Although many digital analysts do understand how Google Analytics works, many of them can find Adobe Analytics Platform to be a complete mystery. So, if you are one of those people, you’ve come to the right place. That’s if you are looking for a website analytics tool with features beyond GA.
But, of course, there are so many other new and well-established web analytics tools that have dozens of features you won’t find elsewhere. Specifically, some of them are even custom-designed to fit your unique needs. Many of these web analytics tools help you in recognizing which businesses are visiting your site. Or even monitoring brand mentions throughout the web.
That’s why this guide will be so helpful. As an illustration, in one of our State of Web Analytics reports, we asked 2000+ professionals to name the web analytics tools they currently rely on. And then we closely looked at the results they provided. Including the Top 9 traditional analytics tools, and the 8 most popular behavior analytics tools.
Plus, in this article, we go one step further by introducing 3 new(ish) cookieless analytics options for you to consider. But, to cut our story short, with the Adobe Analytics Platform, your Site Insights are so rich that they predict success.
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Mainly, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics allows you to track product purchases across channels in a single interface. Using the integrated product, order, and revenue metrics. As you build your analysis with the right metrics in minutes. You’ll also be able to show which web pages prompt the most call center calls.
While on the other hand, with CJA, you’ll be able to build flow analysis charts for individual segments or customers across channels. It’s also so seamless to create easy-to-use, self-serve data views that update in real-time using CJA solutions.
What is Website Analytics?
Website Analytics is the method used in collecting and analyzing what’s happening on your website. While covering everything from what your visitors are doing, where they come from, what content they like, and a whole lot more.
In short, it provides you with the actual reports and analytics on how your site visitors behave once on your website. And by using a web analytics tool like the Adobe Analytics Platform to collect data, you’ll be able to know what is and isn’t working.
As a result, this will help you to steer your website in the right direction. And you’ll even get information like who your customers are. Based on their age, gender, location, etc. As well as how they landed on your site (traffic source), the most popular content on your site, your total conversions, and so on.
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With this information in hand, you can plan fully informed business strategies and grow your business faster. You can also see lifetime value for users you acquired through email or paid search too. Whereby, you can determine a profitable allocation of marketing resources to the acquisition of those users.
Additionally, you can also compare the lifetime values of users acquired through different methods. For example, you can compare users acquired through organic search and users acquired through social. Or even compare social to email, to see which method brings the higher-value users.
The Key Features of the Adobe Analytics Platform
First of all, your website Data Insights matters quite a lot! But, the Actions your site visitors take do matter even more. That’s why the Adobe Analytics Platform helps you to get both of them so easily. Bearing in mind, it might be a campaign that’s underperforming. And at times, you need to know which content will inspire your customers.
Or maybe you just want time to look for the insights that really matter — the ones only you can find. There’s even some more good news — their new features and capabilities have made it easier to put every journey into its proper context. Whether it occurs via a mobile app, website, call center, or across devices.
And as such, they’ve enabled you to refine and deepen your discovery of critical business insights. While at the same time, uncovering previously unseen patterns of behavior among high-value groups of customers.
Its New Features Are:
Furthermore, they’ve even enabled the democratization of data across your organization. With an analysis that’s easier to perform and more accessible. Compared to all other known web tools like the Crazy Egg web analytics tool. Below are more additional features:
1. Enhanced Cohort Analysis
With the introduction of cohort analysis, Adobe Analytics made it possible for you to see patterns across the life-cycle of customer groups, answering critical business questions with just a couple of clicks.
In early 2019, we released a new and significantly enhanced version of cohort analysis within Analysis Workspace. Allowing for much more fine-tuned control over the cohorts you’re building.
What’s more, is that in order to enable deeper and more sophisticated analysis, you can now include up to 3 metrics. As well as up to 10 segments to define inclusion and return criteria for cohort tables.
2. Retention & Churn Tables
A retention cohort measures how well your visitor cohorts return to your experience over time. Each cell in the report table shows the number and percentage of visitors in the cohort who completed the included action during a defined time period.
Equally important, a churn cohort is the inverse of a retention table and shows the visitors who fell out or never met the return criteria for your cohort over time.
3. Rolling Calculations
Previously, Cohort Table calculations could only be made based upon the inclusion metric. Today, Rolling Calculations enable increased flexibility by allowing you to calculate retention or churn progressively based on each previous time period.
On the great side, there is also an introduction of Latency Tables that allows for effective pre-analysis and post-analysis. It measures the time that has elapsed before and after the inclusion event occurred.
Additionally, there are Server Call Usage Dashboard & Alerts. This Server Call Usage provides you with a transparent view of primary and secondary server call usage against your commitment. It will proactively alert you when you’re approaching your total commitment.
As you evenly analyze where your server calls are being used. It also allows you to identify and fix uncontrolled implementations. Or even scale back in places where large volumes of less-valuable data are being collected.
4. Custom Dimension Cohorts
These allow you to go beyond time-based cohorts and create cohorts based on a dimension. Like marketing channel, campaign, product, page, or region. And you can use any dimension in Adobe Analytics to show how retention changes based on these values.
Also, when building projects, you can change the color palette used for visualizations within Analytics Workspace. You can choose an existing color palette or create your own to match the colors of your brand.
5. Panel Drop-Downs
When creating a project, Analysis Workspace now lets you add multiple components to a panel as a drop-down. These drop-downs act as filters, activated when a user selects any one of the included components.
This way, you can consolidate panels and facilitate deeper analysis for projects shared with others. Panels also support multiple drop-downs on the same panel. There is also an Auto-Tracking Mode for Advertising Analytics.
Auto-Tracking Mode lets you automatically track search-engine data by your Adobe Analytics implementation. Simplifying the process of augmenting Adobe Analytics data with search engine data.
Their Drop-Zone Guides help you be more effective using Analytics Workspace by describing what each drag-and-drop action will do.
What are the Benefits of the Adobe Analytics Platform?
Besides the key features mentioned above, there’s also Cross-device Analytics that comes attached to this platform. Whereby, Cross-device analytics helps you unify your app and web data into a single source of data to better understand the customer journey.
So, whatever the challenge — from basic web tracking to creating a culture of insight where data is infused into every action on every team — Adobe Analytics can greatly help you! But, Why?
1. It provides an easy way to start using web analytics
After two decades of digital innovation, web analytics is still at the heart of enterprise decision-making. But in those two decades, a lot has changed.
According to Adobe: “We’re a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics because we’ve been at the forefront of that change.” And as such, by using AI, machine learning, and other advanced technology, you’ll go beyond visits, page views, and bounce rates.
As you also try to find customer insights that really drive the bottom line. And in that case, using the Adobe Analytics Platform as your companion.
2. It’s a great tool for your marketing channels analysis
As you know, today’s customers are mobile. They use wearables and the Internet of Things. They walk into brick and mortar stores and they cruise in connected cars. With the right channel and marketing analytics, each of these is an opportunity to deliver a great experience.
Adobe Analytics is a Leader in The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Analytics 2017. Simply, because they help you integrate data from virtually any channel. Including web, mobile, video, IoT, app, social, and more.
And then, you can analyze that data in real-time to understand your customers on a whole new level.
3. It’s a great tool to discover your campaigns attribution
In reality, many companies spend a lot on content and campaigns. So it’s crucial that they invest in the journeys that really matter. Forrester awarded Adobe Analytics a perfect score in cross-channel attribution — in the 2017 Forrester Wave for Digital Intelligence Platforms.
Why? Because they help you understand the impact of every touch from every customer — through paid, owned, and earned channels. With both rules-based and algorithmic attribution models, they use machine learning and advanced statistics.
So that you can make the right investment every time.
4. It’s a powerful predictive analytics tool for big data
Too often, companies use their data only to reveal insights about the past. With the predictive capabilities of Adobe Analytics, you can easily use your data better. With the help of predictive tools powered by machine learning and AI.
Not only that but these tools are also a major part of their product strategy. And in return, this’s what helps them to consistently earn Leader status in Gartner and Forrester reports. So, what’s with their heavy integration with Adobe Sensei.
Everyone in your company can consistently take advantage of everything Big Data has to offer at unprecedented speeds.
5. It’s one of the most used tools by many big organizations
In this case, as an example, ETSU is able to cultivate its future digital marketers. Whereby, East Tennessee State University teaches students to work with Adobe Experience Cloud for real-world marketing success.
That said, in this article, you can learn more in detail. Another great example is how the BMW Group transformed its data perceptions using these tools. As well as how they used Adobe solutions to deliver personalized and relevant digital experiences.
In a nutshell, they’ll provide you with a Customer Journey Analytics that analyzes data from every moment. Now that better decisions happen when you have a full-scale view of every customer. Their Customer Journey Management (watch video) connects the dots in a single, easy-to-use interface.
How does the Adobe Analytics Platform work?
In reality, the Adobe Analytics Platform is the industry-leading solution for applying real-time analytics and detailed segmentation across all of your marketing channels. And you too can use it to discover high-value audiences and power customer intelligence for your business.
Adobe Analytics APIs offer limitless ways to integrate your most important customer data into key business processes. And as can be seen, from the illustration below, your site data is ingested by the platform, standardized for intelligence and profile creation.
And then thereafter, activated to any system — including their Experience Cloud — in real-time. But, how does Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) compare to other existing Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions?
Well, there are some known instances where Business Intelligence Solutions gets to compare with Customer Journey Analytics Solutions. Let’s, for instance, consider the Use Case in our comparison.
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Whereby, you may compare CJA solutions to other existing BI solutions — it acts on comparing orders made on the web, in an app, at a point of sale, and through a call center. As well as learning why website visitors call customer service. Or even tracking customers from an ad impression to your web visits to in-store visits.
Then again, compared to BI solutions, it also allows executives to view Black Friday in-store and online traffic in real-time. On the contrary, let’s consider the Existing Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions — that require complicated data science and are quickly out of date.
With comparable metrics and analysis taking even weeks to build. Thus, this particular solution is not possible with other modern and newly existing stacks. Not forgetting, at times, the BI Solutions Analysis of Black Friday is not available for executives until days or weeks later.
What about Its Technology Previews?
The Adobe Analytics APIs are a collection of APIs that power Adobe Analytics products like Analysis Workspace. Helping you to create data-rich user interfaces that you can use to manipulate and integrate data.
As well as create reports to explore, get insights, or answer important questions about your data. Not only that but Adobe Analytics customers can now get early access to cutting-edge analysis tools. In order to help shape the future of Adobe Analytics.
Participating customers will be able to access new prototypes as they become available. And then provide direct feedback to the Adobe development teams. What about Java 11 Compatibility?
Java 11 Compatibility for Ad Hoc Analysis
On August 6, 2018, Adobe announced plans to deactivate Ad Hoc Analysis. Since Ad Hoc Analysis functionality and capabilities were slated to move to Analysis Workspace. However, they’ll not set a date for Ad Hoc Analysis deactivation. Not until workflow parity has been reached in Analysis Workspace. Continued support for Ad Hoc Analysis now includes compatibility with Java 11.
Additionally, throughout 2019 they’ll continue the process of moving Ad Hoc Analysis functionality to Analysis Workspace. It’s also important to realize, due to unique regulations governing foreign internet traffic in the People’s Republic of China, companies doing business in China but located outside the country typically experience some degree of data latency and loss.
To increase performance for companies doing business in China, they have introduced regional data collection (RDC) in mainland China. This will allow customers within China to send data directly to a data collection center (DCC). That’s within China instead of other locations globally.
On that note, this greatly improves page load times and data accuracy over sending the data to DCCs outside of China. Regardless of where your digital property is hosted. Or even which the language it uses, your users in China will experience improvements if you are using RDC in China.
About the Author — Hotjar
“Hi 👋! In general, at Hotjar, we allow you to create experiences that your users will love.
Founded in 2014, we are so proud to be a self-funded, profitable, and fully distributed company. And on a mission to help you better understand how users behave on your website. Additionally, we serve customers in 180+ countries and work with the best people around the world.
Our global team of over 100 Hotjarians works remotely throughout Europe, the Americas, and Africa. So, what does Hotjar offer? We help you better understand user behavior so you can make the right changes, improve UX, and grow conversions.
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One of our values is that we want to build a long-lasting, sustainable, and purposeful business with engaged team members and delighted customers. From day one, Hotjar embraced a remote and flexible working environment. We work a 40-hour week but are empowered to plan our time and productivity as we wish.
Not only that but we have budgets to set up our home office, personal development, and wellness allowances. As well as a ‘work together’ budget to visit other Hotjarians. Wherever they may be —among other perks. You can read and learn more about us in detail.”
But, if you’ll need more support, you can Contact Us — the jmexclusives agency — for more help on how to join Hotjar or even how to work with Adobe Analytics more effectively. You can also share some of your additional thoughts, suggestions, or even questions in our comments section.
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