Adobe Discover Gets Cross-Visit Analytics

Adobe Systems announced the addition of cross-visit analytics and other new capabilities to Adobe Discover, an advanced analytics and segmentation solution within the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite.

Adobe announced the new software capability a day ahead of the opening of its Adobe Digital Marketing Summit, an event for digital marketers and advertisers to learn about and share key strategies for driving marketing innovation. Cross-visit analytics enables digital marketers to see a visitor’s journey within the marketers’ web properties beyond single online sessions, giving those marketers a more accurate view of the overall visitor experience.

Connecting the dots

“Consumers don’t interact with their favorite sites in discrete, unconnected visits,” Matt Langie, director of product marketing for the Digital Marketing Business at Adobe, said in a statement. “They do a search and hit your home page, read reviews, leave, get an email offer, price compare, come back and finally convert. The diversity and complexity of any one visitor’s experience over time yields very different insights than looking at each visit as a distinct, separate experience. Adobe Discover provides analytics that mirror the actual visitor experience.”

Discover also provides a clearer understanding of fallout, the reasons why purchases or conversions do not take place. With insight across visits within their properties, including why customers leave without converting, companies can more accurately allocate marketing spend to activities that will generate the most return on investment.

“With Adobe Discover, we can see a visitor’s experience over multiple visits,” Andrew Wathen, web analyst at Vodafone, said in a statement. “Cross-visit analytics is giving us new, deeper insights into how our audiences interact with us online – which of our digital properties they consume, in what order and over how long, before they engage in a key event, such as purchase a phone, download a piece of content or sign up for a new service. We are using these new insights to inform design decisions and invest in the digital marketing initiatives that are having the greatest impact.”

The newest version of Discover has also made significant enhancements, allowing analysts to more quickly dissect and manipulate data across both user segments and time.

“With an expanding global viewership and a large number of digital properties, obtaining a clear picture of how our content is being accessed is a daunting task,” said Francis Lavelle, director of analytics at Discovery Communications, in a statement. “Adobe Discover is enabling us to achieve critical insights quickly and accurately as we better understand our visitors across visits and time. Thanks to Discover, our digital analysts are leveraging better attribution models and advanced trending capabilities to more quickly see the best way forward as we respond to our customers’ content needs and appetites.”

Restructure

These updates to Adobe Discover are expected to be available in April 2012.

In November 2011, Adobe announced a restructuring aimed at helping the company move forward by focusing on two primary business areas: digital media and digital marketing.

The Adobe Digital Marketing Suite offers an integrated and open platform for online business optimisation, a strategy for using customer insight to drive innovation throughout the business and enhance marketing efficiency.

The suite consists of integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimise customer acquisition, conversion and retention efforts as well as the creation and distribution of content. For example, using the suite, marketers can identify the most effective marketing strategies and ad placements, as well as create relevant, personalised and consistent customer experiences across digital marketing channels, such as on-site, display, email, social, video and mobile.

The suite enables marketers to make quick adjustments, automate certain customer interactions and better maximise marketing return on investment (ROI), which, ultimately, can positively affect the bottom line.