Work Environment

Using an existing flow

Once in Data Flow you can use an existing flow (created by another user) or create a new one.

IMPORTANT: you may create several flows per universe per contract:

Creating a new flow

Click on “New” to create a new flow.

All flows created for a site are visible to all users who have access to the site and are included on the contract.

Start by selecting a “universe” in which you want to create a flow:

Events: All dimensions related to pages, clicks, sites variables and the internal search engine.

MV Testing: All dimensions related to Multivariate Testing analyses.

Orders: All dimensions related to order analyses (Sales Tracker option)

Custom Page variables: All dimensions related to custom page variables

Products: All dimensions related to Product analyses.

Publisher: All dimensions relating to Publisher analyses.

Rich Media: All dimensions related to the analysis of rich media content.

Self-promotion: All dimensions relating to Self-Promotion analyses.

Visits: All dimensions for which the value is unique during a visit. The Visits universe shows sub-universes that allow describing the traffic sources properties.

Note: 
The “Visits” universe will provide you with a file containing one visit per line with all its attributes (Source, device, geolocation, etc.)

All other universes will provide you with a file containing one line per event: page load, click, video play, click on ad display, etc.)

Once your "universe" is selected, you will be presented with the flow customisation page. The following information will be displayed:

• All mandatory dimensions and metrics provided by AT Internet. These dimensions are provided by default, they are highlighted in blue and cannot be unselected.
• Optional Dimensions. Click on a dimension to select it. The dimension will turn blue to show it has been correctly selected.

Multi-site selection

To create a flow, you will need to select all the sites from the dropdown list.

You can select multiple sites at a time to create a data flow on several sites. However, you will receive one URL per site to call the API.

The events universe has unique rules that apply to it. If you select multiple sites at once, you will not see variables unique to each site show up in the list of available dimensions as they can change from one site to the other. In order to create a event flow with site indicators, you will need to create it one site at a time.

During the creation of your flows you can test your links before saving your configuration.

If you have selected multiple sites, you have the possibility to select the site on which you test the link.

Once you have selected the dimensions to extract, click on “Copy the URL ”. This will generate one url per selected site.

Dimensions marked with an exclamation mark

Certain dimensions may have specific behaviours. If it is the case, the dimension is highlighted using a yellow exclamation mark.

By hovering over the icon you will find additional information as to why they have been singled out.

You are then reminded you have selected metrics with unique behaviours above the API URL you need to call with the following message:

For example, In the tooltip above, the number of pages viewed during a visit will increase as a user browses the site. Unforetunately, this visit can be straddled over two consecutive full hours (exemple: visit start: 8:50AM -> visit end 9:10AM).

Since the API brings back data for a full hour at a time (a call at 9AM for 8AM to 9AM data & a call at 10AM for 9AM to 10AM data) the API may bring back different values for the same visit between two consecutive calls.

Date & time : local or UTC?

In Data Flow, when you need to report on the time dimensions, you have to choose between the local or the UTC (Epoch timestamp) date/time.

Collection Server local time

• Date-time (visit start): local time of the first page of the visit,
• Date-time (event): local time of the analysed event.

UTC time

• UTC Date-time (visit start): UTC time of the first page of the visit,
• UTC Date-time (event): UTC time of the analysed event.

Format

These 4 dimensions return a date format following the Epoch timestamp format: "1545313209".

What happens when a flow uses closed dimensions?

From time to time, we remove unsupported old dimensions from Data Flow.

Existing flows using these dimensions will continue to operate as before the dimensions were deleted.

However, when you go to the Data Flow interface, you will see these few grey and non-selectable dimensions. You will need to remove them from the flow before you can save it.