Agile Analytics
Note: This series of articles features technologies demonstrated at Summit Sneaks Night during Adobe Summit, the Digital Marketing conference. Sneaks demonstrations are a preview of the ideas and technologies percolating inside Adobe Labs, and should not be viewed as a representation of product plans or features.
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Real-time marketing is now the norm. Businesses need to interact and converse with their customers wherever they are and whatever they’re doing, with targeted, relevant content. That means businesses need agile analytics — the ability to analyze data quickly for activities like keyword optimization, targeted content campaigns or reacting to trending topics in social media.
Even with the best analytics tools, it’s not always easy to move at the new speed of marketing. Sometimes it’s an organizational bottleneck; perhaps a business relies on a single, overwhelmed analyst for all their needs. Other times there are technological hurdles. When you’re talking about large, complex data sets across multiple sources and systems it can take days, or even weeks to run a query.
Regardless of the reason, business data loses value when it can’t keep up with the workflow of the marketer. That’s why Adobe is focused on bringing more speed, ease-of-use and flexibility to the Adobe Marketing Cloud. This year at Adobe Summit, the Digital Marketing conference, Ben Gaines — a senior product marketing manager for Adobe Analytics — showcased a Sneaks demonstration called FreeForm Analysis that does exactly that.
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FreeForm Analysis makes big data analytics more accessible to all types of marketers by providing an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface for building complex data queries and showing the results in an instant.
“We want to take big data marketing and put it in the hands of people who can actually use it without needing to have a data science degree, or write their own queries against Hadoop,” explains Ben.
With FreeForm Analysis, it’s easy to build a complex data query through the drag-and-drop interface — like revenue and orders for three different customer segments, what products they’ve purchased, and what search terms purchasers have used — and compile that insight very quickly.
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“We’ve essentially written a new query language to work with our platform to get data back faster than ever before. You can query hundreds of millions of rows and have the data rendered inside the tool in sub-second time,” Ben notes.
The combination of an intuitive interface alongside real-time, visual results, allows marketers unprecedented freedom to explore and improvise on their insights and hunches, and allows the entire marketing organization to get more value out of the Adobe Marketing Cloud.
“The speed of FreeForm Analysis allows marketers to explore data in ways that haven’t been possible before,” says Steve Hammond, senior director of Marketing Cloud product management at Adobe. “Often times when you go into analysis, you go in with a preconceived idea; but as you start to explore that idea, new things come to life for you and you start to discover new avenues and new channels of data exploration. That’s what this tool facilitates more than anything else.”
See how _FreeForm Analysis _works here:
Check out other sneaks previewed on the Summit stage: