Adobe Analytics

The ability to input data from several sources makes it incredibly convenient.

It's crucial that this platform makes it easy for me to comprehend user behavior.

It offers comprehensive insights on the functionality of websites and applications.

Concerns about data privacy vary by location

The second is that it required a lot of server resources to operate Adobe Analytics.

For novice users, this tool might be somewhat confusing.

Creating effective marketing data analytics.

Migrating data through other tools.

Workflow management.

Data management.

Not much just the configuration of some tools.

Processing big data via poor machine.

Creating big project data analytics as a new user.

Usability of its Workspace module

Ability to crunch large numbers without any sampling issues

Reliability - very rarely does anything error

Certain visual functionality is missing, especially when compared to Excel, e.g. in line graphs

Looker's dashboards land better with clients due to their improved look 'n' feel

For less experienced users improved on-page help and tooltips would be appreciated

measures KPI - and it's easy to interpret and understand

i can easily customize my dashboard to focus on what i need to see at any given time

if i'm running a promotion, i can see real time analytics

i have not used cross-platform analytics yet - next phase

somewhat costly, but i do understand the value

some you tube tutorials were MUCH better than the adobe ones

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.

Our site has about 250,000 definitions pages on dictionary.com. We've got about 150,000 synonym pages across the source.com. So very high volume of pages. As you can imagine, most of these are pretty low traffic. You've got maybe that top 5%, 10% are really driving a huge amount of traffic, but then you have all these really obscure things out there. There's still a lot of important information you can get there and oftentimes in our Adobe Analytics reporting suite, it'll kind of bundle things at low traffic at a pretty low threshold for us to get to. So that can be a limitation when we're trying to do some really detailed keyword analysis. The way we've gotten around that is we make use of the data feed and the export. So we make the data available to our analyst in more of that raw state. So when they really do need to truly get into that weeds data, we don't run into that low traffic limitation.

Reporting-wise, I think Adobe Analytics workspace analysis is a very powerful tool in terms of reporting. It provides very good insights and this is well integrated with the other Adobe products like Target Audience Manager and the content creation. So it's a good product to use.

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.

It's very customizable, so that means that the depth of analysis we're able to make in Adobe Analytics, we wouldn't get anywhere near with Google Analytics or other solutions that say that they play in the same space.

So the first con is that the experimentation reporting is sort of lacking, right? So it's just the very standard significance calculation, but you don't get to do the same thing for segments. So if you segment it, you will also segment the amount of users that entered that data. So we want to know actually from all of those, okay, what does this segment do? Not just reduce the whole result to that segment.

The second one is that it's very complicated to implement custom tracking for each experiment. If you need that, you need to go back to the tag manager convince someone in there to put your tag and approve it and launch it. So customizability is a blessing and a curse.

I would say as far as setting up dashboards, for me personally, it's pretty easy, but it does have a learning curve along with it. Once you do know where to find things and how to bring it to life, it just makes sense. After a minute you're like, okay, I realize that's why they have set up that way.

I really like the feature of having its omni bug track tracking tool. You can be on your own website, and if you don't know what the tag is called or some of those kind of details that you need when you're building out dashboards, you can take a look and use that. That's a web add-on. So you have your page open, and as you're clicking around it's giving you that data on the right hand side of like, okay, here's the page name, here's the E V A R, here's the event. Like all those kind of things that come with analytics tagging. So I really like using that.

I've given this feedback to them already, but I'm getting tasked with setting up executive dashboards and have become the go-to person to set up scheduled reports for our CIO, our CEO, and all the vice presidents. So one of our senior vice presidents challenged me to get them all in one email because they're getting probably 10 emails (or however many reports I have out there depending on the person). I was trying to set up some automation, and I ended up having to use a different tool, Microsoft Power Automate, to combine those links for those reports to click in there. There's no way in the tool that you can do those things. Sharing is not great in my opinion, and I've spoken to them about that and it sounds like they're coming out with some better sharing capabilities. So that would be my biggest thing is like AI automation and then how do I share this in a really efficient manner to executives that don't necessarily want to get 10 emails just from this in the morning when they already get a ton of other emails.

It's very user-friendly. The drag and drop features are great. I really like how you can do the multi-panel stacks to create different views within the same workspace. I like that the panels can either have date ranges applied to individual ones or all of them. It's just easy to use. It's one of those where it's like kind of intimidating on the upfront and then you get in and once that bandaid rip goes away, it's like, "All right! This is actually very intuitive."

We had actually can I share like an actual thing that happened? So we had a segment, again, a lot of our performance reporting we do out of Adobe and I do mid funnel, lower funnel me media specifically. And we have a whole set of segments down to like our sub-channel tactics. And because our agency kind of trafficked one of our M C I D tags wrong, we had to pull in placement IDs that were appended to the tags. And that number resulted in a lot of lines of like campaign code contains these 700 placement IDs. it was a giant segment, but the segment worked the day it was created for at least a year and a half, two years. And then one day it just broke. We couldn't pull multi-month data pulls out of Adobe using this segment. But it wasn't just like the date range was too long.

I would say it's very user-friendly. When I started my job at Hilton, I'd never worked with Adobe Analytics before. From day one it was kind of taught to me, but it was more of like initiation by fire. So honestly that can be kind of stressful a lot of times, but Adobe Analytics was one of the best experiences I've had from picking up something quickly and it's easy to become really good at using the tool. That is definitely unique to Adobe. A lot of the other tools that we use in analytics, it's not as user-friendly, the learning curve is way bigger. That was my favorite thing early on.

The thing that annoys me the most is I don't think it's very easy to do comparative periods. For example, when we're looking at year over year by all of these different metrics, such as when we're looking at device type, marketing channel, you're digging into it. A lot of times we want to look at year over year, how year over year compared to the prior week. It takes a lot of finagling sometimes to get it to work out the way you want it to with the time periods in comparisons.

We're really able to dive into really nitty-gritty behavioral activities. So the pages, the buttons that people are clicking on, how they're converting, how often they're converting. In the case of analytics in the AEP world, we are now coming up with the ability to be able to link that to outside sources through CJA. And so not just what's happening from a digital behavioral perspective, but how that ties into reservation center activity, call center activity from a breaking them down by our CRM data, things like that.

I think the visualization offerings, although they're starting to get better for sure, could definitely continue to use some upgrading. They've had the same set of visualizations for a lot of years, and while they're improving the ability to alter them or to change the settings on them, they definitely could use more of them. We saw a demo where they announced some new visualizations that are going to be possible and are definitely a good step in the right direction to do that.

I think in terms of the tool, especially when you're talking about workspace, is fairly stable as a tool. I think the support side is probably where a there could be a little bit more of an improvement. Adobe hasn't always been great on the support side, especially if you're not a premier member or have a special connection, some type of connection with them in that respect. If you're just an average company using the tool and you run into trouble and you need some help, you can file a ticket and get support, but it's not always been the greatest support. But the tool itself, I don't know that I have a ton of complaints at this point, especially with workspace. It's been fairly stable for a few years now. So just the support part I think is probably the bigger one and the visualization.

Customization. There's no limit to what you wanto to track. I mean you have a limited amount of evar so you have to be conscious about, what's worth getting. But I will say that you can just pick and choose whatever you think is important for your business.

When I first started working on Adobe Analytics, I tried to use the trainings. There's a lot of information when you're new to Adobe. Some of those things are more about telling you what the product is, sounds more like a sales pitch. But when you're like, "tell me, how do I make a report?" I think that's a little bit challenging to find, but maybe I wasn't looking right. That's the challenge that I had with learning how to use it. And again, I guess it goes hand in hand with being customizable to the company, so you have to learn that.

The fallout reports. We can deep dive in to see where users are having issues on what pages so we can see exit rates and help to build a better customer experience on those particular pages.

The flow reports, we can also do flow analysis on where users tend to navigate from the homepage and to see their full-funnel until they check out.

We can get online experience and user behavior patents on websites and apps, but it doesn't stitch the data to something we want. We wanted to stitch the online data to in-store sales data or just the 360 view of customers is one of the lags and Adobe doesn't also have a DEXA analysis. It's more like heat mapping to see how users tend to navigate within the page. We use Adobe Analytics mainly for page loads and clicks on the website, but we don't know like zonings and things like that on the page.

Adobe Analytics doesn't have the ability to integrate with other solutions, like in-house solutions, such as data platforms and data lakes, and where we want to bring in data into Adobe when it's a huge data set.

It makes the analysis the central part. It almost has a front end as a graph database bolted onto a column or backend, which means a lot to some people and nothing to other people. But my analysts don't have to write SQL. They can drag and drop and they literally can have a conversation with their data. They can ask a question and simply drag something over and get the answer to that question.

Currently, the cost model is by server calls. Due to the nature of our architecture, we are charged server calls when there are errors on our web pages. And I wish it wasn't. 404 error, 500 error, we even get 200 errors saying everything's okay when everything's not okay. So that's not Adobe's fault, it's our own architecture. But the answer is, I wish there was more flexible pricing with respect to how server calls are charged. Some of them are non-material in terms of what the product is supposed to do for us and we could delete that kind of data, but it's read-only once it's collected. So we have no way of recouping any value.

Superior data model

Provide more comprehensive insights

Allow limitless segmentation

Its not that easy it needs support of experts

It doesn’t track the apps on url base

Spliting visits by channels

Splitting visits by devices

Funnels based on various landing pages

Forward flows

dobe implementation has always been a challenge

the tool takes lot of time to run the data

Helps understand the Marketing Source and Device for Traffic, Orders and Revenue

Helps us understand how users are exiting at each stage of the journey

Informs about the Tech aspects as in Browser, Operating system, Mobile device being used

Implementation of Adobe Analytics is not that simple and hence need support of the experts

Latest release on the Geographies has started impacting the data

Adobe doesn't track the APPs on url basis

tracking

marketing channels

data visualization

hard to learn

use to regex

high pricing

Pathing analyses

Integrations with target for ab testing

Good data export options

Better options for searching for and sorting components

More label options for visualizations and freeform tables

Exporting more than 50,000 rows

Great Visualizations

Good level of accuracy in its measurement

Ability to integrate vast volumes of data from different sources

Requires expertise in development

Some of the visuals could be richer

Better customer support

Costing could be lower

Ability to perform quick ad hoc analysis

Drag and drop functionality makes it less complex to use that some other data tools

Features that allow us to make custom variables and segments easily

Breaking down dimensions by other dimensions or segments is easy but users need to know which ones go together and make sense. If they don't, it can lead to looking at irrelevant or incorrect data.

The diagonal cascading effect when looking at breakdown can be a little annoying, the breakdown display could look better

There could be more in-depth documentation about a/b tests and test analysis online. What is currently available seems to be at the surface level.

Site Monitoring - it’s incredible for this, trend lines are easy to see and powerful to share

Alerts - automated alerts are simple to set up and are useful on the site to know if there’s a problem

Data Analysis - “should we test this?” “Is this still performing the way we expect it to?” “When did the decline/increase start?” It’s so adept at answering these questions that it’s practically indispensable.

Order/Visit Volume Tracking - slice this as many ways as your data allows: loyalty members, mobile vs desktop, browser type, the possibilities are seemingly endless and there’s almost always gold hidden inside.

Onboarding new users - it’s a powerful tool and does its best to make new users feel like they’re creating meaningful reports, but it has some pitfalls and very custom language

Ease of implementation - it requires a big team of highly skilled professionals, not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but very little is out of the box

Integration of new features - it feels like using some of the newer features requires additional implementations or integrations with other parts of Adobe, sometimes this isn’t too tough, but it can mean a lot of cooperating across the business.

Segmentation

User experience

Speed and agility

Needs date math

Implementation skills are hard to acquire

Steep learning curve

Adobe Analytics is stable

Adobe Analytics is very customizable

Adobe Analytics is scalable

Adobe Analytics could have better documentation

Adobe Analytics could have a better price tag

Capturing campaign data

Creating dashboards

Tracking user journeys

Creating Marketing Channels

API based

Greater flexibility in the workspace

The inability to create segments from calculated metrics

UI can be slightly buggy at times