Quick start guide for Administrators

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This quick start guide walks you through the end-to-end setup—from creating a service account and accessing the platform to connecting your data warehouse, defining datasets, and building your first exploration. See Terms and Concepts for explanations of these terms.

Log in to Optimizely Analytics

  1. Access the Optimizely Analytics web application URL on any browser, enter your email, and click Next.

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  2. Enter the password, verify your account, and sign in.log in-2.png

If you encounter difficulties logging into Optimizely Analytics, write an email to Optimizely Support.

Create a service account with read/write schema

Optimizely Analytics uses the service account to query the warehouse. The schema is used to improve performance by caching common computations, such as the drop-down list of unique values in a column. This substantially improves the warehouse cost and performance.  

  1. Create a service account for Optimizely Analytics in your data warehouse of choice (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or Amazon Redshift) to query the warehouse.
  2. Add a schema with read/write access granted.
  3. Note the database and schema name for enabling materialization in Optimizely Analytics later.

Configure your data warehouse for Optimizely Analytics

Setting up your data warehouse for analytics is a crucial step in ensuring seamless data integration and analysis. This process involves configuring your warehouse to efficiently handle data operations and connect with Optimizely Analytics. Learn how to configure the following warehouses:

Create an application and connect your data warehouse

  1. Create an application within your organization for storing data and generated analyses.
  2. Create a connection to your data warehouse. You can also connect to multiple warehouses and select one of them to be the primary connection. The following warehouse options are available:

Enable Materialization

Analytics creates materialized tables in the data warehouse, which contain intermediate results for improving performance.

  1. Go to Settings > General Settings > Materialization and enable the feature. 

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  2. Configure the following fields:
    • Database – The database name in the data warehouse where the materialized tables are created.
    • Schema – The schema's name in the database where the materialized tables are created.
    • Refresh Cron Schedule – The refresh periodicity of the materialized tables using the cron syntax. The recommended periodicity is daily, so the schedule is 0 0 * * *.

Create datasets and establish relationships between them

You must create user and event datasets and a relationship between them before creating explorations in Optimizely Analytics.

To keep your initial configuration focused and manageable, avoid importing every available table into Optimizely Analytics at the start. Instead, bring in only the essential datasets—users and events—and use them to create a Daily Active Users (DAU) chart. This streamlined approach ensures clarity and sets a strong foundation for further analysis.

Create event datasets

Before you create a dataset, you must understand whether your events are represented by one or many tables in your warehouse. These categories are two common possibilities, but it is also possible that you may not fall under any of these categories.

Create a source dataset if the data you want to evaluate your experiments against lives in one table. If multiple tables represent your event, you can create a union dataset.

If you use Snowplow, your events are stored in a single table. If you use Rudderstack or Segment, your events are stored in multiple tables. If you do not use any of these, click Help Get Help to contact Analytics. Analytics supports a variety of setups, and this document covers common setups, but others are supported.

Create actor datasets

Optimizely Analytics requires a dimension table of users with one row per user. If you have a users table, you can use it to create an actor dataset.

If you lack a dimension table in the warehouse and only have an identifier column, like visitor_id in an event table, you can use it to create a column actor dataset.

Create a relationship between the event and actor datasets

Creating a relationship between datasets tells Analytics how to join these tables together.

  1. Go to Related Datasets > + Add Related Dataset.
  2. Select the event dataset – ProductEvents.
  3. Select one to many for Cardinality because one user will have multiple events.
  4. Select the columns. In the Users table, select the id column — this is usually the primary key. In the Events table, choose the column representing the ID of the user who performed that event – here, user_id.
  5. Click Save.

Build an exploration

When your datasets are ready, you can build an exploration using them. You can manually create an exploration or ask Opal to generate an exploration for you.

  1. Go to Settings > Defaults and select the Users dataset for the Actors dataset field, and for the Event Stream field, choose Product Events. When you set these defaults, users are populated by default as the selected actor for this measure. Now, you are all set to build your exploration. This should be done before you create an exploration.

  2. Click + > Event Segmentation.
  3. Select the Count of unique actors that performed event measure.
  4. Click Select Events and choose Play Content.
  5. Click Run to display a chart in the visualization window.
  6. Name the exploration and click Save.

Learn more about Explorations in Optimizely Analytics.

Performance guidance

The following techniques are various approaches you can take to ensure that Optimizely Analytics runs at an optimal cost and performance profile:

  1. Ensure your events/conversions table is clustered by event date (not time), and event type (the same column selected in the Semantics tab of the dataset in Optimizely Analytics), in that order.
  2. (Experimentation Analytics only) Check if the warehouse is clustered by the experiment ID column and decision date (not time) if it has a separate decisions table.
  3. Ensure that you have created a new schema in your warehouse, give Optimizely Analytics read and write access to it, and then enter the name of that schema in the Optimizely Analytics app settings, in the Materialization section. This enables the materialization of repeated queries, which is a large cost/performance boost.
  4. Ensure your warehouse instance size is appropriate.
  5. Consider creating a new warehouse for Optimizely Analytics, if this same warehouse instance is also used by other workloads, so that Optimizely Analytics queries are isolated from other workloads.