Adobe Upgrades Analytics to Measure Apps and Find Anomalies

Adobe has unveiled new features and functionality in its Analytics offering, part of Marketing Cloud, with the aim of letting marketers respond more quickly to data insights.

“We wanted to enable our customers to act on data faster and more precisely,” says Nate Smith, product marketing manager for Adobe Analytics. “By performing data science on the underlying data, we can inform digital marketing across silos.

The enhancements include predictive analytics, closer to real-time reporting and visualizations, and new analytics for video and mobile apps.

Predictive analytics and anomaly detection identify events that are outside historical trends. “It helps them find the needles in the haystack a lot quicker,” Smith says. For example, if an agency rolled out a new digital campaign but tagged the landing page incorrectly, leading to less data than expected flowing in, this feature could uncover the flaw in minutes instead of days.

Reports now refresh as often as every five seconds, and they can filter real-time streams of data and create charts and graphs to show, for example, what times of day a daily deal performs best.

Adobe released a mobile app software developer kit that lets app developers analyze user behavior within Adobe Analytics. It includes GPS location to let marketers serve location-specific content and in-app conversion analysis to analyze factors such as time spent using the app or behavior within the app. “With a single line of code, you can have out-of-the-box mobile measurement, he says. The SDK is also integrated with app stores, so Adobe Analytics customers can track downloads.

Video metrics are delivered faster, Adobe says, capturing user data every 10 seconds for content and every five seconds for ads. By integrating ad tracking and content delivery via Adobe Analytics, marketers can understand the best times to insert ads and the ideal frequency and length of video ads to show.

Smith says, “It’s all about being able to break down silos between channels … across the board.”