Adjusting Time Zones via Virtual Report Suites

When you are doing analysis for an organization that spans multiple time zones, things can get tricky. Each Adobe Analytics report suite is tied to one specific time zone (which makes sense), but this can lead to frustration for your international counterparts. For example, let’s say that Analytics Demystified went international and had resources in the United Kingdom. If they wanted to see when visitors located in the UK viewed blog posts (assume that is one of our KPI’s), here is what they would see in Adobe Analytics:

This report shows a Blog Post Views success event segmented for people located in the UK. While I wish our content was so popular that people were reading blogs from midnight until the early morning hours, I am not sure that is really the case! Obviously, this data is skewed because the time zone of our report suite is on US Pacific time. Therefore, analysts in the UK would have to mentally shift everything eight hours on the fly, which is not ideal and can cause headaches.

So how do you solve this? How do you let the people in the US see data in Pacific time and those in the UK see data in their time zone? Way back in 2011, I wrote a post about shifting time zones using custom time parting variables and SAINT Classifications. This was a major hack and one that I wouldn’t really recommend unless you were desperate (but that was 2011!). Nowadays, using the power of Virtual Report Suites, there is a more elegant solution to the time zone issue (thanks to Trevor Paulsen from Adobe Product Management for the reminder).

Read the rest of this post on analyticsdemystified.com