Getting Full Value from Adobe Analytics
Despite the fact that Adobe Analytics captures and measures campaign dimensions extremely well, sometimes the codes your system captures don’t get full descriptions. You can find yourself in a frustrating position, will all manner of codes sitting inside of Adobe, unable to tell their stories.
That’s a situation many Adobe Analytics users find themselves in. Their analytics and marketing groups, including inhouse and agency teams, dutifully add tracking codes to each campaign launch. And when the campaign launches, Adobe Sitecatalyst accurately records each instance of interaction with those codes. Yet much of that data is unused. What’s going wrong?
It’s a frustration, but it’s not a mystery. When SiteCatalyst lacks the necessary information to interpret those codes, the data is rendered useless.
Claravine has a rescue plan for that data, one that’s been put to work for one of our new clients, and they’re excited about it. Listen in on this conversation with the director of analytics at a large media/publishing conglomerate, to learn about the company’s experiences with this challenge and their reasons for coming to Claravine for a solution. Our primary contact (we’ll call her Jane) was beyond frustrated by her inability to derive meaningful insight from the data flowing through their analytics.
“So, we’re gathering information from the campaigns that we’re sending out into the world,” Jane says. “Except, in too many cases Adobe captures only the token and fails to connect the decryption key. Claravine allowed us to add an extra step; it allowed us to go in and find all the unmatched codes! It finds them in DCM and matches them up and tells Adobe, ‘Don’t ignore these: this is what those codes mean.’ It is so cool!”
“Now, before any of us analysts have begun our day, Claravine has accessed the Adobe data set and rifled through the lost and found box, identifying any codes that have been dropped off without an identifier, and gets them sorted out. Now we’re looking at all this rich, wonderful data. This is the kind of work you should never, ever ask humans to do, yet it’s essential work. If the computer is remembering and matching for you, use the computer’s brain — it’s efficient and accurate. This is what Claravine allows us to do.”
Jane continues, “So many people say that they want DCM to be their single source of truth. But if these systems are constantly talking to each other and they don’t speak each other’s language, that one single source of truth remains elusive. Claravine is essentially a Rosetta Stone, allowing us to translate between DCM and Adobe.”
Jane and her team tell us that the main benefit from implementing Claravine has been a boost in confidence. “Now we can go back and say ‘Hello, Paid Campaign Team, no, this is not a case of Adobe overwriting your stuff. this is us using the appropriate data of record, DCM, to inform Adobe.’”
“Also, we’re not hunting and pecking anymore. Adobe and DCM can talk to each other in a way that gets whatever information you’ve put in DCM to populate in Adobe. It allows the marketing teams to retain their stakeholder or curator claim to DCM. Politically, this is a lot easier for me than the relentless excel import challenge. So this is excellent. We were so psyched when we could see that it worked!”
At Claravine, we definitely know what the human pain of managing spreadsheets is like, and we’ve experienced firsthand the politics that go on behind the scenes, when there are so many loopholes in the manual transmission of data. We are beyond pleased that we’ve been able to relieve Jane and her team of this particular set of burdens.
We asked Jane to quantify the human capital return on working with Claravine. “In terms of human resource hours that this replaces, you’re looking at 40 hours a month that would have been spent on pecking for this, printing out the excel file, going down with a ruler… And even with that, there’s not always a guarantee you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
“However, with this solution in place, the process is automated and gets documented, so there’s no, ‘Oh, Johnson went on holiday and we forgot to send you the campaign data.’ If DCM has sent information to Adobe, and for a variety of reasons Adobe wasn’t able to fully utilize it, we’ve now closed that gap. It’s no longer if/then/do nothing.”
“I think you guys have done a great job. The proof of concept goes a long way to help me sell it inside the organization.”
If you’re an Adobe user, check out our other data standards connections, too, including Workfront and Experience Manager.
