Leveling Up Your Data Insights & Activation with Adobe Analytics – Webinar Q&A

In our latest webinar, we hosted our very first session with Adobe on the  Adobe Analytics Cloud, which includes Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager. From the Adobe’s Analytics team, we were joined by Heidi Besik, Group Product Marketing Manager, and Clay Warren, Senior Product Marketing Manager, to explore the capabilities and digital maturity that’s accessible through Adobe Analytics. As well, Cardinal Path’s  own Alex Clemmons, Associate Director, Analysis & Insights, provided another perspective on how his team works with top brands to successfully leverage Adobe Analytics.

Check out the following recap of questions raised and responses from our experts.

Q: You mentioned a Power BI integration. Does, or will, Report Builder or Adobe Analytics ever have a Tableau connector?

Clay Warren

We actually have a data connector for Tableau! If you go to our exchange partner website you’ll be able to set that up.

Q: Around Data freshness – how fast should we see data showing up in reports in Adobe Analytics? And, does Adobe ever sample data to improve performance of the tool?

Alex Clemmons

Its generally within an hour or two. There are a couple of real time reports that exist within Adobe, but fully processed data is still quite fresh and typically within an hour or two depending on what you’re looking at. There is no sampling, which I love! If I pull data, and somebody else pulls the same report, we’re going to get numbers that match!

Q:What is your favorite, or most used feature in Adobe Analytics?

Alex Clemmons

Analysis workplace for sure! Particularly the ability to quickly create a calculated metric or segment within the tool without having to jump over and do it in a separate place. It’s just a click of a button, the segments manager comes up, you build a segment out, save it, apply it to your report, and \you never had to leave where you were, and can continue with your analysis.

Clay Warren

I’ll add something to that!  As of today, customers on our newest packaging have access to Attribution IQ. If you haven’t heard of that, we’ve included 10 rule-based models in Analysis Workspace that allow customers to essentially use any metric or dimension to pull in and run attribution, using a variety of the 10 rule-based models. Some of those models consist of: linear, u-shaped, and j-shaped models that you can pull and run any variety of analysis using those attribution models. I think that is going to increasingly become a favorite feature for our customers.

Q: As a follow up to that, do those reports cover cross-device in regards to attribution?

Clay Warren

They can! Without getting too technical, essentially we have a lot of customers who have a high level of authenticated users, and with authenticated users we certainly can! In unauthenticated cases, that becomes more difficult. However, I will plant a seed that we are working towards a capability called Customer Journey Analytics that will essentially allow us to stitch devices to anonymous users and be able to run any attribution model looking historically at a journey leading up to a success event. But for now, its really functional more so in looking at cross-device with authenticated users

Q: Can you give us a bit of an overview of  what you consider are some key differentiators between Adobe Analytics & other enterprise reporting solutions?

Heidi Besik

One thing is the number of channels we’re covering. As we mentioned before, 15 channels, and we’re consistently adding more across those 4 mega areas. Another thing is customer intelligence. Adobe Analytics goes beyond just basic analytics, and helps you to fully understand what’s going on with your customer and what’s going on with their journey with your brand – that’s a key area. As part of your customer intelligence, giving all of your organization the power to really take action and gain insights as they need to in the channels that they manage. This is a key part of becoming an experienced business! Things like Analysis Workspace, the Attribution IQ, and we’re consistently adding more functionality that enables users across an organization to tap into analytics, understand it, and then be able to take action on it.

Dave Eckman

To add to that, for Cardinal Path its the integrations within Adobe, the Experience Cloud and the Creative Cloud. Being able to come in and identify important segments within Adobe Analytics that you can actually push to Adobe Target for testing, or to personalize the experience, and out to all the other different areas of the platform is super valuable. Whether you’re on the creative and content creation side, or your measuring and optimizing, the experience those integrations enable across the stack is powerful. Attribution IQ is also surely to become a most-loved feature as users start digging into this new feature in Analysis Workspace.

Q: How disruptive is it to change platforms if someone is not already using Adobe Analytics?

Alex Clemmons

Any move from one platform to another can be at least partially disruptive, depending on the number of users and systems that are integrated, but there are ways to mitigate and minimize that. It’s going to be in terms of how things are deployed. Do you have a tag manager? How organized is your data? There are a lot of factors, it’s not just a simple yes or no question, but there are certainly ways to minimize that and ease the process!

Dave Eckman

From what we’ve seen from our teams is that if organizations have a best practice setup of an existing analytics solution with a dataLayer, and tagging and campaign standards it can certainly help facilitate those transitions much easier.

Q: Is it possible to set up a propensity score within Adobe Analytics, and then potentially use that for personalization?

Clay Warren

Most of our Customers that are doing propensity scoring are using an add-on called Data Workbench. It’s an advanced analytics tool that feeds into Adobe Analytics. You can create a lead score within Adobe Analytics by assigning that to individual users to drive personalization, But for propensity scoring, most are using Data Workbench.

Alex Clemmons

I would echo that Clay, Workbench is the place for modeling. You could certainly do some simple scoring within a calculated metric within Adobe Analytics and there is a lot of power that exists there, but true modeling will be with something for a product like Workbench that you can then push out into the other tools.

Q: Related to Workspace, some folks found it to be a little bit slow when they’re navigating, Are there ways to speed it up? Are there any minimum requirements that will help people leverage Workspace more efficiently?

Dave Eckman

I know for myself, when I’ve used it, if I have a lot of extensions enabled in my browser to help me monitor tags, that can definitely slow down the browser quite a bit with a more complex page.

Alex Clemmons

I can’t speak to the system requirements, but I’ve found that there’s definitely a limit to how much you can expect a browser to process. What I mean by that is, within Workspace, you can build out multiple freeform tables or panels that exist within it, and you can collapse those. So I can have about 10-15 panels, like tabs within an Excel sheet, and the more of those that are there, the more your browser has to keep track of. I have run into the issue where I just tried to do too much! It doesn’t happen a ton, but my solution has been to remove things that I’m not looking at anymore, or that I don’t need, to improve that.

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