Adobe Analytics: Powerful but complicated and unintuitive

In my experience, set up of a new website in Adobe Analytics from scratch is absolutely atrocious. It is not ready to roll out of the box, unlike other web analytics software.

Adobe Analytics requires careful planning before deploying. This often is in the form of a spreadsheet with multiple columns for the various variables and events to be tracked as well as the classification of the variable. This could be a simple metric or a "conversion variable" which is still a simple metric, but one that can be correlated to other ones and track revenue. Literally simple variables in Adobe cannot do that.

This leads to the duplicate creation of various variables. Granted, Adobe does provide support staff as part of the contract, but this type of software should include some sort of turnkey setup with general metrics beyond a simple page view. Lastly, the need to double up metrics for both standard and conversion metrics feels ludicrously unintuitive to me.

Our organization is so large and Adobe Analytics is so vastly embedded into our product and our workflows, we will not be switching from Adobe Analytics for quite some time. In fact, we've switched some older websites from Google Analytics into Adobe during our last contract renewal.

This is part of the problem with analytics. Once you have a vast amount of data accumulated, it is more difficult to relinquish and export it to a new system

I have gone through a 4-day "training" session. Most of of was simplified and not helpful. The entire content of the training could've been likely been covered in 8-10 hours. Most of the four days was spent with the presenter trying to upsell the attendees on additional features while promoting add-ons for Adobe Analytics features that aren't included in the base product.

I suggest the term "training presenter" because it seemed very clear he was a professional speaker. But he did not present a great grasp of what seemed like simple user questions to the point where he simply did not seem to be a user of the product. When anything was asked outside his script, he was not able to answer it and would have an "engineer" get back to us. The entire four days of training were highly disappointing.

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.

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.