A significant update to Adobe’s Analytics suite seems almost on cue from Google, which recently formalized data-driven attribution modeling for Analytics Premium users.
One new feature, Anomaly Detection, helps users identify statistical anomalies in their marketing data — useful for incident detection or to expose new areas of opportunity.
“The more advanced feature we’re announcing is moving closer to the concept of data science,” said Bill Ingram, VP of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, two pieces of the Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Adobe is introducing a visualization feature in Analytics Premium that will help customers model data better and overlay standard metrics with statistical data. There’s also a way to dig into isolated metrics, such as close monitoring of daily deal performance.
Ingram said customers want advanced visualization with automatic resizing for mobile and tablet displays.
To take one use case provided by Ingram, a media company may wish to look at the dichotomy of engagement with content in-app vs. the Web, It could do so through new in-app conversion analysis and a mobile app SDK for developers.
One Adobe Analytics beta customer, fitness media company Beachbody, called its deployment of the upgraded solution a “solid implementation on Adobe’s part,” according to Mara Hartwig, senior manager of technical Web analytics for Beachbody.
“I’ve used Adobe for about six or seven years and have done a lot of beta testing with their products,” she said. “The components we looked at were the real-time reporting and analysis, which I can foresee us using on big product launches. … Also, with the anomaly detection, I think that’s kind of long overdue. That’s going to be great for the analysts here who are trying to figure out where to ‘begin’ with analytics and don’t want to look for a needle in a haystack.”
Video ad tracking is also a part of the upgrade. Adobe, which acquired video ad engine Auditude in 2011, combined that platform’s functionality with some of its own content delivery components.
“We’re seeing significant growth in our video business across analytics and content management and we’ve taken that all and tried to make it easier for content producers, licensers and people who want to monetize that,” Ingram said.
