Likelihood to Recommend Adobe Analytics is better than some other tools as it feels better set up for actual "analysis", rather than simply "reporting". The power of Workspace allows you to drag 'n' drop at ease which makes you are far more in control of your own analysis/discovery/exploration. However, regards the final reports and dashboards' look 'n' feel the Workspace PDF output is lacking visually compared to other products like Google's Looker. To engage with less technical end users sometimes Looker feels the better, more polished option.
Read full review Google Tag Manager is well suited when the marketer or marketing team does not work closely with the developers. In this scenario, it means that the marketer can deploy 3rd party tools such as live chat widgets, advertising pixels, and much more themselves in a timely manner. Google Tag Manager may be less relevant in an organization where the marketer is also the developer or has a strong development background, where they can implement the 3rd party tags directly on the site when they need. But even in this instance, there's still great benefit in using Google Tag Manager.
Read full review Pros They've been really an industry standard tool in analytics for a long, long time. They've got the trusted brand and the reputation, a wonderful community behind it. It is always nice, having that level of support where you can meet other practitioners. It's a great benefit because I can meet other people who have already pushed the tool a lot farther than I have. And it's a great place to get ideas in that way. We came from a world where we were running on a homegrown system that we'd use to do click tracking. You get some advantages on that of the customization, but losing out on community of support was one of the big reasons why we decided to move beyond that and implement Adobe Analytics instead. Read full review Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it. Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger). Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks. Read full review Cons Most of the problems that Adobe Analytics as of now is having, it is getting addressed in a newer tool called Web Desk DK from implementation. They are already addressing that issue with the new tool and also the time data with the customer general analytics. So there is something not in workspace analysis and this is what they're addressing in customer general analytics. Which is good. Read full review There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list. Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We've found multiple uses for Adobe Analytics in our organization. Each department analyzes the data they need and creates actionables based off of that data. For E-Commerce, we're constantly using data to analyze user engagement, website performance and evaluate ROI.
Read full review Google Tag Manager makes tracking traffic to our websites effortless, which enables our developers to focus on other tasks. Setting up a new instance takes only minutes and additional scripts can be added/modified without touching the source code of a site in production. This enables our marketing directors to coordinate tests and experiments with minimal effort.
Read full review Usability Sometimes the processing times are very long. I have had reports or dashboards time out multiple times during presentations. It could be improved. It is understandable since there is a huge data set that the tool is processing before showing anything, however for a company that large they should invest in optimizing processing times.
Read full review Google Tag Manager is the definition of a learning curve. At the beginning, you can barely do the minimum and it can seem questionable as to why you would use it. However, as users begin to learn its offerings and see how it can do much more, they will have a moment where GTM becomes a tool that empowers their ability to track and efficiently collect data for important business questions.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I do not ever recall a time when Adobe Analytics was unavailable to me to use in the 8 or so years I have been an end user of the product. My most-used day-to-day analytics tool Parse.ly however, generally has a multiple hours planned offline maintenance every two to four weeks, and sometimes has issues collecting realtime analytics that last anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour, and happen anywhere between 1 to 5 times a month.
Read full review Performance Again, no issues here. Performance within the day updates hourly. other reports are updated overnight and available to access by the next morning. Pages load quickly, the site navigates easily and the UX is quite straightforward to get command over. On this front, I give Adobe kudos for building a great experience to work within
Read full review Support Rating I barely see any communication from Adobe Analytics. The content on the web is also not that great or easy to read. I would recommend a better communication about the product and the new addons information to come to its user by a better mean.
Read full review Read full review In-Person Training It was a one-day training several years ago that cost the organization several thousand dollars. There were only about 10 people in the training class. Adobe tried to cram so much information into that one-day class that none of our users felt like they really learned anything helpful from the experience. Follow-up training is too expensive
Read full review Online Training The online training for Adobe SiteCatalyst consists of short product videos. These are ok, but only go so far. For a while Adobe charged a fee for this, but recently made these available for free. There are many great blog posts that help users learn how to apply the product as well.
Read full review I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.
Read full review Implementation Rating One of the benefits and obstacles to successfully using Adobe Analytics is a great / more accurate implementation, make sure your analytics group is intimate with the details of the implementation and that the requirements are driven by the business.
Read full review Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I think Adobe's been around longer as a product but Tealium, from when I did research, it has auto-tagging. So one of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm rolling out new features, and whether it's an app or a website, is that I have to go speak with our metrics team or tagging team and we have to come up with these different strategies. Okay, how are we gonna tag it? What are we going to name it? It just seems like a lot of wasted time in my opinion. I want to track everything. I want to know every single thing these people are doing. We shouldn't have to have this conversation if we tag this, you might not have time to tag this right away for MVP. It's like that to me right now. That shouldn't even be a conversation. I should be able to release a feature, I should be able to just automatically go pull reports on that. And just figure out exactly what they were doing.
Read full review We moved to GTM from a standard
Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has been worth it because it helps us understand at a more fundamental level how our tracking works and gives us a lot more control over what we track and how.
Read full review Contract Terms and Pricing Model Adobe Analytics is relatively affordable compared to other tools, given it provides a range of flexible variables to use that I have not found in any other tools so far. It is worth investing in if your company is medium or large-sized and brings a steady flow of revenue. For small companies, it can be overpriced.
Read full review Scalability My organization uses Adobe Analytics across a multitude of brand portfolios. Each brand has multiple websites, mobile apps and some even have connected TV apps/channels on Roku and similar devices. Adobe can handle the multitude of properties that have simple, small(ish) websites and the larger brand properties that include web, mobile and connected TVs/OTT devices.
Each of those larger brands has multiple categories and channels to keep track of. We can see the data by channel/device or aggregate all the data together. This gives our executive teams the full picture and the departmental teams the view they need to see their own performance.
Read full review Professional Services The professional services team is one of the best teams for complex adobe analytics implementations, especially for clients having multiple website and mobile applications. However, the cost of professional services is a bit high which makes few clients opt out of it, but for large scale implementations they are very helpful
Read full review Return on Investment I like to think it's positive. It's a very steep learning curve, so we do face a lot of challenges with adoption inside of the companies. My team and I evangelize this and also who's in charge of data and advanced analytics, but it's very hard to leverage that with typical business analysis people. These are people who live their life in Excel and SQL and Power BI. They just use this very occasionally and by only looking at that sort of aggregate data, they miss out on behavior and what actually happens in execution. And because it's such a steep learning curve, we do have a challenge pushing it in there. Read full review GTM is very useful to determine if a particular element on the site is useful (i.e. is it being watched, is it being clicked, does it help customers navigate through more pages). As an SEO person, I can use this information to decide what to optimize for but also to track progress and see improvements in engagement. With the use of Google Tag Manager, I was able to easily inject an A/B testing tool which lead to several improvements in lead generation. Read full review ScreenShots