Item: Adobe Analytics
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Adobe Analytics to run all of our weekly performance reporting. We use Adobe Analytics to wire frame data feeds that will then pull out via the API connection or the warehouse and that kind of thing. I work with my stakeholders to help them build their own workspaces to answer their business questions, understand what metrics to use versus other ones, how to break them down to answer what they're trying to figure out. So it's a lot of data management with stakeholder support and then actual analysis in my free time.

Pros and Cons

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.

Most Important Features

Segmentation for sure. We create custom segments out the wazoo, so we are heavily reliant on those and those working as intended every time.
The visualizations are a big one. My team leans a little more on the microstrategy side, like creating a data feed and pulling it out of Adobe Analytics, and putting it into microstrategy has been a little bit more of our path, more so from the interactive perspective. But the public access links they showed at the Adobe Summit, I think changes a lot of that. Because my team understands Adobe Analytics more than microstrategy. So bridging that functionality I think is huge.

Return on Investment

A ton. So when I first started with Adobe Analytics, our analytics team only had one tag per media channel with no additional breakdowns available within the tag. So a lot of the parameters were very redundant saying the same things. We just weren't getting a lot of the support that we needed. So I had to work with each of our channel teams and develop a taxonomy for our tags to tell us our main funding sources, our act, our AC paid channels, and their sub-channel tactics. So we now have a very granular view of marketing in Adobe Analytics that has allowed us to ask for incremental funding. We're hitting global RevPAR targets and we're able to use that data and supplement where there's risk and need elsewhere in the company. So it's been super cool.

Alternatives Considered

Alteryx, Google Analytics, MicroStrategy Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager

Adobe Analytics is just the easiest to read in my opinion. The drag and drop Lego set functionality of it to me is what makes it so easy to understand and it's easy to teach, too. Because you can just go in and real quickly show like, "all right, you search for things here and this is your list of metrics and you drag them over here and these are all your tail." I mean, it's a breeze compared to some of the other ones.

Key Insights

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

Not sure

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?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited is definitely for last touch channel reporting. A key piece of our education is the difference between a last touch channel and an MCID tag and how that data is attributed differently. That's a big educational point in our company because we have the digital teams that tell a digital story and then we have marketing telling the marketing story. Marketing is trying to get down to the ad unit that served and how it performed and that cross-dimensional view of the data can sometimes contradict itself a little bit and just look different. I don't know how to bridge that gap really. It's something I get stuck on a little bit. At Hilton we also have a media mix model, which is measuring all of our incremental and our non-digital upper funnel media and all of that stuff and how it's going to contribute to all of our performance and that kind of thing. But because it's not last touch, there's maybe some big disconnects there related to the data coming out of Adobe Analytics.

Adobe Analytics Review

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Analytics