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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SAS Viya
Score 6.9 out of 10
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An end-to-end platform for AI, data science, and analytics, used for modeling, as well as management and deployment of AI models.
Adobe Analytics is better than some other tools as it feels better set up for actual "analysis", rather than simply "reporting". The power of Workspace allows you to drag 'n' drop at ease which makes you are far more in control of your own analysis/discovery/exploration. However, regards the final reports and dashboards' look 'n' feel the Workspace PDF output is lacking visually compared to other products like Google's Looker. To engage with less technical end users sometimes Looker feels the better, more polished option.
SAS Advanced Analytics excels with projects that have at least 3 parts. The first part is the ability to address and compare different modeling types. Suppose you are an analyst interested in predicting home prices or whether an individual will reapply for unemployment insurance. There are lots of model types that could work for these two situations. SAS Advanced Analytics makes it easy (although not as easy as SAS Enterprise Miner) to compare the performance of different modeling types, such as comparing support vector machines with random forest models. A second scenario that SAS Advanced Analytics does a good job at is making the analysis reproducible. By showing the lineage of analyses, another analyst is able to follow the work of the previous analyst. This is a huge advantage for individuals working in corporations or governments. The third area SAS Advanced Analytics is useful is in text analytics. The field is huge now, and I haven't come across a software that makes text analytics as easy as SAS Advanced Analytics.
They've been really an industry standard tool in analytics for a long, long time. They've got the trusted brand and the reputation, a wonderful community behind it. It is always nice, having that level of support where you can meet other practitioners. It's a great benefit because I can meet other people who have already pushed the tool a lot farther than I have. And it's a great place to get ideas in that way. We came from a world where we were running on a homegrown system that we'd use to do click tracking. You get some advantages on that of the customization, but losing out on community of support was one of the big reasons why we decided to move beyond that and implement Adobe Analytics instead.
Complex Survey Analysis- SAS is a great resource if you need to analyze complex survey data. One can easily write code for this by inserting (survey) in front of the procedure with the weight, cluster, and strata variables. (ex: surveyfreq)
Modeling/ Graphing- SAS creates clean and easy to understand graphs and models which take visual data to the next level.
Support- There is a large SAS Advanced analytics online support in place. It is easy to find help on many procedures that you will use in this software.
Most of the problems that Adobe Analytics as of now is having, it is getting addressed in a newer tool called Web Desk DK from implementation. They are already addressing that issue with the new tool and also the time data with the customer general analytics. So there is something not in workspace analysis and this is what they're addressing in customer general analytics. Which is good.
SAS Analytics does not have very good graphic capabilities. Their advanced graphics packages are expensive, and still not very appealing or intuitive to customize.
SAS Analytics is not as up-to-date when it comes to advanced analytical techniques as R or other open-source analytics packages.
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.
Not only does SAS become easier to use as the user gets more familiar with its capabilities, but the customer service is excellent. Any issues with SAS and their technical team is either contacting the user via email, chat, text, WebEx, or phone. They have power users that have years of experience with SAS there to help with any issue.
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.
If SAS Enterprise Guide is utilized any beginning user will be able to shorten the learning curve. This is allow the user a plethora of basic capabilities until they can utilize coding to expand their needs in manipulating and presenting data. SAS is also dedicated to expanding this environment so it is ever growing.
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.
SAS probably has the most market saturation out of all of the analytics software worldwide. They are in every industry and they are knowledgable about every industry. They are always available to take questions, solve issues, and discuss a company's needs. A company that buys SAS software has a dedicated representative that is there for all of their needs.
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
Although nothing is perfect, SAS is almost there. The software can handle billions of rows of data without a glitch and runs at a quick pace regardless of what the user wants to perform. SAS products are made to handle data so performance is of their utmost important. The software is created to run things as efficiently as SAS software can to maximize performance.
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.
SAS is generally known for good support that's one of the main reasons to justify the cost of having SAS licenses within our organization is knowing that customer support is just a quick phone call away. I've usually had good experiences with the SAS customer support team it's one of the ways in which the company stands out in my view.
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
SAS has regional and national conferences that are dedicated to expanding users' knowledge of the software and showing them what changes and additions they are making to the software. There are user groups in most of the major cities that also provide multi-day seminars that focus on specific topics for education. If online training isn't the best way for the user, there is ample in-person training available.
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 are online videos, live classes, and resource material which makes training very easy to access. However, nothing is circumstantial so applying your training can get tricky if the user is performing complex tasks. When purchasing software, SAS will also allocate education credits so the user(s) can access classes and material online to help expand their knowledge.
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.
Ask as many questions you can before the install to understand the process. Since a third party does the installation your company is sort of a passanger and it is easy to get lost in the process. It also helps to have all users and IT support involved in the install to help increase the knowledge as to how SAS runs and what it needs to perform correctly.
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 had major use of SAS in forecasting where it doesn't require high level of coding knowledge and which has highly efficient models built in which can give good results on forecasts without lot of manual intervention. This tool was designed specifically for forecasting and hence was always a better choice compared to other tools.
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.
It all depends on the type of SAS product the user has. Scaleability differs from product to product, and if the user has SAS Office Analytics the scaleability is quite robust. This software will satisfy the majority of the company's analytic needs for years to come. In addition, if SAS is not meeting the users needs the company can easily find SAS solutions that will.
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
I like to think it's positive. It's a very steep learning curve, so we do face a lot of challenges with adoption inside of the companies. My team and I evangelize this and also who's in charge of data and advanced analytics, but it's very hard to leverage that with typical business analysis people. These are people who live their life in Excel and SQL and Power BI. They just use this very occasionally and by only looking at that sort of aggregate data, they miss out on behavior and what actually happens in execution. And because it's such a steep learning curve, we do have a challenge pushing it in there.
SAS Advanced Analytics is not the cheapest software on the market. The overall cost was weighed against free, open-source software tools. The overall return, I think, was quite positive because SAS Advanced Analytics saves enormous amounts of time compared to the open-source software tools.
At first, adopting SAS Advanced Analytics was a negative return because it took time for individuals to change their analytics habits and adjust to superior tools available at their discretion.
SAS Advanced Analytics has replaced the need to hire less expensive R or Python programmers. So, although the software requires an initial expensive upfront investment, the ease of use makes it so that other areas of expenditure save money.
