Adobe Analytics vs. Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)

It is well suited for everything. I do because my advertising platforms will show me where I'm spending money and where I'm getting clicks, but you don't know anything beyond that. I always have to go into Adobe Analytics to see what those clicks are getting me. Are they actually visiting the website and doing anything we want them to do? And advertising, you can't just spend money without the results. So it allows me to close that loop and show the actions, in some cases, revenue, and the ROI for spending money. What's the return in revenue that we're getting? So I use it for everything. I can't look at the data that's in it. Adobe Analytics, when you live in the world of advertising, the contrary, you said, when would I not use it? So there are some instances where I'll go to a different sales-focused reporting platform or Salesforce reporting. Adobe Analytics is currently in our world at ESRI, but we don't have all that Salesforce data in Adobe Analytics. So that means I don't always go there for that sales-related data. I go into other reporting platforms to see that.

Incentivized

• As mentioned earlier, transactional heavy web assets such as eStores are particularly strong candidates.
• IBM CXA along with other, similar tools, is not set-and-forget. The solution must be well managed in order to deliver value. Purchase of the solution is one thing; driving analytic results is another. If a company's staff are not strong analytical thinkers, CXA will not help. IBM CXA is not just a technology platform - it is a basis to design strong customer touchpoints and interactions. You need to be customer journey design literate to get the best from this.

Incentivized

• It summarizes large complex data better than any other analytics solution I've dealt with without the need for sampling, gives the right level of detail, does the right level of breakdowns, aggregation. I consistently not only use Adobe Analytics, but I use other data sets and compare against Adobe Analytics. And as I go into Adobe Analytics and compare, as long as I've done the query right and the other systems, they're very, very close. And if anything, with a lot of Adobe's newer products, they've gotten more accurate over time. So that's basically, you asked me what I liked about it. I like that it's accurate. I like that I don't have to do a lot of explaining. There's enough explaining in the world of web analytics to have to go back and explain why data's problematic. And so like I said, provided that the implementation is correct, it's a very easy conversation. Even if people may not like the answer.

Incentivized

• Marketing attribution models - capable to deliver an holistic view of the marketing channels performance
• Multisite capabilities : allows to have a Cie view as well as individual site's view
• Unique customer view and Live Profile: we are able to go to the visitor level and therefore use the behavioural data for marketing actions
• Reliability of the data: we have full confidence in the data collected and the rules are clear for us
• Support: available support 24h/7.

• Support. I mentioned this earlier and we don't know what we don't know. Researching the massive amounts of documentation isn't realistic with bandwidth constraints, and our rep getting frustrated with us when we go through what we are seeing is disappointing.
• Education. More please, and designed more towards the "business side". I get with the many many many different implementations (every company is different!), that it's tough, but even a basic of the basics would be nice for situations that everyone is looking at, like the engagement with the merchandising on the home page (or any certain page).

Incentivized

• The new UI is slow, buggy, incomplete, is not intuitive, and has limited support or explanation.
• The demo videos for the new UI showcase features that are not even available in the new UI and support said those features may never be available so they are not sure either why they are shown in the demo videos.
• Tag management is extremely manual leaving a lot of room for human error.
• Support across the board for the legacy UI and new UI are not very helpful. They typically do not take the time to understand the root of your problem and commonly default to the response "that feature is not available". For example, you cannot currently delete reports in the new UI even though there is a delete button available. Support says the feature is not available, so if you want anything deleted you have to submit a list to support and they will delete it for you. This is extremely frustrating when you are creating "test" reports in the new UI and then you have no option to delete them when done.

Incentivized

We need it to discover threats long before they become a loophole in the security ecosystem. Also, it is very much compliant with customer standards and expectations. It provides marketing intelligence through in-depth analysis. Overall, a very good product to gain customer attention and thereby improve market

Incentivized

It is still a best in class analytics platform, but working with IBM contracting has proven to be quite a hassle at times... There are proven pros and cons to each of the major systems and vendors (most I already listed). I always recommend to establish the business questions you are trying to answer, determine which platform answers them best and decide whether it is worth the dollar investment

It is necessary to have a minimum knowledge on tracking tools so you can use the tool on full performance. It is not an introduction tool, so please bear that in mind. Once you got the knowledge you just need a small training on how to create your custom reports, where to find the components you need and how to add them to your dashboard. Then you share your report or create a rule for periodic sharing and it's done. Finally, if you have a lot of data stored the tool might be a little slower but that's ok.

Incentivized

Very easy to implement and use.

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.

Incentivized

Never had any issues

Overall, Adobe's servers seem responsive. Like any
large-scale SAS provider, they can have occasional slowdowns where, I
presume, a node is not available and other servers get bogged down with
the user load. I have noticed this with both large and small data sets
and reports.

On that note, Adobe Analytics can take a long time to run reports and pull various data points, depending on the period of time, number of metrics and segments applied. As you create reports, particularly in Workspace, the data are pulled in real-time while you're creating the report. This can often cause issues while trying to drag more metrics into the interface when certain elements of a table are grayed out because data is being pulled in.The more data points and segments involved, the longer it takes to update. When you look at larger windows of time, it takes even longer. If one were to compare to Google Analytics or one of the open source products like Piwik or Motomo, Adobe seems much slower. However, Adobe also supports far more variables than other web analytics products.

Incentivized

As reports are templated, the system is pretty quick. Sometimes you have to wait a bit for a report to render. Or you might have to re-load the page. But there is no real issue here and the system is on par with other similar systems.

Support for Adobe Analytics is ok, it used to be worse years ago. Now, the technology team at Adobe is way more knowledgeable on the product itself as well as the implementation. They also study your custom implementation and have good knowledge of where your company stands. Dedicated support is something worth considering.

Incentivized

Overall, the level of support is very good and I would say it is a strong asset of the solution. However, you can sometimes feel that there is a difference of level among the support team.

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

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.

Online training is really great. One of the best assets that they have. Lots of great videos, pop quizzes at the end of each module. Fantastic. Other tools have similar features, but not as good.

It is a large effort to implement. Throwing a developer with zero experience with Adobe Analytics with no support is a REALLY BAD IDEA!!! Having experienced developers working as a team is crucial to a strong implementation. I say this because I have experienced both scenarios. I was the only developer on an implementation project and I had no experience with Adobe Analytics. As a result I made many architecturally bad decisions which lead to a rigid fragile implementation that eventually was scraped. It took some hard lessons to learn that Adobe Analytics was not as simple as their sales reps make it sound. Using the Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager made sequential implementations incredibly STRONG. Having a DTM to manage the code was a miracle and a life saver!!! If you plan on doing a big enterprise level implementation, please seriously consider using the Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager!!! it made code maintenance super slick and easy which is super important for a developer!!!

See previous comment: reading and understanding the encyclopedic implementation guide is a must.

I've used Google Analytics, which is probably the most direct competitor to Adobe Analytics, as well as Pendo Analytics, which is a little bit more of an adjacent product. It's more focused on product analytics rather than web analytics. I've also used Localytics, which is a mobile app analytics platform, which is there. In my experience, Adobe Analytics is far more full-featured and rich compared to Google Analytics and Pendo Analytics. Pendo has some interesting features that it offers that Adobe Analytics doesn't, but at an enterprise level, at least, or at a large organization scale, they're not critical features that are necessary. Adobe Analytics's flexibility in ingesting and exporting data makes it well-suited to environments like ours, where we need to merge web analytics data with other datasets we might have. And so that's been very effective for us. Localytics is strictly a mobile analytics platform, so it has some point level advantages, but the fact that Adobe Analytics is able to marry and kind of merge web analytics data with mobile analytics data into one kind of view of the data is a really nice feature that, in my mind, makes it superior to Localytics in general. And its Localytics reporting capabilities are far limited, I would say, from a reporting standpoint. All of the other competitors I've looked at, they're, the reporting capabilities are just not nearly as sophisticated as Adobe Analytics.

Incentivized

IBM Analytics is a great tool for measuring and analyzing web traffic along with consumer behavior to a degree. When compared to other solutions and tools available in the market today, I'd suggest checking out Kissmetrics or even Google Analytics over this tool. Ultimately, it will come down to the end user and if they are comfortable in the environment of the backend and workflows of IBM Digital Analytics.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

This solution can support large amount of data and transaction. The way that user management features are built, it shows it is meant for large organizations.

• I think we're able to quantitatively analyze and report back on activities on our websites, where in the financial services sector, we really haven't been able to report that in the past. And so, as a company that has clutched onto paper as long as it possibly can, it's refreshing to our leadership to be able to report back and say these are exact things that are being done on our website that can lead to increased sales, increased signups, ease of use for our end users, et cetera.

• Using IBM Digital Analytics has allowed us to optimize marketing spend for our clients and provide us the insight to reduce the spend on vendors that are not performing well or not bringing in qualified traffic.
• Using IBM Digital Analytics data to power on-site product recommendations has increased the percentage of total sales from recommendation zones to around 10% compared to around 1% with manually merchandised zones.
• Using IBM's TruePath Funnels to analyze the checkout process for various clients has allowed us to see where visitors are dropping out of the checkout process and make improvements to increase conversion rate.