Highly configurable with many 3rd party/Adobe product integration options
Updated September 08, 2014
Highly configurable with many 3rd party/Adobe product integration options
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
15
Modules Used
- Reports & Analytics, Report Builder, Data Warehouse, Ad hoc Analysis/Discover
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Analytics
It's used across our company, however our department (Web Analytics & Optimisation) are the power users, we provide support within the organisation and advance the implementation.
- Discover or Ad hoc analysis as it's now called is now bundled with AA. Your power users will be addicted to this tool and you'll probably stop using the AA UI seeing as Discover offers additional flexibility and speed.
- Classification or SAINT (SiteCatalyst / Attribute / Importing (and) / Naming / Tool). This is a powerful tool for categorising your data - I'm not sure how we'd get by without this.
- Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) - we've started to migrate from Adobe's legacy tag management system (ATM) which is more of a techie product. We can see many operational improvements to be had with this tool and it has real power. I was told when this product was owned by Satellite it was sold for $200K and it's now free.
- Data sources & transaction id - it's really powerful to be able to pull in data from other systems such as refunds and received revenue and link it back at a granular level in AA.
- Report builder - your everyday users will frequently use this Excel plugin, it's extremely powerful and there's been significant improvement with the last few versions.
- Segment sharing across applications; Adobe Analytics ->Target/CQ5. With the unification of the visitor id across Adobe products which has been called 'The Master Marketing Profile', it's now possible to build a segment in Discover and make available in CQ5 for personalising your website content, or sharing with Target for creating a targeted A/B test.
- Processing rules - now 100 available, this allows for you to make many changes to tracking without having to involve Technology. However with Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager you may find yourself become less of a processing rule addict!
- Adobe's Click Map tool is unusable and they recommend you use ClickTale. Considering how much we pay it doesn't seem acceptable that you should pay for another 3rd party product, moreover it means we receive numerous internal requests for adding ClickTale tracking to pages which becomes a resource burden. I've been lead to believe from one of Adobe's product managers that something is being worked on - which could mean another Adobe acquisition.
- Adobe's training and reference material needs an overhaul, much of it is outdated. I've also suggested to Adobe to improve or better promote the community as when you have an issue it would be easier to resolve questions with other knowledgeable Adobe customers opposed to Client Care.
- There's no multi-channel attribution - this is great and free feature available in Google Analytics however Adobe try to upsell you the "Premium" version of Adobe Analytics for what should be available in the "Standard" version.
- Adobe makes it confusing for everyone with their product name changing and re-branding - it's now called Adobe Analytics (I think), most people still refer to it as Omniture or SiteCatalyst. Documentation and URLs reference legacy names which adds to the confusion - especially new employees. It's only the people in Adobe's marketing/branding department that care about this stuff. How can Ad hoc analysis be a better name than Discover!?
- Campaign optimisation, we run many campaigns so getting rapid feedback is essential for making changes or terminating if there's poor performance.
- It's the essential tool for telling us how to make change on our website.
- An essential 2nd data source for cross checking data from BI and other systems.
- Increased employee efficiency as users become self sufficient with data opposed to making requests through BI.
Using Adobe Analytics
100 - Analysts, Customer support, campaign specialists, Marketing, Product
5 - Our in-house support is broken down into 2 divisions and we run a lot of campaigns so your situation will possibly be different;
- Web Analytics and Reporting - this comprises of 3 people and they work on ad hoc analysis/report requests, managing the classification/rule builder, training, campaign tracking.
- Technical Analytics - this comprises of 2 people and they work on all technical aspects of our analytics. We have new assets that need implementations across web and mobile. These guys are power users of ATM as we migrate to DTM there may be less dependency on code changes.
- Individual campaign and channel reporting; downloads and revenue.
- Forecasting revenue.
- Implementing change on the website.
Adobe Analytics Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Yes - We inherited a broken implementation and gradually worked towards overhauling the reporting and tracking.
- It's important to have someone on your team that's technical and has an understanding on analytics. This mixed skillset can sometimes be difficult to find.
Adobe Analytics Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Support cares about my success | Escalation required Difficult to get immediate help |
Yes - We have Premium Support as a 1 year trial. I'm not sure whether we'll be renewing in year 2.