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Adobe Analytics: Powerful but complicated and unintuitive
Updated March 10, 2023

Adobe Analytics: Powerful but complicated and unintuitive

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Analytics

I've used Adobe Analytics in various companies and in various
capacities to evaluate traffic for websites, mobile apps, and even
connected TVs and streaming device apps. It is the primary reporting
tool for all the KPIs in our organization. This covers all visitors,
page views, video, advertising, and other events across the entire
portfolio of websites within my purview as a product manager. We also segment all the data by visitor source, campaigns, device, platform and a variety of other conversion factors.
  • Quick report creation with workspace
  • Comparison of metrics
  • Segment creation
  • Custom metric creation
  • visualization of data
  • Set up of new sites
  • Speed of the service overall
  • Technical support
  • tracking web visitors
  • creating and using segments
  • data visualization
  • Understanding visitor behavior.
  • Understanding marketing channels.
  • Understanding conversions and non-conversions.
Adobe Analytics allows for the comparison of the same metric with and without various segments applied. Google Analytics is an all-or-nothing situation; either you apply a segment to metric or you do not. This makes it difficult for segment vs. non-segment and creating percentage metrics. In my opinion, this is the ONLY advantage Adobe Analytics has over Google Analytics.
Chartbeat is great for real-time metrics. Adobe is close, with about a 15-20 minute delay. Though often their servers are slow to collect and show all the data for several hours.

Do you think Adobe Analytics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Adobe Analytics's feature set?

Yes

Did Adobe Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Adobe Analytics go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Adobe Analytics again?

No

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.

Using Adobe Analytics

We have thousands of users that include multiple departments: product managers, engineers, marketing, audience development, customer service, business intelligence and a dedicated team for measurement operations.
This is interesting because it highly depends on the user. Our organization has a dedicated measurement operations team that supports how data is collected. This includes which metrics and user events get pushed to which variable and how those interact with privacy policies. The team also works directly with website engineers to assist with data layers, JavaScript and tag management deploys. Our business intelligence team creates data segments and reports based on visitor marketing/acquisition channels, device type and other user factors. This team is instrumental for assisting various audience acquisition groups (social media and SEO teams) as well as marketing and C-level executives.
  • Understanding user behavior
  • Measurement of visitors
  • Measurement of revenue
  • Understanding site performance and errors
  • Multiple reporting suites to segment properties, sub-properties and platforms
  • No current plans
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

Adobe Analytics Training

  • In-Person Training
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.

Adobe Analytics Support

Adobe products come at a price and so does their service. For their analytics product, the support people are more miss than hit. It seems that all their support people are trained to upsell you on something and barely understand the product. The initial setup engineers who do the variable spreadsheets are the only ones who truly seem to know the product best.

Using Adobe Analytics

Once you get used to it, it's easier. The original reporting platform based on the older Omniture version still [seems] clunky and ugly. With the addition of Workspace, reports are quicker to create using the drag-and-drop interface, but you still have to wade through all the metrics and know what you're looking for.
ProsCons
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Feel confident using
Unnecessarily complex
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Adding a metric to a report: Only in Workspace and only if you know the metric you want.
  • Applying a segment to a metric: Only in Workspace and only if you know the metric you want.
  • [In my opinion], initial set up is horrendous.
  • Editing an emailed report is hard to find.

Adobe Analytics Reliability

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.
Adobe Analytics is generally available. I've never personally
experienced the servers down. Most data are typically available within 17-20
minutes of real-time. But more and more over the past several months,
the data has been delayed almost two hours. On rare occasions,
perhaps three or four times over the past few years, the previous day's
data was not available by 9am the next morning. Several times per
month, scheduled reports will not be generated or emailed.
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.