Building Custom Analytics Report – Part1 – Introduction

In this blog series will show you how you can build a custom analytics report from A to Z, I will start by explaining business needs for the report then I will discuss how you can store data, how you can retrieve the data, how you can display the data and how you can add this report to the collection of sitecore experience analytics report and finally how you can extend the default sitecore analytics filters.

Business Needs?

Let’s assume that a client asked you to track some user clicks on custom links, an external link, internal link or a listing that may be showing search results or showing blogs or any other collection of items, maybe the user asked you to track a slide show items clicks so how you can build a full report and integrate it to the existing Sitecore Analytics reports?!

Storing Data?

Now you of course realize that once a user clicks on the required link we will save some information about the related item an ID or a name or event all information we may need to display on the report, so where should we save this data? Will go with the best practices that Sitecore is using to store the analytics data, we will store the information into MongoDB, specifically the analytics collection.

Retrieving data?

After saving the data into MongoDB you may or may not realize that it is a difficult approach to use MongoDB as a reporting in which the retrieval of data is a little bit hard, again will follow Sitecore. As Sitecore aggregate the analytics data from MongoDB to SQL server database “reporting” and use this database as a source for all reports in Sitecore Analytics I will do the same and aggregate or custom report data to SQL Server database which will be used to retrieve the data into the report.

Displaying data?

Now the step of displaying the custom report, what should we use for that? Okay it is a good chance to user Sitecore SPEAK to build the UI for the custom report that will be displayed inside Sitecore Experience Analytics, I will show you how you can add a new section to Sitecore Analytics reports menu and how we can add a list of reports.

Extending Sitecore Analytics Filters?

The default Sitecore Analytics filters contains one filter for date range and another for subsites filter, in this section I will show you how you can use these filters, also you may need an extra filters, will show you how we can extend the default analytics filters by adding additional filters such as dropdowns also a textbox filters.

Are you ready? Let’s begin J