Possible to Lookup Values in Adobe Analytics Classification Rule Builder?

Question

I have tens of thousands of keys being created on a particular var.

var Format: module|page name

var Example: MOD123|My Page

I am attempting to translate the 'module' portion, and have a 'friendly name' classification output of:

Search Box|My Page

There are approximately 200 modules, but the 'page name' portion is multitude, and is already friendly

My initial approach was to use Classification Rules and subclassifications for the 'module' lookup. I am able to delimit the string using the pipe. However, I cannot determine how to re-concatenate the translated 'module' name

I'm faced with an option of creating 200 explicit rules to explicitly name the 'module' and leave the 'page name' as-is.

I'm suspecting there is a more elegant way to do this. Has anyone created this type of Classification Rule before?

Answer 1

Adobe does not currently offer any kind of lookup table feature for Classification Rule Builder (CRB). I wish they did. I've posted it on ideas.omniture.com, along with a lot of other ideas for enhancing CRB. Anyways..

The best you can do with pure CRB is create a rule for each module (one rule set with ~200 rules). Select "Regular Expression" for rule type, and for the regex, use

^MOD123\|(.*)

That first part MOD123 will be a hardcoded value for each rule. Then in the Classification Action > To column, put

Search Box|$1

That first Search Box part will also be hardcoded to the "friendly" name.

So, you will wash, rinse and repeat for every Module.

The alternative would be to write your own server-side script on a cron job to receive raw values and push back classified values to Adobe, using your own lookup table (hardcoded as an array or from a db query or whatever on your own server). You can use the Adobe SAINT API for this, or you can setup a recurring Data Warehouse export pushed to an ftp location for your script to pickup and upload to an Adobe ftp location.

Edit:

Another approach would be to have 2 classification columns, one only for the friendly module name, and one only for the page name. You would then have one rule to pop the page name using a regex ^[^|]+\|(.*) and $1 for the To value.

Then you would have ~200 rules (one for each module). Since you aren't trying to dynamically add anything, you can use Starts With rule type, and just use the hardcoded module names (followed by a pipe), e.g. MOD123| and then just the friendly module name for the To value, e.g. "Search Box"

This will give you two classification reports with classified values like this:

I'm not sure what your actual reporting needs are, so this may or may not be what you need, but you for example go to the "Module" classification report to easily get aggregated data by module, without separate entries per page. And you can break it down by the "Page Name" classification to see the different pages for the module.