NEXT Analytics Business Intelligence User Guide

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1 NEXT Analytics Business Intelligence User Guide This document provides an overview of the powerful business intelligence functions embedded in NEXT Analytics v5. These functions let you build more useful reports without having to use fragile and complicated Excel formulas.

2 NEXT Pivot Tab NEXT provides a built-in capability to pivot your data. You can use this to avoid Excel s own PivotTables because it is much easier to work with. When you use the NEXT Pivot tab, it allows you to put any time oriented data onto the column axis of what you re looking at. This puts each period in the time range beside others which makes for easy left to right visualization. This kind of data is also easy to plot on a chart. The other dimensions remain on the row axis, so if you sort the data, the dimensions with the highest value show at the top. That gives you two business benefits: you can see a left-to-right trend, and you can see how dimensions rank compared to each other. One of the dimensions is on the column axis (Date). This is usually units of time, but it can also be used for dimensions where the number of unique values is not large this will help you to visualize the distribution.

3 If there are a large number, then you can choose Subset, and then manually select which distinct values want shown on the report. The rest will be shown in a summary column. The data that appears in each column is summed by default, but you can also change how the data is summarized. You can, as an alternative to the example, look at the average number of visitors for each day. This is typically only used where there are duplicate values along the row axis and they need to be combined. NEXT Fix Tab The Fix tab provides an automated search-and-replace function that is a very efficient way to clean and augment the data coming into NEXT. Not only does it eliminate a great deal of manual tweaking of a spreadsheet, it has several specific and useful business purposes. 1. Change values in a data column to another value. a. If you went through a period of time when data was being coded a certain way, but later in time it changed, you can use this feature to normalize them, to make them the same. b. This can be used to convert technical jargon to business user friendly terminology. e.g. a dimension value might return ios but you can convert it to say Apple Mobile Device. c. This can be used to convert data to the common business language of your organization. e.g. If your organization always spells a certain city or state in a certain way, you can ensure the variations are all spelled correctly. 2. Group values to the same label.

4 a. This is more easily explained by example. Let s assume we have the Google Analytics Source dimension in our report. That will send traffic from Google.com, Google.ca, Google.fr, and many more variations. For analysis purposes, we d like them all to be considered as one, *Google. So we use Fix feature. When we say When source column contains Google convert it to *Google. Use this feature with as many data columns as you want to implement business rules that convert the values. NEXT s powerful analytic engine automatically sums them correctly under each date period. b. If you are planning to blend data from different systems, e.g. Bing, Facebook, adwords, LinkedIn, and Bit.ly, you can use this feature to ensure that differing values get converted to common terminology. c. Group a series of web page URLs to a category so you can report pageviews by category of your site, even if your site changes over time. 3. The other options in the dialog can be used to clean up the data. For example, to remove commas, underscores, spaces, periods, and to convert the type-case so it s more consistent (like login.php and Login.php).

5 The business rules that you create on the Fix tab are stored in such a way that they can be re-used for any report. When you build a query, you can turn them off and on, as you see fit by changing the checkbox in the top left corner of the Fix tab. NEXT Filter Tab After you click refresh, the three sub-tabs on the Filter tab are populated with the list of columns that are in your data set. You can create filters for as many columns as you wish. This is a great way of isolating what you are looking at and finding or eliminating outliers. Text Filters. If you have dimensions, then there will be a text tab. Each dimension is a text column. You can create one or more text filters that will include or eliminate rows in the report based on the condition you specify i.e. Starts With, Contains, Ends With, and Exact Match. There are two filtering options: Remove rows that match, and Keep rows that match. Numeric Filters. If you have numeric columns in the refreshed data, there will be a numeric tab. The usual math operators are offered and if a row meets the condition, it s eliminated from the result set. Date Operators. If you haven t pivoted, then you might have a Date column in your report. You can specify a date range and a comparison operator. If it matches, the row is eliminated. Caution: Your report will filter to this date, so it makes it a less useful report if you plan to refresh each reporting cycle. NEXT Analyze Tab Rarely does downloaded data match the way you want to present the information. With NEXT, you can add a series of analytics transformations to your query so that what gets written to the spreadsheet is immediately useful and doesn t require any fragile spreadsheet formulas. From the menu items on this tab, you can call up various analytics commands. The wizard-like interface then walks you through the choices and options for the command, whether it is selecting rows or columns, sort order or aggregation type it is all laid out for you. Pick the options you want and click Add then get fresh data to see the impact of the command you just added. To remove or re-order the commands, select the Commands tab.

6 NEXT has over 100 script commands available, but only a sampling is included in the menus. If you have custom analytics needed in your project, contact support for assistance or a quote for the experts to build you a solution.