Welcome to the first of potentially many posts in a newly-found yearly tradition. At some point during the year, I noticed that I don’t have a continuously updated list of the things I’ve been up to outside of this blog. And even besides that, it is sometimes hard to keep up with all the content that eventually makes it onto the blog. To help with both, I’m planning to release a post like this every year, potentially in the last week of the year. I’m going to try my best to remember all the conferences, events, webinars, and foreign posts (or even update a draft post throughout the year) and put them in some sort of order. Thank you for another great year on this blog and I hope you enjoy all the different pieces of content! I have a YouTube channel now! Writing blog posts definitely is my go-to […]
Tag: Adobe Experience Cloud
Using Adobe Analytics as a free Data Warehouse
Adobe Analytics is, without a doubt, the most mature Digital Analytics solution we can buy today. We know and love it for the flexible data collection, superior data model and processing, as well as the phenomenal Analysis Workspace interface. I have yet to find a use case I can’t cover with the tool or a platform where it can’t be implemented. While Adobe Analytics works perfectly for the data we collect from digital experiences, companies often use many more digital tools to manage advertisements, analyze search performance, post to social media platforms, etc. Most of those tools have some form of integrated reporting feature, which can hold crucial information to monitor a company’s offsite presence. With growing online activity, this can create a situation where the people working with many tools have to switch between tools many times per day. To help manage this complexity, companies often consider using either […]
Understanding and getting the most out of Activity Map in Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics offers a metric ton of useful features which make website tracking super easy. Next to builtin dimensions like Referrer Type or Entry and Exit Page, there are many clever metrics like Entries and Exits for any given dimension. Today, I want to show you one of my favorite features and explain why I love it so much: Activity Map! Activity Map, also known as Click Map, helps Adobe Analytics users understand where website visitors, you guessed it, click on a given page. It comes with a bunch of dedicated dimensions, its very own user interface, and even is super easy to implement through Adobe Launch. In this post I’m going to cover some basics of Activity Map, explain why you should use the dedicated interface more often, and how you can customize it for your very own use cases. And once you’re done reading this post, watch Jenn […]
Should you buy Adobe Analytics or Customer Journey Analytics for Web Analytics use cases today?
The market for web analytics tools is going through some big changes right now. On one hand, Google has officially announced to sunset Universal Analytics (also known as “the ‘good’ Google Analytics”) next year in favor of the universally hated GA 4. On the other hand, Adobe is heavily promoting their new tool Customer Journey Analytics, both to new and existing Adobe customers. There is no doubt that, at some unannounced point in the future, Customer Journey Analytics will become Adobe’s only analytics tool. However, there is one important detail about Customer Journey Analytics that we need to keep in mind: It is not a dedicated web analytics tool like good old Adobe Analytics. Customer Journey Analytics is built to handle data from all sources you can think of, not just websites and apps. Because of that, Adobe Analytics still has some unique features, like the Visitor Profile, that are […]
Understanding and utilizing the Event Object in Adobe Launch
Adobe Launch provides a lot of comfort and clever features to make tag management super easy. Quite a few of those features, like the amazing Constant Data Element, are provided directly in the Launch UI. However, there are a bunch of nice surprises waiting for us once we start exploring the more backend-y technical capabilities. One place where we can catch a glimpse of what Launch has in store for us is in the configuration of Custom Code Actions from the Core Extension. All we have to do is hover our mouse over the Execute globally tool tip: Adobe points us towards three technical variables which we can use in our implementations. One of them is, in my experience, especially useful: The event object. But what is it and why should you use it? Let’s start exploring! What is the Event Object in Adobe Launch? As you are probably aware, […]
Creating Marketing Channel Stacking and Pathing Reports from Adobe Analytics with Power BI
Ever since my very first attendance, Adobe Summit is my number-one source for inspiration for new things to try out in Adobe Analytics. When the world’s leading practitioners and product experts from Adobe come together to share their knowledge, there is a lot to learn for everyone. This year, Eric Matisoff invited me to share a visualization I created in Analysis Workspace as part of the Analytics Rockstars session. However, the true Rockstar content in that session was the Tips & Tricks shared by Jenn Kunz using Excel with the Flow viz in Workspace. A followup conversation on Measure Slack then unveiled some improvements using Data Warehouse and reminded me of an approach of my own that I want to share today. Some years back I used Adobe Analytics’ Data Feeds with Elasticsearch and Grafana to analyze marketing performance beyond what Adobe Analytics has to offer. While that was a […]
Cookie-less Server Side Tracking with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics
If there is one big hot topic in digital analytics right now (besides the unfortunate sunset of Google Analytics 3 and GDPR news) it quite possibly is the recent trend of what many call server side tracking. Currently, server side tracking is an obligatory agenda item at every analytics conference and virtually every vendor of analytics or tag management systems is working on a way to serve the rising demand. However, while there is a lot of talk around the topic, there is no shared definition in our industry of what server side tracking actually is. Jim Gordon has assembled a nice overview of what people might mean when they talk about any of the underlying concepts. In my personal experience, people usually refer to a form of server side tag management, often using Google’s server side tag manager, that still uses some logic in the client’s browser. Adobe has […]
Why you should use the Constant Data Element more often in Adobe Launch
Adobe Experience Platform Dynamic Data Collection Tags, by Adobe Launch is the most prevalent Tag Management System for Adobe Experience Cloud customers. It is nicely integrated with the available Adobe Solutions and is offered completely for free to those customers. But while it is best enjoyed to fuel other solutions, it is a beast of its own with some unique features and mechanics. I’ve already written a few posts about Adobe Launch’s particular features, like the ability to use call traces between rules or how rules can be executed exactly once. Today I want to focus on a specific Data Element, called the Constant Data Element Type. It has first been created by Jan Exner as a dedicated Launch Extension but has (thankfully!) later been built into the Core Extension. I’m going to show you three of my favorite use cases for this, in my opinion, shamefully overlooked gem. You […]
Exploring Adobe Launch Server Side (aka Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection Event Forwarding)
In digital analytics, there has been a trend lately to move data collection away from the client towards a server side implementation. In most cases, companies try to circumvent technical restrictions like Apple’s “Intelligent” Tracking Protection, make collected data more consistent across analytics tools and marketing platforms, or hide their non-GDPR-compliant setups from their users. This trend also brings some (but not all) elements of tag management to the server side, as Jim Gordon described well. In most scenarios, data and events are collected from the client (like a website or app) using a tag manager. Instead of sending events directly to, for example, Adobe Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, etc., from the browser, they are first sent to a common endpoint that collects, enriches, and forwards data to the desired tools. This common endpoint is usually referred to as a server side tag manager and is implemented in a first-party […]
Should you really build an Adobe Launch Extension?
If you are using any solutions from the Adobe Experience Cloud family of tools, chances are you are also using Adobe’s Tag Management System, Adobe Launch. Launch works like many other Tag Management Systems (TMS), in that it can bring tools and code to a website without the need to change the source code of the website it is running on. This allows the users of the TMS, typically digital analytics or digital marketing teams, to be somewhat independent from IT and development teams when they want to bring technology, like onsite analytics or marketing pixels, to a page. In Adobe Launch, Extensions are used to bring the actual functionality to the websites that it is running on. A good example for this is the Core Extension: This Extension allows us to run JavaScript code on the website (using the Custom Code Data Element or Action), listen for events like […]
5 Awesome Adobe Analytics Classification Use Cases
Adobe Analytics has a rich set of features that help businesses collect and report on data in most efficient ways. I’ve written a lot of posts already on how it can be configured to collect data in better ways or how the interfaces can be used to its full extent. Today I want to show you some use cases for one of my favorite features, as it can help you in every stage of an analytics project: Dimension Classifications. Using Classifications, at least in my opinion, is a big step towards making the best use of Adobe Analytics. It can help simplify implementations, manage resources (like the number of used dimensions), surprise users with great new features, or even help you correct errors in data collection retroactively. But before I start with the use cases, let’s make sure we are on the same page by asking… What are Classifications in […]
Import Google Analytics data into Adobe Analytics using Data Sources
On one hand, Adobe Analytics remains my favorite web analytics tool on the market. The longer I use it, the more I appreciate all the well thought-out features, from data collection to processing, storage, and analysis. Those features are even more impressive when compared with what Google Analytics has to offer. And yet, on the other hand, even I can’t avoid having to work with Google Analytics in some way or another. In a large, global company, it is basically unavoidable to find Google Analytics on some small, long forgotten marketing landing page in some market. It gets even worse: Up until last year, I personally had to maintain an inherited Google Analytics instance on a legacy website and app. What a cruel world! Besides those cases, where someone in your company actually wants to use Google Analytics, there are also more forgivable cases. For example, a company may be […]
Keep track of goals using the Linearity Indicator in Adobe’s Analysis Workspace
There is an universal truth in life: Inspiration always strikes when and where you least expect it. The same happened to me the other day, when I was reading High Output Management by former Intel CEO Andrew Grove. While the book is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in management, analysts can benefit just as much from reading it to get inspiration for valuable performance indicators and visualizations. Quite early in the book Grove presents one of his favorite visualizations to track progress towards specific goals: The linearity indicator. This chart shows the current progress towards a set target and where the performance might be heading. Here is his example for a hiring target from the book: My initial reaction was “wow, this is super cool and simple to understand”. If the current progress is above the linear progress, we’re in good shape to reach our goals. If it is […]
Monitor Adobe Analytics usage for free with Power BI and Python
Adobe Analytics is, without a doubt, the most complete and feature-rich product for Web Analytics and Reporting on the market. I won’t even try to list all its features, since I would definitely forget some or would have to update the list in a few months as new functionality is released. And while I, as an analyst and power user, love to have all those great tools available, they create a challenge for me in my other role as an analytics admin. All of those features bring complexity to the every-day work of our business users. For example, when Analysis Workspace was released in 2016, it meant that users had to learn a new interface to get the most value out of Adobe Analytics. But as an admin who knows their users, I have a strong feeling that some people still use the old Reports & Analytics interface in 2021. […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 8: A new home
This post is the eight and last post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we were creating the connection from Experience Platform to Customer Journey Analytics. In this post, we are going to take a look at our web analytics data and explore some use cases. Believe it or not, but this series of posts is almost finished! Starting with nothing, we have created a sophisticated schema for our data in Experience Platform, created a tracking implementation using the new Web SDK, enriched our data in Query Service, and pulled all that data into Customer Journey Analytics. If you have been following since the start of the series, I want to say: Thank you, hope you enjoyed the ride! Now it is time for the finale, where […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 7: Customer Journey Analytics Backend Configuration
This post is the seventh post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we were enriching our basic web analytics data with some advanced fields in Query Service. In this post, we are creating the connection from Customer Journey Analytics to Experience Platform. At this point in this series, we have a world-class dataset of web analytics data in Experience Platform, ready to be analyzed. I’m personally very proud of the things we were able to achieve in Query Service, especially with the pathing dimensions. With all of that, we have even more than what normal Adobe Analytics would give us! With all the data enriched, we now have only one step left before we can start analyzing our digital user’s behavior. First, we need to pull data […]
Visualizing Adobe Analytics Report Suites for free with Python and Power BI
Adobe Analytics is super flexible in the way it can be set up to exactly match all requirements of business users, analysts, and developers. A crucial part of any implementation is the creation and configuration of the Report Suites, which can be seen as the backend database of Adobe Analytics, that will hold the events sent to Adobe Analytics. In theory (and practice in some setups), each and every Report Suite can have a completely individual set of variables and metrics. However, having the option to create an individual configuration of dimensions and events for each Report Suite comes with a hefty long-term cost. For example, each and every setup needs to be implemented in Adobe Launch, where the on-page data layer needs to be matched to the dimensions and metrics of the Report Suite. If every Report Suite is configured differently, a lot of work needs to be put […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 6: Advanced Data Processing in Query Service
This post is the sixth post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we took a look at processing some basic data we need for our web analytics use case utilizing Query Service in Experience Platform. In this post, we are creating some advanced fields to our data in Query Service. I think it’s fair to say that even with just the information from the previous part, we could have a very useful web analytics tool already. But if you know me, you know that I like to take things to the next level wherever I can, especially if it involves writing code. And is SQL not some sort of code too? Entry and exit page were a nice start last time, but we have some fields still […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 5: Basic Data Processing in Query Service
This post is the fifth post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we took a look at doing the implementation using Adobe Launch, the Adobe Web SDK, and Client Data Layer. In this post, we are going to processing some basic data we need for our web analytics use case utilizing Query Service in Experience Platform. This series of posts is coming along quite nicely. If you followed all the previous posts until now, you will now have a functioning Web SDK implementation that tracks your data into Experience Platform following the Experience Data Schema we have tailor-made for our use case. Nice! Now we are ready to feed our data into Customer Journey Analytics, right? Well, we could. If we are just interested in the plain […]
Implementing Adobe Analytics in a First-Party context
One of the things I love most about Adobe Analytics is how flexible it is. That is not only true for its interface, Analysis Workspace, and the numerous integrations, but also for everything that happens on the actual website where it is implemented. Almost every functional detail can be configured and tweaked, including the destination where the data is actually sent to. For years Adobe has offered Analytics customers the Managed Certificate program, where Adobe would allow us to send data to a server that looks like it belongs to our own company (or, more specifically, our company’s domain). But upon closer inspection, those requests are only disguised as first-party and are actually still sent to Adobe’s servers directly instead of our own. And in addition to that, Adobe Launch and the Experience Cloud ID Service will still load their data from different domains that don’t belong to your company […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 4: Capturing Data with Web SDK (Alloy)
This post is the fourth post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we took a look at our business questions and how we can structure our data most effectively. In this post, we are doing the actual implementation using Adobe Launch, the Adobe Web SDK, and Client Data Layer. On our way to creating a full-scope, front-to-back implementation of Customer Journey Analytics to track a web site, we are now ready to think about our actual implementation. Since we have the data structure in place and already have an awesome Experience Event Schema, we just need some actual data. The logical choice to feed data to the Adobe stack is, of course, by utilizing their client-side tools as well. Specifically, we are going to use Adobe Launch […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 3: Data Structure in Experience Platform
This post is the third post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we took a look at the different possible solution architectures we can use to bring data into Customer Journey Analytics and decided on the best one. In this post, we will take a look at our actual business questions and how we can structure our data most effectively. From the last post we already know that we want to track data using only the new Adobe Web SDK going forward. To make that work, we need to create a schema in Experience Platform first, which defines the structure of the data that we want to capture. While some people (sometimes me included) see schema management as one of the more tedious tasks in Platform, I […]
Processing Adobe Analytics Data Feeds with Apache NiFi for Adobe Experience Platform
In the series of posts that is currently being released on this blog I’m showing how companies can move from Adobe Analytics to the brand new Customer Journey Analytics to utilize the many advantages of the new tool. However, I feel like the current Adobe-provided solution for bringing data from that old to the new world lacks some essential information. I did an extensive comparison in the most recent post of the series, but will give some of the reasons here again. When we use the Adobe Analytics Data Connector to bring data from an Adobe Analytics Report Suite into Experience Platform, we are dealing with some limitations: The data is based on what Adobe calls mid-values. Those sit between raw, unprocessed data, and fully processed data in the processing chain. Because of this, we don’t have access to dimensions like persisted Evars, Visit Number, and other data points we […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 2: System Architecture in Experience Platform
This post is the second post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In the previous post, we discussed the motivation and scope of this project and why, eventually, existing Adobe Analytics customers will start moving to Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics. In this post, we will take a look at the different possible solution designs we can use to bring data into Customer Journey Analytics and decide on the best one. Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics is built on Adobe’s brand new Experience Platform. With that, it is very flexible in terms of how data can be brought into the tool. Depending on the setup it may seem very easy to bring data in quickly. However, all that flexibility also means we have many ways to deviate from the ideal path, so we […]
Execute a rule only once in Adobe Launch
When you are managing an implementation of Adobe tools like Analytics, chances are you are using Adobe Experience Platform Data Collection, formerly known as Adobe Launch, Adobe Dynamic Tag Management, or the Adobe Tag Manager (and no, this is not a SEO text, it’s the actual list of names. I will still call it Launch for the near future) to implement other tags as well. While Launch is great for making implementation of Adobe’s own tools very fast and easy, managing other tools is not always so straight forward. A common requirement for those 3rd Party tags is to fire a certain tag or pixel only once. What once really means (once per session, user, day, year?) might differ from tag to tag, so as a result it can be surprisingly difficult to fulfill those requirements reliably and consistently. On top of those varying definitions of once, Adobe Launch has […]
Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, Part 1: Goodbye Adobe Analytics, my Old Friend
This post is the first post of the eight-part-series Web Analytics with Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, showing how web sites can be analyzed better using Adobe’s next evolution of Adobe Analytics. In this part, we discuss the motivation and scope of this project and why, eventually, existing Adobe Analytics and new customers will start moving to Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics. If you found this article, chances are high you work in or adjacent to the field of digital analytics or web analytics. It doesn’t really matter if you are an existing Adobe Analytics user, on the Google stack, or just looking for your very first web analytics tool. If you have been following the trends and discussions in our industry in the recent time, you will likely already have caught on the massive changes that both our industry and Adobe’s products go through. With changes to privacy requirements and cookie […]
Tracking Apps with Adobe’s new Experience Platform SDKs and the Edge Network
Tracking mobile apps has always been fun for me. Compared to measuring websites, apps are a more controlled environment, which is great for data consistency. Sure, there are some less-fun cases (like those pesky hybrid apps) but the general experience on major platforms like Android and iOS has been quite great! Changes even happen a bit slower compared to browsers and there are way less moving parts to keep track of. Just like when tracking websites, Adobe has been most helpful in providing us the tools we need to collect data in the most effective and consistent way. If you have been tracking mobile apps with Adobe for a while, you will know about the similarities between websites and apps (like having a trackState function that increments Page Views and trackAction for Custom Links) and nice comfort features (like automatically tracking App ID, Launches, Upgrades, etc.) that make it so […]
Calculated Metrics in Segments are finally here… Sort of, in Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics
If you have been following this blog for a while (thank you!), it shouldn’t surprise you if I claim: Adobe Analytics is the best web analytics solution available today. But if we’re honest, it has been around for a long time, which has been leading to a situation very familiar to anyone working in the tech industry: The things that we build today might limit us in the future when new technology becomes available. This is also true for Adobe Analytics. When Adobe Analytics was created, it was necessary to build features like the Visitor Profile or Props in a certain way with what was available at that time. Back then, it was necessary to store Visitor Profile information in a database and add it to the data as it was processed (something I also used in a previous series of posts). The database engine on top of that data […]
The Visitor Profile: Adobe Analytics’ Big Advantage
We live in some very exciting times for our industry. There is a lot going on in the analytics space with Adobe’s brand new Experience Platform, Customer Journey Analytics, Web SDK, and Launch Server Side. All of those new innovations will fundamentally change how we track data and process data once it has been collected. But since I got the opportunity to try out most of those exciting things myself, people often ask me why I still love Adobe Analytics as much as I do. My answer to that usually covers multiple areas. For example, I like how the App Measurement Library in Launch helps me to collect data efficiently. Analytics’ Processing Rules and Marketing Channels are another great tool to enrich our events after the collection. In a previous post, I already explained why I love prop-type dimensions quite a lot, since they can provide us with metadata on […]
Building the ultimate auto tracking implementation with Adobe Experience Platform and Web SDK
I think it’s no secret that a lot of companies, agencies, and analyst dread the amount of effort it takes to implement a sophisticated analytics tool like Adobe Analytics. That may come in part from the correlation between company size (and thereby business complexity) and choice of analytics tool, but it is quite clear that implementing Adobe Analytics in a way that fully utilizes both all of its countless features and what can be collected from a page is a challenge to even the most experienced specialists. This is where other tools like Google Analytics or smaller solutions like Matomo have their place. If your use case and business situation are right, they may be a quicker solution for you. The simplicity is quite tempting but would not be enough for larger businesses. That leads to a funny situation when people from agencies or small companies join a large corporate […]
A basic AEP Web SDK (Codename Alloy) implementation for Adobe Analytics
If you are taking care of an Adobe Experience Cloud implementation, there is practically no way for you to not hear about the new kid on the block: The Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK (also know as Alloy). It is the next big thing for how to implement solutions like Adobe Analytics, Target, Audience Manager, or the Experience Cloud ID Service. Instead of calling a plethora of different libraries and scripts, Web SDK is a single script that handles all functionality and calls trough a shared endpoint. On the other hand, it’s not available to the public yet. If you want to try it out, you need to contact your Adobe Customer Success Manager and request to be included in the beta. That will give you access to the Edge Configuration in Launch and a stripped-down version of Adobe’s Experience Platform to manage the XDM. This already hints that there […]
Using Flow and Fallout Visualizations like a Rockstar in Adobe Analytics
It’s no secret: I love Analysis Workspace. In fact, I think it is the main advantage Adobe Analytics has over Google Analytics. That is because Workspace allows for seamless collaboration between analysts, marketeers, product owners, and other business stakeholders. With enough enablement, there is no difference in which tools different groups of analytics users would use: It’s always the best one! Workspace is the perfect combination of sophisticated functionality and an appealing user interface. But because of this user-friendly interface, not every advanced function or use case is immediately apparent to every user. This can lead to funny situations, where experienced analysts never really use certain parts of Workspace that could save them a lot of work. In today’s post we will take a close look at two of the most undervalued features: The Flow and Fallout visualizations. While they seem quite similar in functionality and trivial to understand on […]
Bringing clarity to Adobe Launch using Call Traces
The Adobe Experience Cloud (AEC) comes with its very own Tag Management System (TMS). With Adobe Launch, by Adobe, implementing a basic set of AEC tools like Analytics or Target is quick and easy. That ease of implementation regarding Adobe’s own tools comes with the possible downside of having to put in more work for non-Adobe tools. Depending on how important those Adobe tools are to you, Launch might be your first choice as TMS regardless. Unfortunately, Launch is not ideal when it comes to more complex setups. For example, having a chain of actions that needs to be executed in a specific order can require some manual workarounds, like putting steps into separate rules. The same is true for guaranteed conditional execution within rules, which requires either custom code actions or branching rules into multiple others. I have seen setups with literally hundreds of rules because of those restrictions. […]
Summary Report Suites in Adobe Analytics
Ever since Adobe released Analysis Workspace in 2016, customers were looking for a way to combine data from multiple Report Suites within a single Project in Analysis Workspace. Earlier in 2020 we were finally able to pull data from more than one Report Suite in Workspace, since Report Suites could now be selected on a Panel level instead of for the whole project. While this feature is awesome and a huge improvement, users like myself still wanted to combine multiple Report Suites in only one Freeform Table within the same Panel. Unfortunately, we still have to invest some work to get a view like this, where the right Table combines data from the two Report Suites on the left: The screenshot above was taken from a Report Suite which was created to summarize data from other Report Suites. This can be done without any changes to the implementation or additional […]
Supercharge your Adobe Analytics Classifications with Google Sheets and Automation
Classifications are one of the best features of Adobe Analytics. They allow to enrich and translate tracked values by uploading classification files. One of the most common use cases is handling marketing campaign tracking codes, which can be translated from technical ids to understandable details about the campaign. This can be automated to a great extend, which is what this article will be about. We are going to look at the architecture of our solution and plan our implementation. Right after that, we will start building our spreadsheet in Google Sheets and create an automatic upload to Adobe Analytics using the Python programming language. If you are just interested in the final script, you can find it on Github. What we love and hate about Classifications When you are using Adobe Analytics, chances are pretty high that you are already using some form of classifications. Rightfully so, because they are […]
Adobe Analytics Introduction: Terms and Concepts
This is one of several post aiming to give an introduction into Adobe Analytics. They are intended as both tutorials and references for future use. While there already are a lot of good sources for this, some are quite dated and miss connections to recently released features and enhancements. In this post, I will explain some general things that are helpful to know when starting with Adobe Analytics. We will go over different interfaces to analyze data, explain Dimensions, Metrics, and Events and name some common integrations. Know what you are looking at: Dimensions One of the most important building blocks of Adobe Analytics are Dimensions. With Dimensions, we capture descriptive values on our websites or in our apps. Many people call them variables when explaining the general concept. On a website we might record the name of a certain page in a dimension. This would allow us to report […]
Integrating Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics into Voice Assistants
With digital experiences on the rise, interactive Voice Assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Home or Apple’s Siri are still gaining popularity. Companies now need to meet their customers expectations and allow them to interact with their brand however they like. Those new possibilities require a clear strategy to avoid wasting time and resources on products which nobody actually uses. Adobe Analytics can help understand digital experiences better and drive value through customer feedback. With Adobe Target for personalization and experimentation, nothing can stop you from delivering the right experience at the right time. This article describes how both Analytics and Target can be integrated in Voice Assistants’ backend systems to track and test how users are interacting with your App. We will be using the a direct integration with the Experience Cloud ID Service, sync identifiers and use them for Analytics and Target. Target will then be used to personalize […]
Generating more business value with the Adobe Analytics dashboards App
The Adobe Analytics dashboards App has been out for some days now. It has been one of the most demanded features among Analytics users for years. Personally, I had to disappoint my business users for quite some time whenever they asked for an App. So naturally, I was quite happy when it finally came out. Before the app arrived, we had to build workarounds to enable people to take Analytics data wherever they go. At my company we utilized Power BI to pull data from Analytics and offer it in some form of mobile app. That was a huge pain, since we had to rebuild things we already had in Analysis Workspace and maintain two products. We also had to make huge compromises regarding interactivity with data and visualizations. I’m very happy we don’t need to do that any more! One of the concerns I had before I gained Beta […]
Importing Organic Google Search data to Adobe Analytics with a single script
Some time ago, I published an article explaining how to get Google Search performance data from the Google Search Console to Adobe Analytics. For that post, I explained to query the Google Search API, write the result to an Adobe Analytics Data Source file, and upload it to Adobe Analytics. The same can be achieved in a more automated way using the Adobe Analytics Data Sources API, which is what this article is about. It explains how to use a script I published on Github. If this feels to advanced, feel free to go back to the old article. So, why another article about this topic? The old post received a lot of attention and led to some companies adopting the methods I described there. But if you try to implement it in a production environment, you would need to take care of some things yourself. For example, you need […]
Getting Google Search Keywords into Adobe Analytics
While Adobe Analytics is a much more mature solution compared to Google Analytics, the latter always had an advantage when it comes to Search Keywords. It shouldn’t surprise us that the company who offers both the search engine and the analytics tool has some integration between them. While it was easy to get search keywords from the target URL in the past, those times are gone for years now. Ever since then, business were struggling to know what their visitors were initially looking for when they came to their webpage. This article outlines a couple of ways on how to achieve this in Adobe Analytics. For this post we will take a look at the integration Adobe offers to Analytics Prime customers called Advertising Analytics. Right after that we are going to build our own integration based on the same method to get some insight into Google Ads performance. To […]
Trying out the new Adobe Analytics App
Adobe Analytics still is the most complete solution for Digital Analytics. But for years, there has been one thing missing: A mature way to use dashboards on the go, without using your computer. While Analytics is usable on mobile browsers on a technical level, it is not the best user experience for both Analysts and Business Users. This is why a real Mobile App has been one of the most requested features over the years. And guess what: Adobe just released one! Who this App is made for There is one important thing to know about this new App before diving into the features and interface. Let’s ask ourselves first who the target audience for this app is, because it most likely is not primarily made made for you if you are an Analyst. It is not made to offer the same feature set that Analysis Workspace offers and I’m […]
Tutorial: Real time Product Recommendations with Adobe Target
Adobe Target Premium can be used for sophisticated product or content recommendations. Building on the last post, we are going to build our very own recommendation engine based on user behavior in real time. I assume you’ve read that post, but feel free to go back and read it first! Starting with recommendations As we know from the last blog post, Adobe Target is well equipped to personalize content in real time. To do this, we sent information about the products and users to Target in mbox requests. Now we are going to use the same concept to give real product recommendations! To get started, we need to understand a few basic concepts. First, Target must know about your products. We can either give details with the mbox requests or upload them in different types of feeds. What we end up with is a catalog of products with some information. […]
Tutorial: Real time dynamic Personalization with Adobe Target
Adobe Target is part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. It can be used for A/B Testing and Personalization of Websites, Apps and Server Side Applications. This article describes how it can be used to create dynamic Experiences based on the user profile and mbox parameters. Personalization is not a feature, it’s obligatory Some years ago, the internet was not more than a collection of static pages. It was perceived as the worlds largest library, so websites were created the same way as a library: Books don’t change their content over time, or react to the reader. Much like in a library, search indices like Google helped to navigate the web and find the best content. Over time, websites started to make better use of what computers are capable of. Animated images and blinking text rivaled for the user’s attention. If you got an email a human voice would tell you […]
Using Adobe Launch ? for configuration management
Adobe Launch (, by Adobe) ist the tag manager that comes for free with the Adobe Experience Cloud. You can use it to manage and orchestrate all the marketing tags on your websites (not only from Adobe) and reduce integration efforts for the mobile Adobe SDKs to just copy-pasting from the launch interface. For a tutorial, look below on this post. Launch is the successor to the Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) which was used in the past, formerly known as Satellite. In 2018 Adobe announced plans to retire DTM fully by 2021 (source: https://medium.com/launch-by-adobe/dtm-plans-for-a-sunset-3c6aab003a6f). So if you are still using DTM, you should start migrating to Launch, which is only a one-click-action under ideal circumstances. Launch can host scripts for pre-tailored use cases (called Extensions) or custom code. With rules, we define when and where things should happen. Last, Data Elements let us define variables that we can use […]
Blogging Ideas for 2020
So, 2020 is here. Happy updated-copyright-notice! While I need to republish my website because of just that, why not think about what to write in the new year? Here are some ideas of what I may spent an article on: Adobe Analytics. Obvious choice, topics may be: Starting tips, explanations and tutorials. Give some definitions and examples for people starting with Adobe Analytics, explaining Dimensions and Metrics, props vs. eVars, interfaces, etc. Use case examples. Show how to analyze the user journey in Analytics and what to consider. Integration examples. Talk about how to integrate Analytics to get the most value with some Open Source tools for Realtime and Big Data stuff or Classifications. Admin tasks. User management considerations, setting up different things. Analytics analytics. Monitoring your adoption by looking at Analytics logfiles. Expert level stuff. Get into details about how props and eVars work internally, how time spent is […]