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 […]
Tag: Google
Please, stop comparing Adobe Analytics to Google Analytics
This post is going to be a deviation from the “normal” content on this blog. Its purpose is to address one of the questions I received most often from a lot of people reading my posts. The title might already give away what that question is: “Frederik, in your opinion, should companies buy Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics?” And I think there is something fundamentally wrong with this question. I think the above question can only be answered through some absurd level of generalization that does not do justice to both tools. There are some agencies or consultants who end up doing this comparison to either appear neutral and independent, or drive SEO traffic to their own sites. This annoyed me to a point where I started writing this post to have my personal answer ready at hand in the future. Bear with me on this one. To be able […]
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 […]
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 […]
Migrating from Android’s BroadcastReceiver to Google Play Install Referrer API with Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics can track not only websites, but mobile apps just the same. This is achieved by using the Adobe Experience Platform Mobile SKDs for native iOS and Android apps. One very interesting part of tracking mobile apps is known as acquisition tracking, which looks at how users found the tracked app. To help with this, Adobe exposes some functionality in their SDKs to listen for the events that the mobile operating system is using to tell apps about the way they have been installed. This happens “automagically” on iOS but needs some custom implementation on Android. BroadcastReciever and Install Referrer API on Android Adobe requires to use a very old implementation method called BroadcastReceiver. That method relies on the Google Play Store App sending a message (a broadcast) to the app that has just been installed, telling it about the details of the install (like which marketing campaign has […]