Adobe Analytics Review

So we are a pretty high volume reference website, so the goals for us are probably a little bit different than somebody who might be e-commerce. Typically people come and rely on us for looking up definitions and synonyms. It's really our bread and butter between the dictionary and the source side. So from a business point of view, obviously that is our mission. We want to be a resource for education and for literacy from a business standpoint. We are largely ad-supported so that's a primary source of revenue. We think about ways to optimize the page to be able to try to get people to spend more time going to different pages. You know, like another big reference site. Wikipedia is famous for getting people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. So we'd love to be doing the same stuff for etymology and words you know, things to get people to spend a little bit more time on the page.

From an analytics standpoint, we're using Adobe Analytics in a few ways. One is tracking KPIs, tracking revenue, tracking performance. We have certain ads that are getting low viewability and we need to make some tweaks and adjustments on it. We also love to use our Adobe Analytics as just part of general research.

For the content team, it's often the case that there are stories within the data that we find. A really good example of that recently for us was we just had our Word Of The Year towards the end of last year which is always a fun time of year for us. And we chose the word "woman" as the word of the year. And the big reason we did was that we looked at the data and there were a few of these key events where the very definition of the word woman became a pretty major story. You know, a bigger one was Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Somebody asked her, "can you define woman?" She, in a legal context, didn't try to provide the exact definition. But when that happened, as a dictionary, searches soared, searches went over by a factor of about 14 what they usually are. We saw it happen a few other times in the year, too. Just related to certain events with trans rights being at the forefront of so many things. That definition of woman has really become this flash point. It did come down to the data for us because the more we looked at it, the more of an obvious pick it was. But we do love when we can do things like that. Oftentimes some really interesting stories surface just in the words that people look up and how those change over time.