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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Sisense
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Sisense is a BI software and analytics platform. With what the vendor calls their In-Chip™ and Single Stack™ technologies, users have access to a comprehensive tool to analyze and visualize large, disparate data sets without IT resources.
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.
I believe Sisense is perfectly suited for any organization of any size that have access to the proper resources, as the tool is very expensive. The data connectors come in all shapes and sizes out of the box, which allows a great deal of data control within the ElastiCubes. Additionally, while the platform only runs on Windows platforms, the web application can be accessed on any client: mobile, Apple, Windows, etc. This allows a much more flexible user experience, resulting in data and dashboards reaching further than any other tool.
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.
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.
The usability of the application on mobile devices needs some improvement, especially navigation and filtering.
Dashboards that are created by multiple users can be a bit of a hassle to share by Admins.
If you need to embed dashboards into your website, you are require to buy a license separate from the user and platform license. This is a norm on most BI visualization tools, but Sisense can seem a bit on the high side, cost-wide.
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 the business and myself as a user has come to rely on SiSense as a dashboarding and quick ad-hoc reporting tool. I am hoping to integrate SiSense dashboards into more parts of the business in the future. We have reduced our report turn-around time for the most part from hours/days to minutes and in some cases almost the speed of thought. Reports are also easier on the eye and more easily distributed. I would also like to say that the support and professionalism from the SiSense team has been excellent.
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.
New V5 is ground floor of an exciting collection of possibilities. Weekly Sisense developers come up with new functionality that they share with us in their forums. The move to HTML5 has been pleasing in that widgets auto size themselves into appropriate forms in the board but everyone of them can be popped out to full page size to be looked at in more detail
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.
There are very few situations when there is unexpected downtime. Mostly during development, new dashboard implementation and during upgrades. other then that there were very few crashes.
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
SiSense is usually performing better then other solutions even if going for complex reports/dashboards(of course within reasonable frames). I haven't noticed any bad influence on other systems, usually if something happens it stays within SiSense.
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.
SiSense's support ninjas are very knowledgeable and are exceptionally responsive. So far, all of the issues we ran into were resolved within minimum time. My sense of dealing with the support staff at SiSense is that they are very focused on not just answering your immediate question, but also to delve into the cause of the matter.
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
Easy and free training that allowed us quickly understand basics in SiSense and start using them. More advanced features requires some browsing through SiSense forums, but there is always support to help, and SiSense support is one of the best whith which I worked so far.
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.
Many examples, videos and scenarios which you try on your own right away. This combined with in-person training gives you enough to utilize most of SiSense's power.
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.
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.
1) Easy to use, really, there is nothing too much to say. The set up is easy and not confusing. You can use it internally or externally.
2) Customer Service, having spoken to various product reps from similar industry. Sisense rep provides you with the best support to get started, and it is really appreciated.
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
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.
