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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Looker Studio
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Looker Studio is a data visualization platform that transforms data into meaningful presentations and dashboards with customized reporting tools.
Clients usually select Adobe Analytics because it suits them better than the alternatives and they want more customisation than GA4 offers. Also because they might be with Adobe Experience Cloud for a few other things like tag management, A/B testing, audience manager, campaign …
Adobe analytics integrates well with its other digital marketing tools. The interface is very slick and easy to navigate.
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Director
Chose Adobe Analytics
There are some usability features that we no longer have to think about in Adobe Analytics. Of course, Google Analytics can accomplish a lot as a free plug-and-play tool, but it is also without proper support. I've had to go without any insight into our website for 1-2 days …
Adobe Analytics is a more sophisticated tool than Google Analytics, especially because of its integration with other Adobe products. While Google Analytics is easier to use, implement, and train others on, specific organizations prefer Adobe Analytics because of data privacy …
Compared with Tableau and Power BI, I would say Google Data Studio is fairly placed or a pretty decent tool. We need to understand, this is a free tool and it will have its own limitations - apart from that this is a pretty decent tool compared to the biggies in the market.
Honestly, because Adobe Analytics is so customizable, I found that it is very well-suited for almost any type of web digital experience tracking of behavioral analytics. It has a very robust mech architecture for any type of e-commerce platform. But it is extensible and is easily adaptable to other circumstances. For example, in our university situation, we've been able to use it for student portal experience tracking, how well they are interacting, interfacing with our internal sites, and how well they are working with our task submission processes. But it does a great job of managing all aspects of the key journeys, especially from a marketing perspective. So while it might not be as out-of-the-box for some of those other alternative use cases outside of marketing, it's extensible and customizable enough that it's worked really well and met our needs.
Visualizing cross-channel campaign performance can blend data from a few different sources to compare performance metrics like spend, clicks, and conversions side-by-side in a single view, which helps in quick budget reallocation decisions. When dealing with massive volumes of data (millions of rows) or highly complex queries, Looker Studio dashboards can become slow, laggy, or even crash. Performance issues are a frequent complaint when working with large datasets, making it unsuitable for enterprise-level companies
Within my role of advertising, I can come in, and I can see I'm paying for visitors, paying to drive people to the website. So I can see the differences in my different traffic sources, whether that's a Google search campaign or a Facebook social campaign. I can measure the quality of that traffic and see what they're doing, whether they're bouncing right away and leaving the website, or spending more or less time on the website. And whether they're taking the actions. My ad campaign is focused on filling out forms, and ultimately, that's it. Just measure and see if my campaigns are successful or not.
Breath of data - the number of ways to interrogate the data is endless, and the options to view metrics alongside each other make for comprehensive datasets.
Data visualisation and customisation - the options for presenting data and separating out across pages allow for clean visuals and segmented information.
Easy shareability/usability - a quick and simple tool to introduce colleagues to, and easy to grant access for them to be able to view the data, without having to understand the setup itself.
I think the biggest room for improvement is performance. When I go in certain times of the day or for certain clients, it's slow and it won't load the reports that I need. And as a result, needing to answer a question where you normally have the expectation of it being a near real-time answer that you get when you have to wait for reports to load or you have to wait because the reports can't load at all. It's a really unfortunate thing. It's a big problem actually. So I'd say that's one area of improvement. It's just improving the performance of the reports so that they'll load consistently all the time quickly and effectively.
It needs better handling of complex logic. We often need workarounds to perform complex custom calculations, and it can be really unpleasant at times.
Felt it got slow with a larger data set, and in one minor report, we had to set up time filters so that calculations during spikes could be traced more quickly.
Compare to competition they need to improve with notification things.
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
It is the simplest and least expensive way for us to automate our reporting at this time. I like the ability to customize literally everything about each report, and the ability to send out reports automatically in emails. The only issue we have been having recently is a technical glitch in the automatic email report. Sadly, there is almost no support for this tool from Google, but is also free, so that is important to take into consideration
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.
Looker Studio is easy to use, and it offers a sufficient variety of predefined visualizations to choose from. It's easy for us, and anyone can set up basic reporting without extensive data visualization skills. The interface layout is easy to understand, and it doesn't take long to get used to.
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
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.
I give it a lower support rating because it seems like our Dev team hasn't gotten the support they need to set up our database to connect. Seems like we hit a roadblock and the project got put on pause for dev. That sucks for me because it is harder to get the dev team to focus on it if they don't get the help they need to set it up.
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.
We evaluated and we currently use Mixpanel and we have Google Analytics on a couple of our properties. And honestly, once you get the hang of the Adobe Analytics workspace, the other products really don't stack up against it because the segmentation and the ability to create reports pretty rapidly are invaluable.
Looker Studio is far easier to implement, stand up, and learn. The interface is simpler and user-friendly for various levels of data visualization/analysis knowledge and experience. The biggest benefit of Looker Studio, however, is its ease of connection to GA data and speed. Furthermore, since it is an online program/tool, it requires less CPU/battery/storage on the user's device.
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.
