The Marketing Cloud will reveal the truth.
November 11, 2016
The Marketing Cloud will reveal the truth.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Marketing Cloud
We're using Adobe Analytics across our online marketing organization. We have a wide variety of web properties and an incredible amount of industry specific content. Prior to implementation, we used Google Analytics (the free version), and when I would get questions about how the site was doing, I'd often have no response other than, "That's a very good question." We're now able to see much more clearly what content is driving conversions, how visitors are moving through our sites, and thanks to the various integrations, which conversions are driving revenue. We also have a much better idea of who is coming to our site.
- Content Analysis - Between the Pages report and the participation metrics which show what percentage of conversions a page was involved with, you get an excellent analysis of what content is important and effective, and what is not. With the ability to add up to ten metrics side by side, drill downs, and power tools like Ad Hoc Analysis, you will know exactly where you need better content.
- Pathing - Adobe Analytics captures every single path of every single visit of every single visitor and puts it at your fingertips. There are tools to aggregate common paths so you find out how frequent they are, lots of good page flow reports, and tools to pick out specific paths that will keep you from being overwhelmed. This has been absolutely invaluable to us as we have learned about how our customers are using our sites and which paths are leading to exits rather than converions.
- Customization - There are so many custom metrics and dimensions you can add and you can create segments based on all of them, along with the out of the box metrics and dimensions. You truly get an implementation that is specific to your company, your needs, your strategy, and your site.
- The Workspaces tool is nice, but not as functional as Ad Hoc Analysis. I think some power has been sacrificed for ease of use.
- To get this power, you will need a dedicated implementation developer and you will need to train up your own developers on how to maintain and update the tool. I think the power of analysis you get out of the tool is 100% worth the development resources required (by basing your decisions on good data, you'll save development resources in the long run), but you should be aware of this.
- I think you should be able to stack segments in Ad Hoc Analysis as you can in the main UI.
- Growth - We now know where to focus our efforts. This has led to increased conversion and an increased conversion rate as we figure out exactly where our effective content is.
- Spend - We are concentrating our resources where they matter. We've learned that some of our web properties are not paying dividends and so can we can safely reduce spend in those areas.
- Content - We are finding the right content to draw in visitors and get them to convert. We're also finding the shortcomings. This is going to be key to reducing our bounce rate.
If you are an enterprise, there is simply no comparison. The sampling in Google Analytics will lead you astray. The lack of pathing will leave you unaware of how people navigate. You will essentially be making all of your decisions based on bad data. There's a stunning lack of customization. My internal stakeholders saw the difference immediately. Rather than trying to make guesses and inferences, I was able to provide hard data and back it up with many more pieces of data that backed my conclusion. The insights we gained from the first month of tracking were of greater value than the prior year of Google Analytics. I identified key areas of improvement that are now driving our content strategy.