How to Master Your Analytics

The word on every marketer’s lips right now is Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence (CX), and cus­tomer intel­li­gence is the path­way to win­ning CX. Indeed, accord­ing to Adobe’s Dig­i­tal Trends report 2019, 50% of respon­dents are plan­ning to invest in improv­ing their CX this year, and 42% plan to do so by improv­ing their cus­tomer intelligence.

But how should com­pa­nies go about doing this? When it comes to ana­lyt­ics, it becomes incred­i­bly clear that there are a hand­ful of fea­tures and tech­niques that set the lead­ers apart from every­one else. We want­ed to share some of our tips for using Adobe Ana­lyt­ics to estab­lish a data-dri­ven culture.

Step up your viz game

We all know that a well-designed visu­al has the abil­i­ty to com­mu­ni­cate a com­plex sub­ject with more impact and clar­i­ty than data tables and prose. In Analy­sis Work­space there are a ton of pow­er­ful visu­al­i­sa­tions that you may be fre­quent­ly using today, how­ev­er the real pow­er lies just beneath the sur­face (tip: try right-click­ing on just about any­thing in Analy­sis Work­space for addi­tion­al options such as copy, paste and to explore the under­ly­ing data).

Empower the non-analysts

As we’ve con­tin­ued to devel­op Analy­sis Work­space, we want it to serve the expert ana­lysts as well as your broad­er busi­ness stake­hold­ers. Increas­ing ana­lyt­ics adop­tion in your busi­ness is one of the most impor­tant goals for an ana­lyt­ics team and helps fos­ter a data-dri­ven oper­at­ing mod­el. You may be shar­ing your Analy­sis Work­space projects today, how­ev­er fea­tures such as tem­plates, tuto­ri­als and cura­tion can real­ly help you to take user adop­tion to the next level.

Colour palettes: To make your Ana­lyt­ics projects much more rel­e­vant to your brand, sim­ply pick an exist­ing colour palette or cus­tomise with your brand’s very own hex colours!

Text & links: Analy­sis Work­space also sup­ports rich text sum­maries and hyper­links that unlock a range of uses with­in your analy­sis projects. As well as pro­vid­ing sum­maries, how-to guides and oth­er com­men­tary, you can design a Table of Con­tents (see below) to act as your dash­board entry point. These TOC’s make it incred­i­bly easy for your users to nav­i­gate through your work­spaces and link deep­er to visu­al­i­sa­tions or even any oth­er HTTP link out­side of Adobe Ana­lyt­ics (it could be an inter­nal tool, wiki page or oth­er analy­sis plat­form). To include links to oth­er Analy­sis Work­space pan­els or visu­al­i­sa­tions, sim­ply right-click on the project pan­els or visu­al­i­sa­tions and copy the link. If you’re link­ing to anoth­er Analy­sis Work­space project, then you can link the link under the “share” menu.

Harness the power of calculated metrics

Cal­cu­lat­ed met­rics have long been a fea­ture that sets Adobe Ana­lyt­ics apart from oth­er ana­lyt­ics tools, espe­cial­ly because they allow you a high lev­el of cus­tomi­sa­tion with­out always need­ing to change your phys­i­cal imple­men­ta­tion. Despite this, it’s odd that Cal­cu­lat­ed Met­rics is a fea­ture that is often under-utilised by most users!

As well as some of the more obvi­ous func­tions such as add, sub­tract, divide and mul­ti­ply, there are some oth­er real­ly use­ful fea­tures you should be using today:

• Sta­tis­ti­cal func­tions: there are a wide range of these stats and math func­tions such as max or min val­ue, aver­ages, per­centile and count that pro­vide a huge amount of flex­i­bil­i­ty. A par­tic­u­lar men­tion goes to the Approx­i­mate Count Dis­tinct func­tion that can be used to count num­ber of unique items with­in a dimen­sion, such as # of search terms. See Tip 8 on this link for more information.
• Nest­ing: this offers the abil­i­ty to place oth­er cal­cu­lat­ed met­rics and seg­ments into new cal­cu­lat­ed met­rics for a much high­er degree of flex­i­bil­i­ty. For exam­ple, you could cre­ate a met­ric to define your unique view­ers who ini­ti­ate at least one video play, then nest this “unique video vis­i­tors” met­ric into fur­ther cal­cu­lat­ed met­rics that mea­sure oth­er aspects of your unique video vis­i­tors such as an aver­age num­ber of videos that are con­sumed or time spent watch­ing video.
• Mov­ing beyond dig­i­tal met­rics: Cus­tomer Life­time Val­ue is a gold stan­dard in mea­sur­ing your customer’s ongo­ing busi­ness val­ue and enabling you to see the big­ger pic­ture. Most often, we find our cus­tomers ingest­ing this met­ric from a cus­tomer sys­tem such as their data ware­house or CRM which leads to addi­tion­al inte­gra­tion over­head and inter­nal coordination.

It’s so excit­ing to see the raw pas­sion and inno­va­tion occur­ring in the ana­lyt­ics sec­tor today! Adobe’s tech­nol­o­gy fea­tures can play a large role in help­ing mar­keters lever­age the full pow­er of ana­lyt­ics, how­ev­er I am care­ful to under­score that these are mere­ly enablers – the real val­ue is dri­ven by how ana­lysts and CX spe­cial­ists are apply­ing this tech­nol­o­gy with­in their businesses.