The release of Adobe Analytics version 1.4 marks a major shift in empowering marketers and marketing analysts with powerful advanced statistics and predictive analytics capabilities, helping move both marketers and analysts up in the Analytics Capability-Maturity Self-Assessment Tool. Now, more than ever, marketing organizations can harness the power of predictive analytics without a deep knowledge of statistics and data mining. Leveraging the new predictive analytics features in Adobe Analytics 1.4 will drastically increase the effectiveness of analysis and optimization, leading to increased success, decreased costs, and a better understanding of your business and customers.
Among other features (such as real-time reporting), Adobe Analytics 1.4 includes powerful capabilities that easily progress an analyst through the following steps in the predictive marketing workflow:
- Anomaly Detection
- Data Exploration
- Audience Discovery
- Customer Scoring
- Optimization
Anomaly detection leverages advanced algorithms to automatically discover and surface statistically relevant insights, thus empowering marketing analysts with the ability to make smarter decisions, faster than was previously possible. For trended data, anomaly detection identifies statistical anomalies—that is to say, by separating “true” signals from “noise” as data changes over time. This helps analysts unearth anomalous behaviors or patterns that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Anomaly detection transforms analysts into advanced statisticians by unearthing valuable opportunities ripe for optimization.
Availability: Adobe Analytics – Standard (Reports & Analytics, Analytics iOS mobile app, Report Builder)
Data exploration assists analysts with discovering hidden relationships across their data. Data exploration consists of statistical correlations, statistics/mathematical summaries, and trend lines. Correlations are useful for quantifying the relationship between two variables (measuring the degree to which two variable’s movements are associated). Statistical/mathematical summaries quantify the “typical” or “average” values as well as the dispersion in a data set. These summaries include the mean, maximum, minimum, count, variance, standard deviation, and interquartile range. Data exploration not only exposes unknown opportunities across data sets but also helps the analyst select important and/or relevant metrics for the next steps.
Availability: Adobe Analytics – Premium (Data Workbench)
Audience discovery moves beyond simple segmentation toward identifying groups (or clusters) of similar customers that differ significantly from other groups of similar customers. Although segmentation plays an important role in using “borders” (premeditated divisions) to separate customers, audience clustering finds the “borders” between groups of customers that produce sizeable, marketable, actionable, and valuable audiences for analysis and optimization.
Availability: Adobe Analytics – Premium (Data Workbench)
