Discover how to make the power of ObservePoint work for you even more. This session covers how to utilize lesser-known features and capabilities of ObservePoint to enhance your data governance, such as LiveConnect, Action Set Library, Webhook integrations, Google Sheets Ad-ons, and more!

Jordan Avalos

Senior Analyst Analytic Technologies

Southwest Airlines

Jordan is a Senior Analyst for Digital Implementation at Southwest Airlines, his experience consists of 10+ years of web development and programming with a recent switch into an implementation analyst role. He has a wife and 3 beautiful daughters. He finds his inner solace while working out and quoting 80’s movies.

Pam Frei

Senior Analyst Analytic Technologies

Southwest Airlines

Pam is a Senior Analyst Analytic Technologies and specializes in communication across a variety of work groups. She has nearly a decade of experience in the analytics industry and with her background in technical writing, web development, and analytics she has a gift for communicating easily with technology groups, marketing groups, and analysts.

Aaron Cheung: (00:08)
Hi everybody. Welcome to validate 2020 hope you guys are all excited and learned a lot so far. Today we're going to be going over Data Governance Tips & Tricks: How to Do Even More with ObservePoint. My name is Aaron Cheung, I've been working at ObservePoint for about a year now. And so with today's presentation overview, we're going to be going over a couple of things. Firstly, we're going to be going over Action Set Library, that will be taken care of by Pam and Jordan. And then afterwards, so the last portion, I'll be going into OP custom tags, Live Connect, and also the web hook integration. So without further ado, I'll let Pam and Jordan introduce themselves.

Jordan Avalos: (00:57)
Thank you, Aaron, I appreciate that. My name is Jordan Avalos, I am a senior analyst at Southwest Airlines, in which I am a team member with Pam. We have been using ObservePoint now approximately three years. They have been a wonderful partner to us, as last year they helped us getting ObservePoint really implemented into a day-to-day management stasis. We are using it daily across the boards, within our MarTech teams to use it from capturing tags, data governance, our journeys are especially kind of business crucial for us on a daily basis. We are monitoring every morning just making sure that things are coming through as expected with the journeys and the audit systems. They assisted us greatly last year and getting our rules set up, so we are now starting to build upon our rule library index, getting things to a level to where ObservePoint really has just become the day-to-day here at Southwest.

(01:53)
So my background is more of a development background. As a prior Southwest, I spent the last 10 years as a primary developer programmer, transitioning into the MarTech analyst. Day-To-Day working with Pam and some, some more of our co-workers has just been fantastic and working with people such as the individuals at ObservePoint, where really they're MarTech minded, but with a technology skill set has really helped shape our team. So I'll pass it over to Pam to kind of give her introduction and then we'll get started here, but thank you guys for showing up.

Pam Frei: (02:28)
Hi, I'm Pam. I've been working with Southwest for forever and I've been working with analytics implementation for an exceedingly long time, we won't go into that. What we do is use the ObservePoint tool to do some really cool stuff, and to help us to evaluate our tags to make sure that our analysts don't complain to us before we tell them that something is broken. One of my favorite cool new tools is the Action Set Library. I don't know if you've used it or not. Hopefully if you're here, you haven't had a chance to use it because, but you should, because it's really cool. So we're going to talk about the basic use cases, how to get it set up and then how to apply it to your audit or your journey, and then advanced use cases.

(03:14)
So we use Action Set Libraries, and the best use for it is for repetitive actions in your journeys. So I don't know how many of you have been to Southwest.com, but one of the things that pretty much everybody does, if they're actually going to fly with us is sign up for a Rapid Rewards. So we need to log in in order to run our journeys. Well, logging in is something that we do across all of our dev, all of our QA, and in production. So having a standard login, in Action Set Library makes that tremendously easy. We just have to plug it in once, and then we can run it and use those library elements in any journey that we want to log in on. Another thing you can do is for selecting common elements. So when you're booking a flight, I think everybody knows that some of the things that you do are set your dates and your origin and destination.

(04:05)
So we use the Action Set Libraries to set those things, also. We can do custom code that lets us, for example, say we want to have this journey run two weeks, out or two days out, depending on whether we want to test the check-in functionality or whether we're trying to do a change or whatever our function might be. And then also for site updates, this allows us to roll those changes. If we set the Action Set Library up for change that's going to happen in development, we can test that Action Set Library in our journeys, in our dev environment, and then as it moves through to production, we can just move that same Action Set Library over into our production journeys, which makes it super easy.

(04:50)
So how do you get this Action Set Library set up? You got a couple of ways of doing it. What we have in this slide is the standard way of setting it up. If you have nothing set up, you can go follow the menu instructions and then hit on 'create new'. My personal favorite, however, is to go ahead and use it in the journey. Again, here we are, and we're in the journey. We're going to edit the journey. So you've got these steps set up and you know, your journey is already running. So then what do you do? If you want to use an Action Set Library, you can just select it like you do execute or anything else from the menu, but if you want to create a new one, see the button highlighted in yellow down there where you can create your own? So you have a choice right here of checking the check boxes. Once you hit that, select your start, create a journey and Action Set Library. You can check the check right there and that will be saved.

(06:00)
Next step, so there are a few "gotchas" with adding Action Set Libraries. One of the "gotchas" that we've run into is we like to apply rules, of course, to all of our journey steps where we would expect analytics or some other variety of tag to fire. So we've found that you need to go ahead and set those rules in the Action Set Library. You can't set them in the journey separately, so they need to be the standard things that you'd expect to find on this pages that they need to be set within the Action Set Libraries. You need to know the exact steps for your Action Set Library. We find a good name and convention helps. So for example, if I'm logging in for a certain account, I might put that account number in my naming convention, because that way it would let me know whether it was what type of membership it might be. Or if we're doing four steps in this journey, we might describe what all four steps of that journey are. So for example, did you set your Action Set Library to click through continuing your login or just to enter the username or password? Knowing where your Action Set Library starts and ends, it helps tremendously.

(07:07)
And then what you'll see is once you say that you want to create an Action Set Library, it'll show you this little check box that says, "do you want this to apply to all journeys that seem to have similar steps?" Now, I've been too afraid to do that, but more power to you. If you've got the courage to do that, my concern is just that I would screw something up and everything would be broken, but it's a really cool feature. And I look forward to building my courage up for that. And now I think that's the last of my slides, so I will hand it over to Aaron.

(07:38)
I have advanced use cases, I'm so sorry. I totally missed one. So one of the advanced use cases that we do have is, we did a lot of A/B testing. So if you do A/B testing, this is a great way for you to go ahead and set up. And again, we do it in dev, but we go ahead and set up both experiences that you would get as a customer in our journey and in the Action Set Library. And then when you do push to development, whatever the winning experience is, you have the quick option of switching to that new winning experience. It also allows you to test the journey steps before you apply them to a larger volume. So for example, if I'm creating an Action Set Library, I might test that Action Set Library out in my dev environment before I pushed it over to prod. And it allows you to use it for the individual actions and those actions need to be applied and removed regularly. So for example, when we have our development teams going through the QMO process, they might turn on a page or turn off a page. And then what happens to us is that we end up having to go fix the journey, remove it, and then they put it back in again, the next day they have to go fix the journey again at a backend. Actions Set Library makes that super easy to swap in and out pages. Aaron. Now it's up to you.

Aaron Cheung: (08:52)
Thank you, Pam. Awesome. Well, thank for sharing that. So the next part after we've talked about Action Set Library is Live Connect. Then I'm going to go into web hook integration and the OP custom tag. I thought the best way to be able to show this is just to do it in the tool. So I'll just go ahead and bring that up. So for the first portion, let's talk a little bit about what Live Connect is. So the easiest way to explain it is for WebAssurance, right? We have things such as journeys, right? We're able to go through the entire process. So Live Connect is very similar to journeys, and the fact that you have to go through step-by-step to be able to go through a certain flow. So to be able to set that up, to be able to see what tags fire. So usually this is more for AppAssurance or mobile devices, right? So if you can see my screen currently, you'll be able to see in the left-hand nav, you'll see a Live Connect, second item from the bottom.

(09:57)
So if you click on that, you'll be brought to this page right here. And so in order to, for example, if you wanted a test on an iPhone device, iPhone 11, you can go ahead and add a new device. And go ahead and fill all that out. We also have different options for smart TV and game consoles, as well as PC and desktop. But for the most part, the most common use case would be for a phone or a tablet. So you can go ahead and select the model that you want, select the folder that you want it in. The operating system, obviously we have Android, Windows or iOS, and then go ahead and add your different versions and labels to be able to start. So obviously Live Connect in it of itself can be its own session, but just to keep it high level, the idea behind this is if you want to, there's two options to record your journey.

(10:50)
Number one is you can go ahead and click on this new journey. This is where you hook up your iPhone to your computer or an emulator or some sort to be able to start recording that journey. So once this loads, the idea here is that once you're in it and you click on different' locations on your phone, like different buttons, different user flows, right? The idea is once you click on something, the tags will show up under this 'tags found' section right here. What you can also do is you can assign rules. So for example, if you're saying, okay, well, Adobe Analytics, when I go through this login flow or this checkout flow, Adobe Analytics and eVar 2 has to equal this value. So you can create the rules just like you would in a journey or an audit and assign it to this Live Connect flow. And be able to run through this and it will show you whether or not it failed and it'll bring all of those up to the top. So that's the first way of using Live Connect.

(11:59)
The second way you can use it, it's a little easier I think, but you can upload a har file. And so for those of you who don't know, a .har file is a document that just saves all of the different network requests. So if you are using a Charles proxy then you can go ahead and easily download the .har file there, and then if you upload it, you don't even have to click through that flow. It will all get uploaded here, and then it'll go through that same outline that I just showed you before. So that is for Live Connect.

(12:40)
The next thing I like to talk about is the web hook integration. So you guys are used to, in your account, to get notifications by hitting this down here through an email or on a rule. Be able to put your email in there, but sometimes you know, maybe it's not the best or most conducive to your user flow. So what you can actually do instead is if you look right here there is a an advanced setup. You can actually use something called complete web hook URL. So what that does is, the best way to explain it is using our most popular web hook integration, which is slack. So once you are able to configure it within slack, you can actually get messages like this, as you can see, and it shows you like, "Hey, you know what test audit has run already, but this has failed." So this can be part of your use of flow. You can break out into different teams on slack and be able to have that run smoothly and continuously through slack, as opposed to just through email. And so right now, currently, we only can do one, one slack integration per account. But hopefully eventually as we roll out more and more phases, you'll be able to integrate with slack and teams a little more natively.

(14:16)
So some of our other integrations besides teams and Slack, we also have Jira and Jenkins integrations as well. And if you ever wanted to be able to find how to integrate with us currently, you can come to help.observepoint.com. We can put it into an article and send it out to everybody afterwards. But you can just come here, and then in here you can either search integrations, or you can just come to this bottom part right here and it'll show you all the different things. So we have Tealium triggers, for example, if ever you're wanting ObservePoint to run whenever you have sent out a release with Tealium, you can go ahead and set that up. With Slack, you can also make your own custom web hooks, and you can find that just through here. And again CIC, CD integrations, like against Jira Microsoft teams. So all of that can just be done right here. So that's the web hook integration.

(15:16)
And then lastly, what I wanted to go over briefly is custom tags. So a lot of times people ask if ObservePoint, so mainly what ObservePoint does at its very core is we go ahead and run audits and journeys to be able to figure out what fires on the data layer, or what tags and variables fire across your domains. But sometimes there are people who need a little bit more. Like SEO data, or searching for videos, or consent manager links, or those key elements on a page that ObservePoint doesn't necessarily do. So we've created something called the OP custom tag where you're able to go in and be able to customize the data that you want to pull from a particular page. So again, at its core, ObservePoint is a web crawler and we mostly just crawl for those network requests for tags. But you can also create, if you guys are a little bit more technical, or you guys can find somebody on your it team to be able to help you guys find this information, but essentially all you have to do is grab this info. This is a template that we have to be able to create that OP custom tag.

(16:40)
So if you come back to the account and let's just say, for example, let's just say my Southwest audit right here. Actually let's just say this ESPN audit right here. So if I click edit and then if I wanted to run that OP custom tag, I can go ahead and come to 'actions'. So what action does is that it will run this JavaScript every time it hits a certain page. So if I hit 'add action', add an action right here, and then I can hit, and you come down to execute, which is right here. So by adding an action and hitting the action type, being 'execute,' this will allow me to run any type of JavaScript to be able to pull any kind of information I need. So if I come into here and then I have this OP custom tag template, I can go ahead and copy that.

(17:49)
And again, if you're not technical, don't worry about it too much. But somebody who understands JavaScript a little bit better can help you pull the information you need. But this is the template you need to be able to pull that information. So as soon as you do this, and then you go ahead and save the audit and then you run it, then the next time you can go into the audit and it'll show up almost exactly like a regular tag. So you can come into here come into variable summary. So this is after it runs, you'll be able to come into variable summary. And then all the tags will show up on this left-hand column. And then you can just scroll down and search for the OP custom tag that will show up under this vendor's column right here. So that is the general gist of OP custom tags.

(18:48)
And I guess for now I will leave the rest of the time for any questions that anybody has. It looks like Dylan said "the wait field within the journey step, is that a wait before or after the action?" So in the wait step for the journey, for those of you who are wondering what he's talking about. So for 'edit', we go ahead and go to 'actions,' 'add an action', you'll see this, 'wait additional seconds for this action,' so whenever you go ahead and navigate or click on a selector, that wait section, so if I said 10 seconds, that is after the action has been executed. So I execute it, and then I wait 10 seconds and then I can usually go onto the next step if there is another one. So that's the first question.

(19:51)
So Kyle said, "how does Live Connect compare to the Chrome Web Journey extension? Are they both alternatives to achieve the same purpose? Very good question, Kyle. So with Live Connect, Live Connect is usually geared more towards mobile devices. So usually if you have something like a web journey on your desktop or something like that, I would recommend using the web journey manager, because it's much easier to use. Also on top of that, you have to understand the difference between a web journey in Live Connect. Live Connect is like a one-time session, whereas a journey automates the whole process. So once you record it in the web journey extension, it'll save as an actual journey, and then you can set a cadence for like daily, or hourly or something like that. Whereas Live Connect, it's kind of like a one-time thing where you upload that one .har file, or you bring out your device one time and then you click through that, and then that's the end of the session.

(20:57)
Justin said, can you give an example of what the OP custom tag can be used for? Yes. that is a very good question. In my time at ObservePoint using OP custom tag, the biggest thing that people asked for where to find their videos. So a lot of times digital analysts, I didn't know this from before I had to learn this on the job, but I always thought like digital analysts would know exactly where the videos were put, but what I've learned was actually other teams put them in and they have to deal with it later on. So a good example of this is, for example, Justin, I don't know what your particular use case is, but a good one would be for finding certain things that you don't know exactly where they are, but you're responsible for it. For example, like videos, right? So being able to say, "Hey, where are all the videos?" And if your manager comes up to you and says, you need to make sure that all the videos and all the tags, Google heartbeats, and everything like that is running smoothly on all the videos. And you're thinking to yourself, "I don't know where all the videos are!" And so the best way to do that is obviously if, again, if you're not too technical, you can go ahead and get somebody more technical on your team and talk with your consultant and be able to say, "Hey, I need to find where all the videos are across this domain." We can go ahead and set up that OP custom tag, and then we can run it through all your sites and then show you exactly where those are.

(22:22)
And then Mohan said, could you please explain one more time about A/B test use case. So Pam, I believe this question.

Pam Frei: (22:31)
It's mine. So essentially what we can do is, I'll give you an example from our site. We were testing our booking flow. We were testing the option of adding a new page to the booking flow. So the customers were getting an A/B test where they're seeing the booking flow with the extra page, or were they seeing the regular booking flow. So we would be able to then go ahead and set up an Action Set Library for each of those scenarios. And then whichever one was the winning scenario, we could push that Action Set Library to production quickly on the ObservePoint side to test. Also, depends on the testing software you're using for the A/B testing, but the software we use allows us to determine our own experience that we go through. And so you could also set up two ObservePoint journeys, one for the whole journey, with the A ,experience and one for the whole journey, with the B experience. Again, it's up to you to figure out the best use case for you, but that's what I was talking about.

Aaron Cheung: (23:29)
Perfect. Thank you.