Adobe Analytics to Customer Journey Analytics Migration Considerations

Updated: August 4th, 2023 Published on: May 1, 2023

Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics & its Positioning

Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) is an application that sits on top of Adobe Experience Platform. This is the much familiar analysis workspace setup, but on an entirely new dataset which makes it different from Adobe Analytics.

“Adobe Experience Platform” is a recent offering inside Adobe Experience Cloud, which is a shiny new backend for Adobe products, built on a scalable enterprise grade data lake. Adobe is reimagining traditional products like Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience manager cover more wider use cases. Such an evolution is CJA.

Many a time, there is a confusion between Adobe Analytics and CJA. Adobe is still offering both the products as a standalone solution and as part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. Adobe Analytics is still an industry leading web analytics platform, but CJA falls into a much broader “Journey Analytics” category which encompasses different channels including web, mobile, call center and CRM. To put it in simple words, CJA is a multi-channel version of Adobe Analytics.

Key advantages of CJA over Adobe Analytics:

CJA helps you to analyze data from any channel including online channels like web/mobile and offline channels like store purchase. This is perhaps one of the key fundamental advantage of CJA over Adobe Analytics. Adobe Analytics has some offline reporting capabilities, the most famous being Data Sources. But none of these capabilities stitch data at a visitor level and just display data side-by-side to the web reports. CJA does this stitching over the variety of datasets that you have in Adobe Experience Platform data lake in a controlled manner. You can define connections to combine datasets and conjure up data views which are separate containers (more like virtual report suites) for your data.

Below are some of the additional areas where CJA scores over Adobe Analytics:

1. User-friendly data definitions:

The traditional Adobe Analytics variables like eVars and props are good, but frequently needed translations for business users.
Technical developers had a steep learning curve in implementing this as well.
With CJA built on top of Adobe Experience Platform, this is now changing as the underlying data is in the form of simple, standardized key-value pairs.
This removes some character length limitations (like 100 characters for a prop) and provides users with unlimited variables.

Impact: No more complex eVars and props which are difficult to implement and analyze. Standardizes the data across the entire organization

2. Field-based stitching (Cross-Channel Analytics):

With CJA, 1st party IDs like customer ID, email ID can be used to stitch cross-channel data.
Multiple views are possible which can help you to compare stitched vs. standalone data and insights.

Impact: Move beyond traditional web and visit based analysis to flexible person based analysis and improve attribution

3. Alter Historical Data:

Using “Data Views” which is a powerful way to transform your collected data, you can change different components, use strings as metrics all without touching the underlying data.
Combined with Adobe Experience Platform’s data lake features, some of the historical data can be removed or corrected in CJA for accurate analysis.

Impact: Not limited by the time in which data collection changes was implemented. Protect the sanity of underlying data as the changes are just views

4. Advanced data manipulation:

CJA is built from the ground up for marketers. Adobe is known for marketer friendly UI and workflows, which are part of CJA as well.
Complex tasks are well abstracted, so there is minimal learning curve for the marketing organization.

Impact: No dependent on implementation changes or IT team for any implementation to infer any implementation to infer advanced insights from web and cross-channel data

5. Alter visits logic:

CJA offers custom ‘sessionization’ logic which enables your to define different session timeouts. (ex: custom time out, metric based time out)
These session timeout settings are available retroactively, enabling marketers to compare intelligence across time periods.

Impact: Offer full flexibility for data analysts to have different time session time outs and compare the outcomes like attribution across different session time outs

6. Change variable persistence:

In CJA, all the variable settings are applied at report time and also some of the settings like attribution, can be changed inside Analysis Workspace projects.
Like visits logic, these settings are retroactive, and different settings can be easily compared with each other.

Impact: Simplifies and streamlines the data collection and helps rationalize the variables (same information need not be captured as a eVar and a prop). This intuitive schema provides marketers with an improved understanding of the data schema.

CJA Migration Considerations:

In order to assess whether you want to migrate from Adobe Analytics to CJA, we are recommending top 10 considerations. If you rank your business problems against each consideration and you end up with majority “High” ones, then it is recommended to migrate to CJA.

Summary:

Migrating to CJA is definitely the future of true omni-channel analytics. But like every other product, CJA also addresses a range of business problems. Before you migrate, we strongly recommend doing an internal assessment of the needs and wants across different teams, counting some futuristic needs like 3rd party cookie sunset etc. NextRow being a leader in migration assessments can help build assessment roadmaps and help implement the building blocks of CJA like WebSDK migration, Adobe Analytics Connector implementation effectively across your organization.

About NextRow

NextRow Digital is a trusted Adobe Gold Partner with over 10 years of experience serving clients across various industries. Our team of experts possesses the necessary skillsets and proven processes to support your complex needs. With NextRow’s assistance, you can drive your business growth by leveraging the expertise of our Customer Journey Analytics specialists.

If you’re interested in learning more about migrating from Adobe Analytics to Customer Journey Analytics, please reach us at +1-847-592-2920 or through email at marketing@nextrow.com.