Item: Adobe Analytics
Rating: 6
Author: kevin mcclure

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I think more than ever, our organization is trying to become more data-driven. Just because you're tracking data doesn't mean you're data-driven. So we have a huge effort this year that I'm personally working on to kind of bring together and leverage the Adobe Analytics tool as one of the tools that we use out of probably about 15 different things that we track metrics in. But I'm bringing on a piece of software that actually brings in all that data into one view, one dashboard that'll have the whole health of your pages or your product. And it's just a couple of clicks, right? But with Adobe Analytics obviously being our main tracking tool, it will allow us to start surfacing some of those insights and be able to start moving quicker in regards to what we see out of the tracking to really push it to the software engineers to implement. So really just teaching and changing an organization's mindset of data-driven - just because you can report something out, it's like, what actions do we need to take from that data?

Right now there are some issues with it just released a little while ago, multifactor authentication for our account manager. So some folks were having issues with that the other day that it wasn't coming into their email. Then we had some issues in the code where we were locking them out of their account. So I actually talked to Adobe yesterday about it and they're going to get someone to come help us.

But just stuff like that, for example, are you a problem? Like that comes in because we see a dip or increase right? Rate of something, whatever we were tracking and we're like, okay, that's an anomaly, right? So we go to the Adobe Analytics tool, along with some of our observability tools to really say, okay, we're in the customer journey potentially, right? Is the error happening? What page were they on? Did they go somewhere after? Did they click around somewhere after? It gives us an idea of how to address those kinds of issues that sort of pop up.

Pros and Cons

I would say as far as setting up dashboards, for me personally, it's pretty easy, but it does have a learning curve along with it. Once you do know where to find things and how to bring it to life, it just makes sense. After a minute you're like, okay, I realize that's why they have set up that way.
I really like the feature of having its omni bug track tracking tool. You can be on your own website, and if you don't know what the tag is called or some of those kind of details that you need when you're building out dashboards, you can take a look and use that. That's a web add-on. So you have your page open, and as you're clicking around it's giving you that data on the right hand side of like, okay, here's the page name, here's the E V A R, here's the event. Like all those kind of things that come with analytics tagging. So I really like using that.

I've given this feedback to them already, but I'm getting tasked with setting up executive dashboards and have become the go-to person to set up scheduled reports for our CIO, our CEO, and all the vice presidents. So one of our senior vice presidents challenged me to get them all in one email because they're getting probably 10 emails (or however many reports I have out there depending on the person). I was trying to set up some automation, and I ended up having to use a different tool, Microsoft Power Automate, to combine those links for those reports to click in there. There's no way in the tool that you can do those things. Sharing is not great in my opinion, and I've spoken to them about that and it sounds like they're coming out with some better sharing capabilities. So that would be my biggest thing is like AI automation and then how do I share this in a really efficient manner to executives that don't necessarily want to get 10 emails just from this in the morning when they already get a ton of other emails.

Most Important Features

Return on Investment

I think for us we were following this thing called OKRs: objectives, key results, where it's kind of like KPI, but with a soul is what they call it. We set these objectives and for the last year and a half a lot of those objectives, I build out specific reports so I can just easily go in there and say, okay, where we are wanting this specific thing to go up 10%. So I can easily see that and fill out my other reports with it with a summary.

Alternatives Considered

Tealium Customer Data Hub

I think Adobe's been around longer as a product but Tealium, from when I did research, it has auto-tagging. So one of my biggest pet peeves is when I'm rolling out new features, and whether it's an app or a website, is that I have to go speak with our metrics team or tagging team and we have to come up with these different strategies. Okay, how are we gonna tag it? What are we going to name it? It just seems like a lot of wasted time in my opinion. I want to track everything. I want to know every single thing these people are doing. We shouldn't have to have this conversation if we tag this, you might not have time to tag this right away for MVP. It's like that to me right now. That shouldn't even be a conversation. I should be able to release a feature, I should be able to just automatically go pull reports on that. And just figure out exactly what they were doing.

Key Insights

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

Are you happy with Adobe Analytics's feature set?

Yes

Did Adobe Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Adobe Analytics go as expected?

Would you buy Adobe Analytics again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

I think there's much room for improvement. And I think they can do it right. When I go take a look at other pieces of software like Google Analytics, Tealium, and some other competitor products, it seems like the UI and UX, the way you build reports, is a lot easier. I just feel like for the amount of money we're paying, we should be getting a little bit better product.

Areas where it's well suited: I think baseline it's a great product to just be able to create those dashboards, create those reports, collaborate with people. I do a lot of training for it and, you know, once it clicks, it makes sense. Like I mentioned earlier, it's all use case-based, right? I don't think I have a strong opinion on where it wouldn't be suitable I guess. People have a choice on what platforms they use today, so I mean, you can either use it or not use it, in my opinion.

Adobe Analytics Review

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Analytics