Christmas has (sort of) come early this year for us analytic nuts with Adobe’s overnight update for the 2015 Spring Release. They’ve added a number of amazing new features to the analytics platform, including:
Customer Attributes
This new feature brings in descriptive data from our CRM systems or any owned source of enterprise data as an added analysis dimension to find new customer segments, behaviours and other insights. Customer attributes are enabled through the Adobe Marketing Cloud Profiles & Audiences core service.
We were on the beta of this late last year and early this year, and it’s very easy to use, and extremely valuable.
With it, you can upload any first-party customer data directly to Adobe Marketing Cloud to enrich audiences. Adobe Analytics is the first solution with access to this new capability of the Profiles & Audiences core service.
Contribution Analysis
This brand new extended capability helps to eliminate hours searching for explanations to changes in metrics. This new tool-set analyses all variables (conversion, traffic and out of the box) to explain changes in metrics and identify what contributes most to an anomaly – causation. You have to go through a bit of a set up to get the most value, but the new capability is incredible – and the visualisations on this are just awesome.
Sadly though, the majority of Adobe customers won’t get to use this feature. This is because Adobe has limited the Analytics Standard customers access to just 3 dimensions out of hundreds, which drastically devalues this whole functionality. You’d better be able to pick the right 3 dimensions otherwise you’ll end up with a contribution report that says ‘This report contains no contributing factors.’
And so, despite the claim by Adobe that this will ‘save time and effort by automatically identifying the factors that contributed to a spike or dip in a key metric or for a particular segment’ if you’re a Standard customer, there is no automation on this at all.
More Variables and Events
Guess what though – we now have 1,000 custom events and 100 eVars for Standard, and a 250 eVars for Premium. Yay. How many of us have needed these?
Mobile App Cohort and Funnel analysis
Couldn’t have arrived at a more timely moment. With this capability in the mobile marketing suite, we can now measure the retention of new and acquired users with side-by-side segmentation and comparisons. The new cohort enhancements can also inform which mobile app features lead to repeated launches and in-app conversions, and which do not. Timely as we’re just launching a number of new app measurements for clients.
Freeform Analysis Workspace
OMG – this one will set your socks on fire! If you’re an admin, you can now participate in the ‘public beta’ on this enabling anyone to create custom analysis projects out of the component parts (dimensions, segments, date ranges, metrics) in real-time, all in an incredible new intuitive and visual way. And the speed of the analysis, the response within the browser is staggering. I think this might be my new best friend. This certainly brings some of the Ad Hoc capability directly into the browser.
Dynamic Site Overview dashboard
The Site Overview dashboard, which is the default landing page in Reports & Analytics, has had a facelift – well, more like a functionality lift. It now updates dynamically to show data from your most frequently run reports, making your login experience far more relevant and personalised.
Summary
Overall, though this is a great release, the continued separation of functionality between Standard and Premium makes other technologies an ever greater requirement.
