Adobe Analytics vs. Smartlook

It is well suited for everything. I do because my advertising platforms will show me where I'm spending money and where I'm getting clicks, but you don't know anything beyond that. I always have to go into Adobe Analytics to see what those clicks are getting me. Are they actually visiting the website and doing anything we want them to do? And advertising, you can't just spend money without the results. So it allows me to close that loop and show the actions, in some cases, revenue, and the ROI for spending money. What's the return in revenue that we're getting? So I use it for everything. I can't look at the data that's in it. Adobe Analytics, when you live in the world of advertising, the contrary, you said, when would I not use it? So there are some instances where I'll go to a different sales-focused reporting platform or Salesforce reporting. Adobe Analytics is currently in our world at ESRI, but we don't have all that Salesforce data in Adobe Analytics. So that means I don't always go there for that sales-related data. I go into other reporting platforms to see that.

Incentivized

Smartlook is best for screen recordings. Especially when you are running MVPs. However, its pricing is very high. If your daily visitors are too much then either you will have to lose many of your recordings or you will have to pay too much money.

Incentivized

• It summarizes large complex data better than any other analytics solution I've dealt with without the need for sampling, gives the right level of detail, does the right level of breakdowns, aggregation. I consistently not only use Adobe Analytics, but I use other data sets and compare against Adobe Analytics. And as I go into Adobe Analytics and compare, as long as I've done the query right and the other systems, they're very, very close. And if anything, with a lot of Adobe's newer products, they've gotten more accurate over time. So that's basically, you asked me what I liked about it. I like that it's accurate. I like that I don't have to do a lot of explaining. There's enough explaining in the world of web analytics to have to go back and explain why data's problematic. And so like I said, provided that the implementation is correct, it's a very easy conversation. Even if people may not like the answer.

Incentivized

• Funnels are both easy to configure yet comprehensive enough to detect complicated customer journeys.
• Real-time recording provides exceptional insights to our design & engineering teams.
• Session recording is surprisingly lightweight and seems to cause no substantial performance degradation for our customers.

Incentivized

• Support. I mentioned this earlier and we don't know what we don't know. Researching the massive amounts of documentation isn't realistic with bandwidth constraints, and our rep getting frustrated with us when we go through what we are seeing is disappointing.
• Education. More please, and designed more towards the "business side". I get with the many many many different implementations (every company is different!), that it's tough, but even a basic of the basics would be nice for situations that everyone is looking at, like the engagement with the merchandising on the home page (or any certain page).

Incentivized

• Events -- but I think this is something that we could improve ourselves in our system.
• Create some suggestions for funnels and heatmaps.
• Give general insights for a certain period of time, e.g. from Oct. 7th to 12th, 75 users left the checkout step and 60% of them left due to a payment issue. IDK just bringing some ideas!
• Send an e-mail with main insights.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

As my ratings show, I have been absolutely delighted with Smartlook in terms of usability, cost, support, and its benefit to our organization. I have given it such high ratings because I think it has really benefitted our organization and I think it could do the same for other companies too.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Smartlook is very intuitive and simple for an average programmer (I don't know if it will be as simple for a normal user). We have never had to resort to looking for information on the web or ask for help for something we didn't understand or didn't work as expected.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Overall, Adobe's servers seem responsive. Like any
large-scale SAS provider, they can have occasional slowdowns where, I
presume, a node is not available and other servers get bogged down with
the user load. I have noticed this with both large and small data sets
and reports.

On that note, Adobe Analytics can take a long time to run reports and pull various data points, depending on the period of time, number of metrics and segments applied. As you create reports, particularly in Workspace, the data are pulled in real-time while you're creating the report. This can often cause issues while trying to drag more metrics into the interface when certain elements of a table are grayed out because data is being pulled in.The more data points and segments involved, the longer it takes to update. When you look at larger windows of time, it takes even longer. If one were to compare to Google Analytics or one of the open source products like Piwik or Motomo, Adobe seems much slower. However, Adobe also supports far more variables than other web analytics products.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I am always very happy when a company offers the option to use online chat, as I do not like to call customer support and writing an email is just too slow and cumbersome. I did not even expect a reply right away, yet it took the customer support team less than a minute to respond to my problem.

Incentivized

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.

It is a large effort to implement. Throwing a developer with zero experience with Adobe Analytics with no support is a REALLY BAD IDEA!!! Having experienced developers working as a team is crucial to a strong implementation. I say this because I have experienced both scenarios. I was the only developer on an implementation project and I had no experience with Adobe Analytics. As a result I made many architecturally bad decisions which lead to a rigid fragile implementation that eventually was scraped. It took some hard lessons to learn that Adobe Analytics was not as simple as their sales reps make it sound. Using the Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager made sequential implementations incredibly STRONG. Having a DTM to manage the code was a miracle and a life saver!!! If you plan on doing a big enterprise level implementation, please seriously consider using the Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager!!! it made code maintenance super slick and easy which is super important for a developer!!!

I've used Google Analytics, which is probably the most direct competitor to Adobe Analytics, as well as Pendo Analytics, which is a little bit more of an adjacent product. It's more focused on product analytics rather than web analytics. I've also used Localytics, which is a mobile app analytics platform, which is there. In my experience, Adobe Analytics is far more full-featured and rich compared to Google Analytics and Pendo Analytics. Pendo has some interesting features that it offers that Adobe Analytics doesn't, but at an enterprise level, at least, or at a large organization scale, they're not critical features that are necessary. Adobe Analytics's flexibility in ingesting and exporting data makes it well-suited to environments like ours, where we need to merge web analytics data with other datasets we might have. And so that's been very effective for us. Localytics is strictly a mobile analytics platform, so it has some point level advantages, but the fact that Adobe Analytics is able to marry and kind of merge web analytics data with mobile analytics data into one kind of view of the data is a really nice feature that, in my mind, makes it superior to Localytics in general. And its Localytics reporting capabilities are far limited, I would say, from a reporting standpoint. All of the other competitors I've looked at, they're, the reporting capabilities are just not nearly as sophisticated as Adobe Analytics.

Incentivized

Like I mentioned, Smartlook is younger than FullStory and it seems like they're trying to improve. The dashboards are lacking. I wish I had more control over what I see there instead of the standard. We use the API to determine customer name and company and I'd like to see some custom dashboards.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• I think we're able to quantitatively analyze and report back on activities on our websites, where in the financial services sector, we really haven't been able to report that in the past. And so, as a company that has clutched onto paper as long as it possibly can, it's refreshing to our leadership to be able to report back and say these are exact things that are being done on our website that can lead to increased sales, increased signups, ease of use for our end users, et cetera.

• We have increased the conversion rate from the beginning till now with 120%.
• We redesigned our landing pages and decreased the bounce rate by 41%.
• We rethinked and redesigned our menu structure and internal site linking to increase the time users spent on our site based on the data we got from Smartlook analysis.

Incentivized