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It’s finally time to migrate to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics

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The market for digital analytics solutions is going through some big changes. Google continues to annoy customers by removing features from the universally hated GA4, which helps companies like Amplitude, Piano, or Piwik Pro to gain traction in a diversifying market. On the receiving end, vendors are eagerly trying to differentiate themselves by claiming that “product analytics” or “marketing analytics” could only really be done with their tools.

Adobe has been quite busy defending their market leadership with their own new tool, Customer Journey Analytics. While I’ve been one of the very first customers of this next-gen Adobe Analytics, my general recommendation has been to stay with (or buy) Adobe Analytics instead, as CJA was still missing some important features for anyone wanting to replace AA. However, this recommendation has now finally changed.

As you can see in my comparison post, my general recommendation is now to buy Customer Journey Analytics. With this, it’s also time for existing Adobe Analytics customers to start planning their migration. But, you might ask, what changed my recommendation? Why is CJA suddenly the better option? How can you start using it? And is it superior in every aspect? Let’s dive in!

The best tool on the market, now much better

It’s no secret that Adobe Analytics has been my tool of choice for many years. As I mention in my anti-comparison to Google Analytics, AA’s superior data model and interface made it the perfect environment to turn user behavior into potential for business success. While some competitors try to cater towards certain personas, like product teams, Adobe Analytics was always made to bring diverse teams together and make holistic improvements to user experiences.

The biggest advantage in this endeavor has certainly been Analysis Workspace. With this user interface, there was no longer a need to separate business users from analysts by using reporting-interfaces with behind-the-scenes SQL queries. Product teams or marketers can be fully self-sufficient in discovering what makes them more successful, with the analytics team to help them get smarter and smarter and building the right tool stack.

However, Adobe Analytics’ backend seems to have been created in a now distant world, at least when compared to younger tools on the market. Back then, cross-device analysis use cases were less common and multi-channel analysis was not that easy. Many of Adobe Analytics’ “limitations” are coming from that era, when unlimited dimensions and metrics were simply neither needed nor feasible.

Customer Journey Analytics was built from the ground up to handle those complex scenarios with ease. Because it does not rely on the Visitor Profile, data can now be brought together from many sources, even retroactively. As mentioned, we can use an unlimited number of custom dimensions and metrics in a much more structured way. Despite this promising mindset, there were some challenges that made it hard to recommend over Adobe Analytics.

Initial challenges, now resolved

Customer Journey Analytics was not just built more recently, it’s also made for many more use cases beyond digital analytics. If you want to analyze call center or CRM data, CJA would allow you to do so just as easily as you could analyze digital data in Adobe Analytics. With that, digital analytics becomes one of many possible applications and shares development resources with other applications, like call center analysis.

As a direct result of this different positioning, some common digital analytics features were missing in the past. For example, there was no built-in way to analyze the referrer type or marketing channel of a website. This makes a lot of sense considering the changed positioning but made it hard to recommend to a general audience. At time of writing, things like Entries and Exits, Counter eVars, Data Sources, or Visit Number are still not available (see here for the full comparison). And yet, one recently released feature solved many of my complaints: Derived Fields.

Derived Fields allow us to create completely new data points based on rules and transformations. It’s now quick and easy to combine fields, create lookups, and define complex rules. All of that happens in real-time and is fully retroactive. Derived Fields can be used for Referrer Types, Marketing Channels, Classification Rules, Traffic exclusion, and many more. Some of that was possible through Query Service before but now became accessible to every customer. This is how the interface looks like today:

This recent release solves so many of my concerns with CJA that I’m now confident to say: If you want the best digital analytics solution on the market, you should go for Customer Journey Analytics! There’re some features I really want Adobe to build, but there is more than enough value in CJA to recommend it to the general audience. And I couldn’t be more excited for it!

Alright, but what does that mean to me?

With Customer Journey Analytics now pulling ahead of Adobe Analytics, now comes the perfect time to start discussing migration timelines for existing Adobe Analytics customers. Some concepts will be unfamiliar to those existing customers, like dedicated Data Retention SKUs in addition to Rows of Data, so you should reserve some time to understand the contractual differences. Make sure to mention Data Retention in your negotiations!

While the commercials are being discussed, it would be a good idea to familiarize your team with the actual tool. Besides the already mentioned feature comparison, you might want to read through my web analytics with CJA tutorial or learn about the exciting data enrichment features in Query Service. While it is certainly not required, a bit of SQL knowledge might be advantageous in the future. For data collection, the new Web SDK would be worth a deeper dive to understand migration paths. Schema-based data structures are something everyone maintaining CJA should understand. Last, but not least, other Experience Platform features like Server-Side Launch or RTCDP are something to keep an eye on.

I hope this post got you a bit more excited for Customer Journey Analytics. Feel free to share your own stories and challenges!

Other cool posts:

  1. Marketing Channels just got so much better in Adobe Customer Journey Analytics
    Like it or not, but analyzing marketing performance is a key requirement for any digital analytics solution. Even solutions that try to find a niche by self-branding themselves as “product analytics” tools have some more-or-less developed feature to analyze marketing performance. In Adobe Analytics, we can use the Marketing Channels...
  2. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics keeps getting better with Derived Fields
    You won’t be too surprised when I tell you: I’m a big fan of Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics. Ever since I got the pleasure of using it for the first time four years ago, I am excited for every new release and its many new features. Sure, there are some...
  3. Adobe Customer Journey Analytics’ Summarize Function is Awesome
    Just last week, I was celebrating Customer Journey Analytics’ new “Next or Previous” and Math features in Derived Fields. While I originally intended to update that post once the new Summarize function is released, I found this feature so useful and versatile that I decided to write an entire post...