Solution Design Reference (SDR)

One of the most popular types of analytics implementation documentation is the Solution Design Reference or SDR. The SDR is commonly used to:

• Show different teams what data is being collected within the digital analytics tool

• Compare different analytics implementations to determine if they are using the same data points consistently across the organization

• Assist with checking data quality

Unfortunately, the SDR is often used in place of having a robust list of business requirements. This is not ideal since the SDR only shows you what you are tracking, not why. This is why Apollo defers to the use of business requirements since this facilitates better communication between the analytics team and its business stakeholders. Nevertheless, the most recent version of the SDR can always be viewed or exported by Apollo in the Document > Documentation screen.

Viewing the SDR

On the Documentation screen you can see the list of variables in your implementation, along with any associated vendor configurations.

You can expand details for any variable by selecting the caret:

Downloading the SDR

Since Apollo has all information about the analytics implementation in its database, it can easily generate a real-time, updated SDR. To download the SDR, go to the Document > Data Destination tab and click to download the SDR as a spreadsheet file:

This file can then be opened using any spreadsheet tool. Keep in mind that subsequent changes in Apollo will result in changes to the SDR, so be sure to always download the latest SDR from Apollo when sharing with others and consider using a date in the file name to see when the SDR was downloaded. Here is an example of the SDR in spreadsheet format: