Reports
This guide will help you understand:
- What is a report in Bloomreach Engagement
- How can reports empower you in understanding your data
- How to create a report using Bloomreach Engagement
- How to further specify the settings of reports in Bloomreach Engagement
- How to customize the report view
What is a report in Bloomreach Engagement
Reports in Bloomreach Engagement are a powerful analytical tool that summarises your data in a grid table. You can specify the attribute or event to be displayed in the rows and columns of the table. Then, if you chose a specific metric, the report tool will generate a table with the specified rows and columns. Each cell of the table will contain the number of customers or events satisfying the row and column settings measured by the given metric. What's more, the reports tool in Bloomreach Engagement allows you to automatically highlight the most important cells, or even visualize the table as a chart.
Watch this short introductory video about this feature:
Pivot tables
Reports in Bloomreach Engagement share many similarities with pivot tables in Microsoft Excel. If you are already an experienced user of pivot tables, you will easily transfer your knowledge to reports in Bloomreach Engagement.
| To further illustrate the usage of reports in Bloomreach Engagement, consider the following example. |
|---|
| Suppose you wanted to better understand during which hour of the day are your customers making purchases. Firstly, note that traffic on your website will vary not only throughout the day but throughout the week as well. Hence, you can choose to make a report and set the columns to be the weekdays of purchase and the rows to be the hours of purchase. What is left is the choice of the metric, you might be interested in the total price of purchases, the average price of a purchase, or just the number of purchases. Each choice of metric may tell you something different, we chose to display the total number of purchases, see the picture below for the outcome. |
The table created as in the example showing the number of purchases, highlighted yellow to white.
Learn how to do this in the "Weekly Heat-map" Analysis article.
How can reports empower you in understanding your data
A lot of the power of Bloomreach Engagement comes from a single customer view. For each customer, your database will contain a lot of events and customer attributes. However, to give the data meaning, you will almost always need to condense and visualize your data. This is where reports come in handy, they allow you to summarise your data into an easily comprehensible structure of a grid table, which you can further clarify using either highlighting or the chart view. Consequently, you will be able to gain quick insights into the raw data stored in Bloomreach Engagement.
For a step-by-step guide through a typical Use Case, view this article about creating a report from AB testing.
How to Create a Report
You can find the Report tool by clicking on the buttons highlighted by red rectangles
1. Create a new Report.
a. Navigate to Analyses > Reports.
b. Click on the + sign next to the Reports item in the drop-down menu.
c. You will now see the edit window with a new, empty Report editor.
2. Navigate the Report Editor
An empty report consists of a table editor with empty rows and columns, but with one metric already filled in - customer count. You can start building your report by adding event attributes or customer attributes to the rows and columns of your table. Also, don't forget to give your report a name and save it, so your valuable work would not get lost.
The initial configuration of a new report.
Important parts are highlighted by red rectangle.
The Rows and Columns sections in this Table editor correspond to the rows and columns of a table. In turn, this table will be used as the basis for the output chart.
The Report Editor will generate a bar graph by default. Here, the row attributes represent the values of the x-axis of the bar chart, and the column attributes are represented by one or more bars per value on the x-axis. The METRICS section in the table editor represents the values on the y-axis of the bar graph.
(Please see the metrics guide for more details.)
a. Click on the + sign in the ROWS section to set your row values.
b. Click on the EVENT or CUSTOMER tabs to browse through the respective attributes.
c. Click on an attribute to add it to the `ROWS section.
d. Alternatively, click on the text Add timestamp if you want to plot the attributes in your COLUMN section over time.
e. Please follow the same steps, from a to d, for the COLUMN section.
f. Press the Preview button on the upper right-hand side of the page.
g. Scroll down to see the result.
Further specify the settings of reports
Grouping
Grouping is useful when there are too many values to display or you want to group the values based on certain properties.
Limitations
In reports, the number of:
- rows is limited to 9 999
- columns is limited to 99
- metrics is limited to 249
- cells is limited to 200 000
Trying to go beyond any of these limits will result in an error.
If these limits are not sufficient, consider dividing the report into smaller chunks or using features such as Exponea Big Query or Exports, that make all the data available to any complex analytics.
| Grouping options | |
|---|---|
| none | Disables any grouping |
| auto | Selects the best possible grouping based on the attribute |
| top | Selects only first X values (max 9 999) in rows according to the first metric used in the report. |
| discretization | Creates equally large groups, the number defines the number of groups. |
| histogram | Automatically creates groups from available values based on average and standard deviation to create a histogram-like distribution. |
In discretisation grouping, if one value is significantly more prevalent than other values, the number of groups might end up being smaller.
Show N/A
If turned on, it will display also values that are not defined and will also allow users who don't have any value for the field to enter the calculation.
Metrics
Metrics compute values in the table according to the drill-down specified in rows and columns. For example, metric customer count, when combined with session start > country attribute in rows, will compute how many customers started a session in given countries.
Formats
Formats allow you to format values in the report. There are 3 groups of formatting related to time (date format, date part, date difference), 1 group of numeric filters, and 1 group of string filters. Only one filter can be applied at a time.
In case sorting in the report would produce unexpected results, try to manually set the format corresponding to your data.
Filters
Date filter
The Date filter on the top right limits the time frame concerning the events that are used for the calculation of the report. This setting does not apply to customer attributes, but it does apply to event aggregates and segmentations.
Please read the Filtering data article to learn more about Date filters.
Customer filter
You can specify an additional customer filter at the bottom of the report editor. Only customers who pass this filter will be used for the report.
Please read the Filtering data article to learn more about Customer filters.
Actions
On the right-hand side of each field in the report definition, you'll find a delete icon, duplicate icon, and move icon. Click on the delete or duplicate button to either delete or duplicate the row or click and drag the move icon to move the field up or down.
Report view
Above the Report view, which allows you to select a table view, a chart view, or both.
Chart
By default, the Report view will select the most appropriate chart type to display the contents of the table.
There are 8 types of charts available in the reports:
- column
Classic column chart - stacked column
Available when using field in columns - bar
Limits to 15 values - line
Adjusts y-axis based on the values (can start from negative values) - area
Doesn't adjust the y-axis (starts from 0) - pie
Shows additional information on hover (percentage of the whole) - percentage area
- bubble
- In order to create a bubble chart (more complex scatter plot), you ideally want to have a report with:
- One row - the different values in this attribute will determine the discrete bubbles
- One column - the different values in this attribute will determine the color of the bubble (overrides the fourth metric)
- Up to four metrics:
- first metric will determine the size of the bubble
- second metric will determine the position of the bubble on the X axis
- third metric will determine the position of the bubble on the Y axis
- fourth metric will determine the color of the bubble
It is also possible to change the color of the charts by simply clicking on them and choosing the option 'Change series color'.
Axis limits
If you want to compare your reports in an easier way, you can set up the maximum/minimum limits. To set it up, click on the axis value or the 3 dots in the upper left corner of the chart. If there is data outside the shown chart, it will warn you with a warning sign.
Table
The report result is displayed in the table. In case your report is larger than your screen, scroll horizontally or vertically and both, the header and the first column are frozen. It helps you with better navigation when having large reports.
Example: report with session start > country in rows and count customer metric
Modifiers
There are multiple modifiers in report metrics, which help visualize the data in tables. There are three categories: summarize, show value and visualize.
- Summarize provides some statistical data about the metric at the bottom of the rows. You can choose from the sum, average, maximum, minimum, standard deviation, variance
- Show value as
- Column total % shows the percentage distribution within the column
- Grand total % shows percentage distribution considering all columns
- Running total counts values from all previous rows up to the current one, being effective in YTD revenue reporting
- Running total % counts percentages from all previous rows up to the current one, resulting in the last row always being 100%
- Visualize
- Heatmap changes the background of the cells based on their value in the selected color scale
- Highlight changes in the background of the cells based on the selected condition
Send via Email
Bloomreach Engagement offers you the possibility to frequently receive updated reports straight to your email account. This allows you to be always up to date on what has been recently happening to your project.
In order to set this up, navigate to … > Send via email
There you can set how often you wish to receive updates on the Report.
You can choose to receive it:
- Daily – you will receive the Report every day at 8 a.m.
- Weekly – you will receive the Report every Monday at 8 a.m.
- Never – you will not receive the Report.
To review all the Reports you are receiving, navigate to your profile, and go into the email digest tab. There you will be able to view what Reports and other analyses you are currently subscribed to. You can also choose to stop receiving them by clicking on the trashcan icon.
Updated 24 days ago
Learn how to clone your report into another project or account that you have access to in our Cloning article