Adobe Summit: What’s New in Analytics Cloud

No matter what industry you are in, every business understands that experience is crucial to success. A hotel is not merely a hotel, but the culmination of every interaction from booking and check-in, to the post-stay experience. An apparel retailer is no longer defined by what they sell, but how shoppers engage with the brand in-store, on the website and through their multitude of devices. Tying every moment and touchpoint together is challenging, but it is the key to thriving in a harsh competitive climate. Modern intelligence teams have risen to the challenge, with Adobe Analytics Cloud serving as their underlying system of intelligence and audience insight.

As the intelligence engine powering the Experience Business, Adobe Analytics Cloud, which includes Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager, gives brands the ability to better understand customer journeys and leverage insights to build deeper relationships with their audiences. Two-thirds of Fortune 100 companies rely on Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager as the backbone for their business, including The Home Depot, T-Mobile, MGM Resorts, Citibank, NBC Universal, Heathrow Airport, and thousands more. Today, we are announcing new enhancements that gives the modern intelligence team the tools to close the insights-to-action gap in customer experience.

The latest enhancements in Adobe Analytics Cloud include:

New Advertising Analytics

Adobe Analytics is expanding its integration with Adobe Advertising Cloud, to give marketers more visibility into how paid search drives engagement on other channels. With a projected $92.4 billion spent in 2017 alone on paid search ads, the lack of proper attribution has long been a pain point for brands. Now, a customer who completed an action such as providing an email or downloading a whitepaper can be properly attributed to ads that influenced that action. Paid search insights, available soon, include integrations with Google, Yahoo and Bing, with updates coming for display, video, social and other ad formats

Adobe Attribution IQ

In order to optimize marketing spend and drive more impactful campaigns, brands need to better understand how customers engage at different inflection points from display ads to email. Only Adobe Analytics is able to deliver on this type of granular insight and we have enhanced our offering with new rules-based attribution models in Analysis Workspace. Any dimension, metric or event can now be applied to various attribution models—in real time and retroactively—to effectively optimize marketing initiatives. An online retailer for example, can now more accurately tie conversion to touch points like paid social and push messaging. And with Adobe Sensei, brands have the tools to also identify anomalies, contributing factors and segment differences.

Analysis Workspace Enhancements

Analysis Workspace has always been a canvas for free-form data discovery that anyone can use to generate actionable insights. Dozens of usability enhancements have been made to make it even easier for users in various roles to self-serve and discover new insights. For example, users will now be able to enhance their interactive dashboards for executives with dropdowns, making it easy to filter any view of data—with dimensions such as region and sales team—to let senior leaders consume data insights without needing to know how to use the tool. Teams will also be able to leverage a capability within intelligent alerts (part of Virtual Analyst) designed to remove false positives and make real-time notifications even more relevant. For instance, most brands only care to be notified in real-time if page views go down significantly—not if they trend upward.

Publisher Reporting

For publishers, identifying the right audience and monetizing content consumption proves to be a constant challenge. With Audience Manager Reporting for Publishers, it’s easier to discover new performance opportunities, identify high-value audiences and manage portfolios of segments. Publishers will feel empowered to optimize advertisers’ campaigns with segmentation, track campaign success in real-time and truly understand which part of the business is driving the most ROI.

Data Explorer

First to market, Data Explorer surfaces trending signals to ease the workflow from signal insights to action. With the powerful capability to ensure structured or unstructured data is actionable as soon as it enters Audience Manager, brands will be able to create traits based upon behaviors that cannot be predicted beforehand, for example, search terms. By eliminating the need to create all traits ahead of time, Data Explorer eases overall trait and segment creation workflow, powering marketers to make decisions based on insights into audience signals.

Data Science Workspace

Audience Manager currently boasts several features powered by Adobe Sensei, and this year we’re taking our Adobe Sensei toolkit to the next level with Data Science Workspace. Data scientists can bring their own algorithms in, or utilize multiple Adobe-built models and activate those insights in Audience Manager. Brands will feel empowered to experiment, optimize, and explore models to refine and improve performance with Adobe’s AI/ML framework.

For any brand it is also clear that when it comes to customer experience, thinking and designing with privacy in mind is an investment for the future. In advance of the May 2018 GDPR deadline, we look forward to working with customers to implement product enhancements, and update any necessary policies and procedures to help enable GDPR compliance for their enterprise. Adobe has a strong foundation of certified security controls and privacy by design, and will continue to make product enhancements within Adobe Analytics and Audience Manager. To learn more about what we’re doing to help our customers with GDPR, click here.

Audience Manager enhancements are expected to be available over the course of the year; keep an eye on Adobe Experience Cloud release notes for the latest information on feature availability.