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 Tag Manager
Score 8.8 out of 10
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From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps, thus gaining the benefits of data standardization and speed of deployment. Google touts an agency friendly system with multiple user access, and tools to improve tags performance like debugging, and rules, macros or automated tag firing. The Google Tag Manager also integrates with Google product DoubleClick. Moreover, Google Tag Manager is…
Adobe Analytics has a more modern and friendlier user interface and it's easier to use for me. Google analytics has better compatibility with other Google products
Adobe analytics is more powerful than the free version of Google Analytics. One key difference is that Adobe provides user and session ids whereas Google Analytics does not by default.
Google Tag Manager is used hand in hand with Google analytics. I do favor Adobe Analytics over Google's free version, though I have not used Analytics 360. Adobe does not have any limitations on the number of dimensions applied to a metric. This can be stunting when trying to …
We actually many times end up implementing a few tracking tools because each marketing department has their way of doing things so we don't pick this over that but use it in addition based on client reqs.
Where it's particularly well suited, figuring out just the ins and outs of how we drive traffic to certain editorial articles that we're using. That Word Of The Year was a good example of that. We have a team of lexicographers that a few times a year put out collections of new entries. The thing about a dictionary is even in the old days when it was just print dictionaries, the day it goes into print is the day it starts going out of date. It really just has to constantly be updated. So we have a lot of good content that comes from the lexicographers team about which words are getting updates and why that is. We try to put some thought based on influence and how they organize their queue. If they find words that are particularly high volume, that might be a good reason to kind of get that up in the work queue, relative to where something else might be. For example, I know the team got really excited recently. Only the kind of thing a lexicographer can get excited about, but the word "at" can now be a verb because of all the use in Twitter of "Don't at me." So they added a separate entry for "at" to be a verb. That's just one of those words that you never even think about. So they got real jazzed about it. So with using the tool, we love using it to spark ideas and to dig up ideas. It's testing our own performance. For example, we had to make some changes to our crossword last year, so we were keeping a very close eye on session duration and how long people were taking. And that time on duration, Adobe Analytics has it set up in the reporting. You can do it kind of bucketed into groups or you kind of run your straight average, which is helpful because that sort of data, you always have some wonky outliers that can skew it. So I find it really helpful to be able to show that distribution because if you take something like our crossword puzzle and games, that's something where we hope people can come play word games and learn, but obviously there are ads going along the side, too. We want to maximize that time. We use the tool to see if we've made these changes - is time going up or down - and we can adjust based on that.
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.
Reporting-wise, I think Adobe Analytics workspace analysis is a very powerful tool in terms of reporting. It provides very good insights and this is well integrated with the other Adobe products like Target Audience Manager and the content creation. So it's a good product to use.
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.
So the first con is that the experimentation reporting is sort of lacking, right? So it's just the very standard significance calculation, but you don't get to do the same thing for segments. So if you segment it, you will also segment the amount of users that entered that data. So we want to know actually from all of those, okay, what does this segment do? Not just reduce the whole result to that segment.
The second one is that it's very complicated to implement custom tracking for each experiment. If you need that, you need to go back to the tag manager convince someone in there to put your tag and approve it and launch it. So customizability is a blessing and a curse.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
A ton. So when I first started with Adobe Analytics, our analytics team only had one tag per media channel with no additional breakdowns available within the tag. So a lot of the parameters were very redundant saying the same things. We just weren't getting a lot of the support that we needed. So I had to work with each of our channel teams and develop a taxonomy for our tags to tell us our main funding sources, our act, our AC paid channels, and their sub-channel tactics. So we now have a very granular view of marketing in Adobe Analytics that has allowed us to ask for incremental funding. We're hitting global RevPAR targets and we're able to use that data and supplement where there's risk and need elsewhere in the company. So it's been super cool.
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.
