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The Blog Post below is from Nate Smith, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Analytics

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Leave the Cookies in the Jar: Turn Insight Into Action With Adobe Analytics

With the Adobe Analytics Spring 2016 Release, Adobe is delivering more intelligent, automated tools that aid in the discovery and sharing of meaningful audience insights across your organization. The latest advances in Adobe Analytics feature several industry firsts, including a new people metric to understand how many actual people viewed content, purchased a product, came in via various marketing channels, or otherwise interacted with your brand.

We are all in a new online world that no one could have predicted just a few years ago. Organizations that don’t use analytics are quickly realizing that they run the risk of being left behind.

Users of the Internet come from all over the globe and have diverse interests, but nearly all of them have one thing in common: they desire seamless, amazing, relevant, personalized, and real-time experiences that connect them with your brand. If they don’t get that in the first few seconds of their visit, they are more than happy to visit your competitor.

Adobe is uniquely positioned to serve its clients’ data-analytics needs because it has a single, unified platform based on world-class security standards, and no capabilities are outsourced. The customer experience is consistent across all channels, and all digital assets are coordinated with ongoing marketing campaigns.

We All Need to Become Data Scientists

The key is, though, that our new Analytics release embraces and enables the new reality that is quickly taking shape — that we all need to become data scientists.

A powerful example of using analytics and embracing the customer journey to get the whole customer view is UniCredit Group, which is based in Italy. With more than 8,400 branches in 17 countries and 146,000+ people employed, it had a minimal online presence just a few years ago when it turned to Adobe Marketing Cloud and Analytics for the insights needed to understand its customers. After mapping the whole customer journey and making changes to the way they addressed customer needs, online users rose from 300,000 to over 3 million — with over 50,000 visitors per hour! UniCredit Group knew it needed to optimize the user experience and become a company of data scientists to understand its users.

Keep the Cookies in the Jar Where They Belong

The Web-based, user-friendly dashboards of today’s Adobe Analytics make that possible. Cookies just don’t cut it anymore. In the mid-1990s, a cookie was a reasonable approximation of a person, since most people had just one device. But today, the average person may have a desktop, laptop, work computer, tablet, smartphone, and maybe even a smart watch. Without using analytics, you have no link between the devices. The cookie crumbs you get with one cookie per browser will not get you the information you need to construct a 360º view of your customer’s journey at every touchpoint with your brand and on every channel. You have to dig deeply into the available data.

Another successful example of leaving the cookie in the jar is the leading online-investment firm, Scottrade, that uses Adobe Analytics to measure the impact of its ad spend across various channels, publishers, and social media sites. For example, through Facebook and Twitter initiatives, Scottrade has the opportunity to engage in ongoing dialogue with existing customers and with people who might not otherwise consider using an online brokerage firm. Interactive advertising analyst for Scottrade, Bill Dehlendorf, explained, “Adobe Analytics helps us measure the success of all our campaigns—Facebook, Twitter, and others. Through a single platform, we can monitor the performance levels of each channel and then adjust accordingly.”

Turning Insights Into Action

As a result, Scottrade has boosted the return on its digital strategies. Equally important, Adobe Analytics helped it boost productivity, freeing up 15 percent more time through automation and integration. “We spend a lot less time simply capturing and managing data and more time executing on campaigns that impact our bottom line,” Dehlendorf said.

Businesses that have moved toward a more automated data-analysis solution are seeing big returns on their investments. For example, let’s say you do an A/B test on a campaign, and the data shows that B is best and that it increased revenue by 20 percent. Why wait a week for the staff meeting to present the test and get approval? If you let the software — with the proper oversight — simply put version B into use, think of all that additional revenue you could make. Your marketers can always adjust the campaign based on real results. The new 2016 release of Adobe Analytics effectively puts a play button on your data.

Connect the Right Workflows to the Right Work

With the availability of highly detailed, easy-to-use data tools in the new release of Analytics — such as conversion and success metrics, real-time trend changes, the ability to see customer journeys before and after they visit your page, and instant segment comparisons — you can adjust workflows within your organization to bring the right people to the right tasks.

For example, your marketers — who know the details of your campaigns and are the best people to judge what data they need — push the buttons to collect and manage data and immediately implement the insights they gain. Revenue flows instantly.

Adobe Analytics, especially the new tools released this spring, gives you the power to make everyone in your organization responsible for the customer journey and allow an unprecedented opportunity to reorganize your talent into the roles best suited to maximize your ROI.

To provide the experiences that today’s customers expect, organizations are faced with having to gather lots of data from different sources in an attempt to get to know their audiences at every touchpoint and on every channel. Understanding the data needed to create that experience is very complicated, but because of Adobe Analytics, your entire organization can have access to the whole customer view. In an era of high-velocity change, using Analytics may be the only way to truly future-proof your organization.

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Read the original blog post at - https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/leave-cookies-jar-turn-insight-action-adobe-analy...