Under the Hood with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Analytics Premium

Last October, our SVP and GM, Brad Rencher, made a big announcement on his blog: five core solutions within Adobe Marketing Cloud. I’m privileged to work on one of those solutions: Adobe Analytics. In this post, I’ll discuss in a bit more depth what Adobe Analytics is, how it will benefit you, and also why this announcement has turned out to be so exciting for me and my colleagues. (You may also want to check out Brad’s keynote from Adobe Summit for more information.)

What are Adobe Analytics Standard and Adobe Analytics Premium?

In his post, Brad said that Adobe Analytics “enables data-driven, multi-channel mar­ket­ing by com­bin­ing the power of action­able ana­lyt­ics and audi­ence seg­men­ta­tion with the dis­trib­uted value of report­ing and shar­ing of key busi­ness analysis.” I like to think of it as “the best of all worlds” for anyone who uses data to influence customer behavior. What does this mean in practical terms?

There are actually two flavors of Adobe Analytics, one of which will be right for you depending on your analytics and digital marketing needs.

• Adobe Analytics Standard combines the capabilities of multiple analytics tools that have been available from Adobe to date: reporting and dashboards (functionality available previously in SiteCatalyst), ad hoc analysis (Discover), Excel dashboarding (ReportBuilder), a raw data repository (DataWarehouse), tag management (TagManager), and data connectors between Adobe and its partners (Genesis). When you use Adobe Analytics, each of these capabilities will be available to you centrally and seamlessly via Adobe Marketing Cloud. You and your colleagues will be able to do more to generate and share insights than ever before.
• Adobe Analytics Premium includes all of the capabilities mentioned above, but goes a step farther by including customer analytics, multi-channel capabilities, and statistical/predictive modeling (primarily delivered through Insight) to provide a more complete view of your customers, allowing you understand their broader impact on the business.

Existing Adobe Marketing Cloud customers who are using any of the various analytics tools won’t be signed up for Adobe Analytics automatically; however, you can get in on Adobe Analytics any time (at contract renewal or sooner) by talking with your account team at Adobe. New customers will be able to buy Adobe Analytics beginning immediately. Additionally, note that many features of the above-mentioned tools that previously may have required contract addendums (such as Discover licenses, API tokens, and Transaction ID usage) will be included with Adobe Analytics at no additional cost.

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What does this mean for you: now and in the future?

In the short term, as a user of Adobe Analytics you will continue to use the existing workflows within individual tools, with the added benefit of additional capabilities you may not have enjoyed before. You can continue to log in to Adobe Analytics tools as you previously have. Settings and user accounts will be unaffected in these tools, but various Adobe Analytics tools will be integrated into Adobe Marketing Cloud so that you can collaborate and share insights.

The coming weeks and months are where things get even more exciting. As a Product Manager, the shift to Adobe Analytics and its role in Adobe Marketing Cloud helps me identify the most valuable integrations, both within the marketing cloud and outside of it. Our ability to help you influence customer behavior across multiple channels will increase. We’re already seeing customers move in this direction, and you’ll see the products do likewise. Here are just two examples of how Adobe Analytics data can power action elsewhere in Adobe Marketing Cloud:

• No matter how insightful your analytics are, they are only as good as the action you take with them. Adobe Analytics delivers deep understanding of emerging trends and segment behavior that marketers can use with Adobe Target to tailor customer offers and experiences in order to drive higher conversion rates.
• The evidence that social media can truly drive business results is in the data. Adobe Analytics delivers marketers insights into how social media is working, and direction for how and where to tune their efforts to improve results. This information is used to focus the listening and engagement marketers perform in Adobe Social, and, most importantly, to properly attribute the impact of social on the bottom line.

The introduction of Adobe Analytics also opens up possibilities for new ways of thinking within the analytics space. For example, you’ll see innovative improvements in mobile, video, and predictive marketing capabilities across all of Adobe Analytics, with the first announcement coming just last week at Adobe Summit. It allows us to think about analytics and marketing holistically so that we’re focused on delivering solutions to your most pressing problems, rather than feature sets within disparate tools (as valuable as those are). For us, the emphasis is on always solving the right problem facing analysts and marketers, regardless of where that answer occurs.

It’s a thrilling time to be part of Adobe. I believe you’ll catch that excitement as you dig into Adobe Analytics Standard or Adobe Analytics Premium and Adobe Marketing Cloud. We’ll be diving deeper into all aspects of Adobe Analytics on this blog over the coming weeks, so please stay tuned for plenty more news and other goodness!