Adobe Analytics vs. Google Universal Analytics (discontinued) vs. Keynote Systems (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

I think this is a great platform as long as there is a dedicated team which is going to spend reviewing the data and also taking out insights from it, making it beneficial. It was well suited for me when working with a client that had a very large amount of traffic, with a large range of complex products on offer. This tool allowed us to be able to do more with the data and segmenting it more which ultimately drove our relationship forward, but also the results that we saw

It is totally suited for start ups that are developing an app. With Keynote they will be able to test it and to have some feedback about the bugs that it may have, even before they launch it. It will help you have a better product once it's launched.

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

• It is an excellent cloud analytics platform that is easy to install and configure and easy to deploy and use, allowing us to measure web traffic and other tools.
• It is an entirely online tool; it does not take up hard disk space like other desktop tools.
• Since this tool is draggable, Google is constantly adding more features.
• Even beginners who do not have a custom dashboard can get information. If there is a problem somewhere on the site that needs to be investigated, Google Analytics 360 will notify you.

Incentivized

• User simulation
• Multidevice test
• Great monitorization of your app's performance

Incentivized

• 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

• As far as I can tell, this is the ultimate large scale analytics platform. It does so much and can be a very powerful tool. Maybe it's overwhelming for newbies, but that's kinda what the pro Google consultations are for.
• Although I've never been personally responsible for paying the GA 360 bills, I know it's very pricey ($150K/year last I checked). If your business is managing a lot of high-traffic sites, and maybe you resell other Google services, then it's probably worth it for the dashboard and integration. So... it's expensive, and by definition, not for everyone.

Incentivized

• It's difficult to use it if you are not an expert
• The code is difficult to implement depending on the format

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

I believe that once Google Analytics Premium releases some additional eCommerce capabilities, it will be the best tool on the market for multi-site customers. Google does an amazing job of fully vetting out new features and functionality before releasing them publicly, so I have found very few issues with the functionality and usability of the tool. Some of the other big players in the industry are too quick to release new features, and they are often riddled with bugs and defects. I know that when I set something up with Google Analytics Premium, I'm getting a reliable, strong product that will deliver what it promises.

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

Google Analytics Premium has a very easy to use and intuitive User Interface. It's easy to find anything you are looking for and apply different segments to reports on the fly. This is very important especially if you are doing report comparisons. It's also an aesthetically pleasing design, making the general experience pleasant.

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

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

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

• Everyday support is primarily through chat and email with the centralized, general team. Its as you would envision with an anonymous individual attempting to figure from "page one." Often responses are later in the day or next day.
• At first signing, one account person is assigned along with an initial individual to assist in onboarding. There's an interview of the goals with GA360, but the provided deliverable document is limited in the review of one site. Also, after delivery of the onboarding document, you are left with an account individual who is looking for expanded vertical integration with other Google products.

Incentivized

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.

There is a ton of information online about Google Analytics, but Google Analytics Premium users will have dedicated support and training from Google or an Authorized Reseller.

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!!!

If you already have the basic version of GA installed, "getting" GA Premium happens immediately through a virtual flipping of the switch - no need to re-implement. You'll want to expand your use of custom dimensions and metrics (you get 10x the amount with Premium). Ideally, you'll be using a tag management solution to talk with GA Premium, in concert with implementing a dataLayer (to note, Google's Tag Manager platform is covered under the same GA Premium SLA, and it's free). There are some welcomed "configurations" with GA Premium, such as integrating with DoubleClick products, activating data driven attribution models, and building roll-up executive reports - but all of these are easy point and click solutions. In comparison with any other enterprise analytics solution, implementing GA and GA Premium is traditionally easier and more flexible. And if you have any trouble or need an extra set of hands for implementation, GA Certified Partners like LunaMetrics can help

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

Since our data is on Bigquery it is very easy for us to connect our database to this platform which is very challenging for us to connect the data integration part to other platforms so this is the primary reason for us to choose this platform. The second reason to choose this is that this platform will solve our problems of multiple departments of product, marketing, business, and analytics rather than choosing separate platforms for different departments

We used Keynote Systems because it's easier to use it by yourself and you can prepare your own app and do the testing with the target you are addressing it to.

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

• 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.

• It helps me understand which social media platforms are most successful for me - which I should focus on and which I might want to focus less on.
• I can also see which blog posts people are reading - so I know which topics resonate most. I can write more of those, hopefully gaining more visitors.

Incentivized

• It helped us to find some critical errors before we launched it
• We launched the final version with a great feedback

Incentivized