Report Getter

Exports reports from Adobe Analytics to Google Sheets and allows scheduling them regularly.

Video Guide

The following video guide shows the main functionalities. Note that the menu has now moved to Extensions -> AA Component Manager (the video shows an older version).

Step-by-Step Guide

First, Select Reports -> Create New Report (You can create as many reports as you like)

Now, enter a name for the new report tab.

You can change the tab name later, but if you have a report schedule tied to this tab, the schedule will fail if it cannot find a tab with this name anymore. If you want to change the name, first deactivate the running schedule, then change the name of the tab, then reactivate the schedule.

A new tab is created. Now go to the Analysis Workspace. Enable the debugger via Help -> Enable debugger:

Now go to the freeform table report that you want to export to GoogleSheets and click on the Debug icon on the top right of the table, then on "Freeform Table":

If you see multiple timestamps, click on the last one:

Copy the JSON Request to your clipboard:

Go to your Google Sheet Report tab and paste the JSON into the "Query Payload" field:

Choose daily or no granularity. Daily granularity will get you the data for each day in the date range as a 2-dimensional report (first dimension: day, second dimension: the dimension from your AA report).

Select a start and end date. Double-click into the field to get a date picker overlay. You can also type in the date manually (date format "2022-11-22") or use formulas, e.g. =TODAY()-1 (=>yesterday) to refer to rolling date ranges. This is especially useful for scheduled reports.

Results: Type in the number of desired results (=rows). The maximum is 50'000 (limited by the Adobe Reporting API). See more under Limitations. To make your report fast and avoid stretching the infrastructure unnecessarily (also think of the greenhouse gas emissions that this creates), use a sensible limit, e.g. don't use 50'000 rows if the first 5'000 rows give you enough information.

Headers: Choose technical Component IDs (don't change, but hard to read or even cryptic (Calculated Metrics) or Component Names (human-readable like in the interface, but can change).

Export Destination (New!): Choose "Sheet" or "CSV":

  • Sheet: The report data is written to the same tab below

  • CSV (Premium only): After each run, an CSV download link is provided to the right. Since Google Sheets can handle only a limited number of cells and large sheets get very slow, exporting daily-granular data with tens of thousands of rows each day can make your sheet unusable. With the CSV option, you don't need to worry about these limits:

Run the Report: Select AA Component Manager -> Reports -> Run Report.

Follow the status updates on the top of the sheet. It tells you when the report has finished.

That's it: Enjoy digesting your report data!

Schedule a regular Adobe Analytics-to-Google-Sheets report

To activate a regular schedule for a report, go to the tab on which the report is that you want to schedule.

Next to "Schedule", choose your schedule, e.g. "daily at 13:00". Times are in UTC.

Now select AA Component Manager -> Report -> Activate Schedule.

After some seconds, you see the scheduled report confirmation in these 2 places.

Your report will get scheduled every day now (around 4 AM UTC).

Note that the scheduled report is generated based on the settings of the report tab at the moment of delivery!

Assume that you e.g. have a daily scheduled report with daily granularity and your settings report tab today says "1000 results". You receive the report on 2 consecutive days. Both these 2 days will export a maximum of 1000 rows.

Now you change the setting to 5000 results. The next run will get 5000 results, but only for that incremental day. The already imported days are left untouched.

If you want to re-run the report for all of the days, simply delete the existing report data, and then run a manual granular report with 5000 results once.

Deactivate a schedule

To deactivate a schedule, simply choose AA Component Manager -> Reports -> Deactivate schedule. You will get a confirmation in the status bar, and "Active Schedule" now says "none" again:

Limitations

Row Limit

The Adobe Analytics Reporting API allows for a maximum of 50'000 rows to be exported. When using date-granular reports, the row limit is 50'000 per day. So a report for 10 days with a limit of 50'000 rows will require a maximum of 500'000 rows in total.

One-dimensional reports only

Similar to Analysis Workspace's "export to CSV" feature, you cannot export multi-dimensional reports, since the Adobe Analytics Reporting API is incapable of doing this for larger amounts of data. The exception are date-granular reports which are 2-dimensional where the first column is the date and the second column the actual dimension.

8:30 minutes maximum per report query

A report will fail it takes longer than 8:30 minutes to generate. For date-granular reports, this limit applies only to each individual day, not the time for all days together. So if you have a daily-granularity report across 30 days and each individual day takes less than 8:30 minutes, that is fine.

24 metrics (columns) maximum

To not sacrifice on performance, the Report Getter can process a maximum of 24 metrics (columns). If you use segments or date ranges to split a metric into multiple columns, those count as their own columns and will display the metric name only. Example: A table like this ...

... will end up in the Google Sheet like this:

So instead of splitting columns, create individual calculated metrics that contain the segment you use for splitting. Ideally, all your your columns are just one green component (= 1 (calculated) metric).

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