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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Tableau Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center, or it can be deployed on a public cloud.
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.
Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.
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.
It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server
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.
Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with
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.
It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.
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.
Tableau Server is unbeatable at creating easy to use, interactive dashboards for busy executives. The software also saves time for the busy analyst that is tired of always using Excel. Tableau Server is a head and shoulders improvement over Excel.
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.
Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues
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
While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.
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.
We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer
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
In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.
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.
The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.
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.
Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either
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.
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
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.
Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
There are some significant setup for the server product.
Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.
