloads

This report shows all downloads for all issues in the publication (Figure 4).

• Folio Downloads: Shows the number of times the download was completed.
• Download Errors: Shows the number of times a folio had a failed download attempt.
• Cancelled downloads: Shows the number of times a folio download was cancelled by the end user.

Individual Downloads

This report shows all downloads for all issues in the publication at each issue level (Figure 5).

• Folio Downloads: Shows the number of times the download was completed.
• Download Errors: Shows the number of times a folio had a failed download attempt.
• Cancelled downloads: Shows the number of times a folio download was cancelled by the end user.

All Purchases

This report shows all purchases for all issues in the publication (Figure 6).

• Purchase starts: shows the number of times a purchase process was started.
• Purchased: shows the number of times the purchase was completed.

Individual Purchases

This report shows all purchases for a specific folio over time (Figure 7).

• Purchase starts: shows the number of times a purchase process was started.
• Purchased: shows the number of times the purchase was completed.

Content Browsed

This report shows the number of times an end user views ads or articles (Figure 8).

Ad Views

This report shows the number of times a user views each ad (Figure 9). Note: this only counts articles that are designated as an ad (article property "Advertisement" is checked). It does not count ads that are within articles not designated as an ad (for example, if the third page of an article is a full-page ad, the Ad View metric will not currently count views of this.)

Video Overlay

This report shows number of times a video overlay is started (Figure 10).

All Overlays

This report shows the number of times all overlays are viewed (Figure 11).

Individual Overlays

This report shows number of times each overlay is viewed (Figure 12).

Fulfillment report

To download a .csv file containing information about billable downloads that can be viewed in a spreadsheet application, click Fulfillment Report.
This .csv file includes the number of downloads from the Adobe Distribution Service charged against your download count.

Through tight integration with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, publishers can access deeper levels of insights around audience and brand engagement, digital readership, and the business value of their publications. Publishers with an Adobe SiteCatalyst subscription can access digital publishing data directly in SiteCatalyst for advanced analysis, leveraging the full suite of SiteCatalyst report categories.

When you sign up for a Digital Publishing Suite subscription (Professional or Enterprise), you are assigned a master account ID that lets you use the Account Administration tool of the Digital Publishing Suite dashboard. Use this tool to assign the "Application" role to the Adobe ID used for building folios and publishing content for your app. As part of that process, you provide the necessary information to enable SiteCatalyst analytics.

Analytics options appear in the Application Accounts section (Figure 13):

If you have a existing SiteCatalyst account, then it is necessary to know the "Company Name" used to log in to your SiteCatalyst account. Enter that, and the name of the report suite that you want, click Check Availability, and if it is not already in use, click Submit. There is one report suite per app, and the name must be unique in the system. If you don' have a SiteCatalyst account, then you can leave the "Company Name" blank.

Note: Company name must match your company name that you use to log into my.ominture.com, otherwise you may lose data and it can be difficult to recover.

The report suite name you enter is converted into a report suite ID. Any spaces are converted to periods, and then prefixed with "dps." followed by "dl." or "sj." to indicate which data center they are created in. For example, the report suite name "my new report suite" produces a report suite ID "dps.sj.my.new.report.suite". There is a limit to the length of the report suite ID. So, you get an error if you enter a string that is more than 33 characters long, including spaces.

Note: Once you provide this information, it can take as long as five days to enable analytics for this app.

Testing the Analytics Setup

To confirm that your analytics are actually working, at least in an initial application deployment, it's best to do some testing. If you haven't already, publish a folio using the same Adobe ID used as the Title ID when building the application. Install the developer app on a device. Open the app and download the folio. View the folio's contents for at least two minutes, while your device has an active internet connection. Wait two to six hours, then check your SiteCatalyst reports to ensure that your activity appears. The first time data is sent to a new report suite, the report suite's tables are built, so it could take four to six hours.

Analytics about DPS content can be confusing if the content is not named appropriately. The names of most content are based on text inputs assigned in InDesign, the Folio Builder panel, and/or the Folio Producer.

Folio Name

One of the most critical pieces of information in your analytics will be the Folio Name. This is used in reports regarding your unique folio download counts, as well as to categorize where various content appears. For most users, the Folio Name comes directly from the Folio Name as defined in the Folio Builder panel, or Folio Producer (Figure 14). This is the name of the folio as it appears in the list of folios in the Folio Builder panel, not the Publication Name meta-data attribute associated with the folio.

It's best to avoid use of upper ASCII characters in folio names. This can avoid some issues with display in SiteCatalyst.

Article Names

Article Names can be used to track the specific articles that users are viewing, as well as to help understand the article source of other more specific content. Additionally, articles that have been marked as Advertisements in the Article Properties metadata report their Ad Title based on the Article Name prefixed by "AD:". The Article Name is defined in the New Article dialog box when using InDesign to add a new article and in the Folio Producer: Editor (Figure 15).

Overlay ID (Name)

Overlay IDs are important to track interaction of your viewers with the content you have published. This applies to nearly all types of overlays, including hyperlinks, which can be an important metric.

Nearly all Overlay IDs are based on the name of the InDesign frame that contains the content. By default, InDesign frame names will simply reflect the type of object they are, such as "<rectangle>", "<circle>", etc. When content is placed into the frame, the frame name will typically incorporate the asset name. For example, if I place a movie into a frame, I'll get a frame name such as, "<my_great_movie.mp4>". Angle brackets on an element name in the Layers panel are a good indicator that the element name was automatically set, rather than defined by a user. These angle brackets are stripped from the name when reported in viewer events.

To change the name of the frame, select it in your InDesign layout, then look for the element in the Layers panel with the selection indicator (Figure 16). The selection indicator is the square next to an element in the layers panel that has a solid fill. Once you locate the item in the layers panel, click on it once to select it, then click again on the text of the element name to activate it for editing.

Some overlays will have a correlation between their name in the layers panel and a relevant label elsewhere in the document. For example, a Multi-State Object's name as defined in the Object States panel will be reflected in the Layers panel, and vice-versa (Figure 17). Note that in this example, the active selection is the state named "Visible" which is a child of the Multi-State Object, so the parent, "SodaPop Ad" has a smaller selection indicator.

Hyperlink overlay types are not represented in the layers panel, as they may be part of an expansive set of content inside of a text frame. In this case, a hyperlink assigned to a string of text in a text fame gets its Overlay ID from the name of the hyperlink in the Hyperlinks panel. This can be renamed by selecting the hyperlink and choosing "Rename Hyperlink…" from the panel's menu (Figure 18).

Overlay IDs will typically be concatenated with a postfix which indicates the element's position and source layout orientation. For example, "Adobe.com_435_234_172_513_L" is a hyperlink with the name "Adobe.com" defined in the Hyperlinks panel, the numbers represent its position, and it is on a landscape-orientated layout. How much of this postfix is included depends on the length of the element's source name and other variables.

Accessing SiteCatalyst Report

To generate a SiteCatalyst report for your DPS app:

1. Open a Web browser and navigate to my.omniture.com.
2. Alternatively, you can navigate to www.omniture.com and click Client Login.
3. In the appropriate fields, enter the following information, then click Login.

   Company: Your company name as defined in the Adobe Online Marketing Suite. If you are unsure of this value, contact your organization's SiteCatalyst administrator.

   Username: Your SiteCatalyst username.

   Password: Your SiteCatalyst password.

   From the drop-down menu, select Adobe Online Marketing Suite / SiteCatalyst 15.

   Note: All DPS customers should be using SiteCatalyst version 15. If you are not able to access version 15, please contact your Administrator or Adobe representative. While you will be able to log into version 14, functionality specifically needed to fully utilize DPS reporting will be limited.

4. On the Online Marketing Suite home page, click SiteCatalyst.
5. In the left-side navigation, select the appropriate report category.
   

   Please refer to Adobe Digital Publishing Report Guide to learn about the reports available in SiteCatalyst.

Note: See the Understanding Folio Download Counts knowledge base article to learn why DPS fulfillment server download counts (which determine how you are charged for folio downloads) may not match SiteCatalyst download statistics.

To view information for additional Digital Publishing Suite report types available in SiteCatalyst, download the Adobe SiteCatalyst Digital Publishing Report Guide . For full documentation of SiteCatalyst, access the help documents.

Change log

Updated as of the R27 (July 2013) release of DPS.