Adobe acquired Omniture in 2009 and re-branded the platform as SiteCatalyst. It is now part of Adobe Marketing Cloud along with other products such as social marketing, test and targeting, and tag management.
SiteCatalyst is one of the leading vendors in the web analytics category and is particularly strong in combining web analytics with other digital marketing capabilities like audience management and data management.
Adobe Analytics also includes predictive marketing capabilities that help…
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Google Ads
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is Google's pay-per-click online advertising program. With Google Ads users set their budget and choose where their ads appear in search listings, and on partner websites. Google Ads uses cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.
Adobe analytics was decided on above my pay grade, while I am a user I did not decide to solely use this platform as a company. That being said, I have used other platforms and can see why the complexity of Adobe was chosen over the simplicity of Google Analytics.
Not all the platforms above are a direct competitor to Adobe Analytics, as some of them are advertising platforms and not analytics only. Saying that, I think Adobe Analytics is most probably the best out of them all and this is due to Marin having a slightly "older" look and Go…
Adobe analytics has been selected as a platform to be used across a huge company, which tracks the performance of a hundreds of thousands pages with different type of content. It's believed to be the most accurate tool and the support on the side of the platform has been always …
We also use Google Analytics. I still use Google Analytics for evaluating Google Adwords, but use Adobe Analytics for most of my day to day analysis. We chose Adobe analytics because we were using some other Adobe products that this ties into nicely. We also wanted better ways …
Google Ads
Verified User
Executive
Chose Google Ads
Bing Ads is an indirect competitor to AdWords, which does much of the same as AdWords (with a reduced level of detail) on Bing searches. We mainly used Bing Ads to complement AdWords activity, meaning, if we have saturated the market via Google, we will then use Bing Ads to get …
Maybe for a small company with small products for their thing, Adobe may be bit of an implementation too much for them, but when it comes to companies like us, like a life sciences or large enterprises and even small enterprises, but with more products, more analysis that they need to make their marketing experience better, maybe Adobe product is the best suitable.
Google Ads is a useful advertising tool to build brand exposure and generate lead volumes for your chosen product. Whilst it can be costly at times due to competitor bidding strategies and requires constant monitoring to ensure campaigns perform as expected, it typically provides the desired quality and quantity of leads for custom budgets.
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.
Automated targeting via Smart Shopping campaign. It's one of the best campaign types in Google Ads. In the beginning, you may see lower revenue and ROAS, but once you give some meaningful time to your campaign, it is most likely to perform well.
Smart bidding strategies: Google Ads has developed some really great bidding strategies such as maximizing conversion and maximizing conversion with ROAS settings. Based on one's requirement and their goal with revenue and target ROAS, they can choose the appropriate bidding strategy.
Reporting: A business owner and advertising must know about their audiences, how their campaigns have been performing, what's working and what's not, and for that reason, powerful, effective reporting is needed, and Google Ads provides rich details reporting that covers almost every aspect of a business.
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).
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.
I think Google Ads is good for getting your company out there and becoming more visible to potential customers in general. However, for specific product launches, social media advertising might be a better fit. Also, our user base is younger so social media is a better channel for our target audience.
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.
This is more of a subjective rating, because I think it can be increased with how much our ad spend is. The more of an ad spend, the more visibility we can get, and therefore all features can climb. With an overall larger presence the usability is that where we can get messages out quick, and that's the main thing we try to do with our campaigns.
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.
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
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.
We have not yet had an account rep who hasn't tried to bully me or other employees to raise our budgets. At the same time, several years ago, one attempted to help refine our ads and ended up changing the ads to be something we were not affiliated with
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.
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.
Google Analytics comes across more of a reporting tool whereas Adobe Analytics is more of an Enterprise level analytics tool. Contentsquare provides some traffic and flow capabilities but not to the same level as Adobe Analytics. However, Contentsquare's major advantage is its Zoning (Heatmapping), Impact Quantification and Find 'n' Fix modules; none of which are knowingly available in Adobe Analytics.
Our agency invests heavily in Google Ads (particularly paid search advertising) on behalf of our clients relative to competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo because Google is the top search engine in the world. Google collects the most search data which enables the company to improve its AI to drive better performance for agencies and brands. As such, our paid search and app install campaigns always start with Google. If a client has a large budget, we will allocate media dollars to other search engines, but in some cases, the entire search budget goes to Google because we see the best returns.
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.
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.
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
Adobe Analytics impacts nearly every aspect of a billion plus dollar revenue eCommerce business. From measuring the impact of new build features to marketing campaigns.
We are saving substantial money and resource effort by consolidating all of our properties to Adobe Analytics from alternative solutions, at which point we will finally be able to report on Total Digital, rather than disparate reports.
We support experimentation on every platform and the performance is only known through Adobe Analytics tagging.
Google Ads is often one of our highest ROI channels, especially when you factor in branded ads.
Depending on the stage your business is in, search ads can be really powerful from an ROI perspective, providing an investment with a very high spend cap.
If you do not manage the campaigns well though, you can quickly spend a lot of money on nothing. So make sure someone is keeping an eye on your account.
