Case Study
Adobe
We’re an Adobe Platinum Partner providing expertise within both Experience and Creative Cloud.
In the intelligence era, being fast and first to unlock AI-driven efficiencies is crucial for marketers, and Adobe’s suite offers powerful tools for transforming these challenges into opportunities. Our mission is to empower brands to conquer speed, scale, and spend hurdles by transitioning to AI-powered workflows that deliver cost savings and maximize return on investment.
With deep expertise in both Adobe Experience and Adobe Creative Clouds, we prioritize outputs and outcomes, breaking free from legacy time-and-materials models that hinder innovation. By harnessing generative AI capabilities, we enable organizations to elevate their operations and drive meaningful engagement, paving the path to future success.
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Our collaboration brings together best-in-class technology with implementation expertise, helping organizations navigate the complexities of creating an efficient content supply chain.
Tony Sanders
Senior Director, Adobe
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Dive Deeper
A Comparative Analysis of Google Analytics 4 and Adobe Analytics
A Comparative Analysis of Google Analytics 4 and Adobe Analytics
In the dynamic landscape of data analytics, choosing the right platform is crucial for businesses seeking actionable insights. Two major players in this space, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Adobe Analytics, cater to distinct needs and come with their own set of features. In this article, I will compare the two based on their key differences, features, and use cases, along with ways you can identify which platform may be the best fit for your team’s needs and objectives.
Understand the fundamental differences in platforms.
One prominent distinction between each platform lies in their parent suites. GA4 is an integral part of the Google Marketing Platform (GMP) suite, focusing on advertising-driven analytics. On the other hand, Adobe Analytics is an essential component of the Adobe Experience Cloud, emphasizing the delivery of customized user experiences. This fundamental difference is reflected in their core objectives, features and functionalities.
Keep cost in mind.
One of the initial differentiators is the cost factor. GA4 offers a free entry-level product, making it accessible for businesses of all sizes. In contrast, Adobe Analytics typically starts at around $100,000, with costs influenced by features, server calls, and negotiations (ask for discounts!). The pricing structure is a crucial factor for businesses when deciding on the analytics platform that aligns with their budgetary constraints.
Be aware of differences in data collection and reporting.
Adobe Analytics excels in enterprise level data collection. Notably, it provides advanced segmentation options and robust custom reporting and tracking capabilities. Nevertheless, setting up Adobe Analytics demands a higher level of technical expertise.
In contrast, GA4 offers a more straightforward data collection process with minimal technical implementation complexities and less customization. Enhanced by machine learning and AI-powered insights, GA4 stands out for its web and app architecture and audience linking with the GMP platform. Additionally, GA4 proves adept at tracking cross-device user journeys and effectively measuring campaign ROI.
Consider ease of use.
Both Adobe Analytics and GA4 feature user-friendly interfaces, with GA4 being notably more accessible, particularly for non-technical users. GA4 boasts a straightforward and streamlined interface, enhancing ease of navigation and setup. This now includes a feature that lets you customize your home page.
In contrast, Adobe Analytics presents a more intricate interface, which demands a greater level of technical knowledge and a steeper learning curve. I like the fact that Adobe Analytics’ menu button names can be changed in the Admin section, but I don't suggest changing the order of the buttons.
Strengths of Google Analytics 4
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Seamless Integration with GMP Stack: GA4 seamlessly integrates with the Google Marketing Platform stack, even at the free version level. This integration offers users a comprehensive view of channel performance, covering social, direct, organic, and paid media.
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Behavioural Insights from Chrome: GA4 leverages behavioural information collected from Chrome, including interests and demographic user data. This information, encompassing demographics and interests, proves valuable for building retargeting segments.
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Cost-Effective Entry with Free Products: Google Analytics 4 provides a cost-effective entry point with free products, making it an attractive option for businesses with budget constraints.
Strengths of Adobe Analytics
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Unparalleled Customization: Adobe Analytics stands out for its exceptional customization capabilities, empowering users to tailor analytics solutions according to their specific needs.
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Overcome Sampling Challenges: Unlike GA4, Adobe Analytics does not face data sampling issues. GA4 users seeking unsampled data must integrate with BigQuery, adding an extra step to the process.
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Advanced Segmentation Tool: Adobe Analytics boasts a more advanced segmentation tool, allowing users to create intricate segments with a broader array of operators
Which platform is right for you?
In conclusion, the choice between Google Analytics 4 and Adobe Analytics hinges on various factors, including the existing tech stack, business requirements, use cases and budget considerations. For ecommerce-centric businesses heavily reliant on paid media, simple report customizations, and looking to track apps, GA4 emerges as a strong option, despite some features being in beta and occasional bugs.
On the other hand, if you are an Adobe Experience Cloud customer, opting for Adobe Analytics ensures a seamless integration within the Adobe family, offering a customizable and robust implementation tailored to your unique needs, which may include collecting data from very diverse sources.
Ultimately, the decision rests on a thorough evaluation of your organization's priorities, goals, and resources, ensuring that the chosen analytics platform aligns perfectly with your business strategy.
If you’ve already invested time and energy into one product, stick it out and keep moving forward. Switching products won't solve the core issues, it just means more time and money.
A Measured Approach to Global Brand Transformation
A Measured Approach to Global Brand Transformation
The digital landscape continues to grow, recovery from the pandemic continues unevenly around the world and local regulations are always in flux. It’s a uniquely challenging time for global brands as they aim to build connected and consistent experiences to show up for audiences more effectively.
But those brands may seek inspiration in what Wesley ter Haar calls “digital’s second reawakening,” a movement in which brands have shirked conventional storytelling methods to instead offer bespoke, personalized journeys to consumers across the digital ecosystem—ones that are measurable and drive better business impact. And as we enter a new era of digital, a new approach to partnership is needed to help global brands meet the needs of consumers around the world.
What Is Digital’s Second Reawakening?
The earlier days of digital—ter Haar calls them the “age of the microsite”—were blessed with a kind of renaissance of creative experimentation and fun. While the work was flashy and exciting, there was a catch: no one really understood how well they moved the needle, if at all. “Creators focused on things like storytelling and story doing, and then put that narrative on digital channels to create some form of consumer experience,” he said in a SoDA Series Live interview, hosted by the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) and Adobe. “But at that time, we didn’t have any meaningful way to show value against that.”
So, what’s changed? Ter Haar notes that those who have managed to connect insights with creative experiences across the customer journey are better equipped to meet their audiences’ multifaceted needs—and drive impact. “The easiest path we’ve seen for clients is the moment they have a good understanding at the data level of what their work is doing, where it’s going and how it’s impacting,” he says.
Monk Thoughts
It opens up the next level where we can actually start experimenting with our messaging and content, and we can start seeing what the difference is between one message and 1,000 messages.
Connecting the Dots in the User Experience
Many global brands have turned to decentralization to solve for challenges like geopolitical pressure, representing local consumers’ values and adapting to local regulations. When done successfully, this strategy makes businesses more agile in the ways they show up for audiences around the world. But if handled clumsily, decentralization can backfire and result in inconsistent user experiences and siloed data.
This has given rise to multilocal firms: businesses whose work streams strike a balance between tech-powered efficiencies on a global level and creative autonomy on the local level. Giving more ownership to teams closest to the audience enables more relevant creative touchpoints and activations, with global guardrails ensuring consistency. These guardrails include things like a building global budget, connecting insights through a data spine or unifying the customer experience on a common tech platform.
We took the latter approach by partnering with ATCO, a global business whose vast portfolio of services includes logistics, utilities, energy infrastructure and much more. Throughout the pandemic, the remote working trend has accelerated ATCO’s desire to transform by decentralizing its properties and putting them under the control of specialized business units. But each unit caters to a different audience and need, raising challenges in unifying the customer experience across them.
After surveying both the business’s consumer-facing platforms and the back-end, including page navigation, content authoring and form data, we worked directly with ATCO’s robust internal team to roadmap how they could get the most out of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). With AEM in place as a common platform used across the brand, ATCO now offers a more consistent experience and is set up to better understand audiences as they navigate throughout its ecosystem. This in turn creates more opportunities to drive higher engagement.
ATCO has focused on a nontraditional approach to enhance the customer experience across our brand portfolio. In placing more ownership into the hands of the teams closest to their customers, the firm has streamlined its efforts to activate audiences through a unique combination of data insights and creativity—and are staying one step ahead as new user behaviors emerge and digital’s second reawakening gains ground.
Monk Thoughts
Most brands are in a similar situation where business transformation is concerned: they’re operating against an unknown.
Futureproof by Blending Analytics and Creativity
Connecting teams and experiences is crucial to driving relevance and personalized paths. But it’s made increasingly challenging with a rapidly expanding digital ecosystem, and the messy “frankenstack” of adtech tools brands have built to manage it. To truly set oneself up for success, a business transformation strategy must be built around futureproofing and maintaining the flexibility needed to build one-to-one, lasting relationships across the evolving customer lifecycle.
As brands adapt to a post-cookie landscape, they must offer compelling creative media moments that convince people to part with their data in a fair value exchange. To this end, our strategy is built around a solid framework that connects data, creative, production and technology to enable insights and optimization at every step of the creative process.
“The goal is to deeply understand what type of creative and messaging is influencing the performance,” says ter Haar. “Is there a reason behind this performance that can actually provide some type of understanding of what resonates with our consumers in that channel? That’s where everything we’re doing is moving.”
Digital’s second reawakening will benefit the brands who are best set up to drive impact by blending data and creativity at every touchpoint. As global brands decentralize to become more flexible and relevant to audiences online, unifying the customer experience will serve as a useful first step, helping brands combine insights to show up more effectively—and forecast where the brand should head next.
(Re)Connect Acts of Digital Through Adobe to Enable Transformation at Speed
(Re)Connect Acts of Digital Through Adobe to Enable Transformation at Speed
Driving consumers indoors and online, it goes without stating that the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly changed the way that brands connect with their audiences. Now is the time for brands to catch up to the digital needs of their audiences and strategically prepare for the future so they bounce back stronger than ever.
Until now, many brands have already made some sort of investment in digital, whether it’s super-charging their social media feeds, building personalization into their content delivery or more. But there is always opportunity for brands to raise their digital maturity—something that’s become especially clear today.
As CTO Solutions at MediaMonks, Tim Goodman has helped brands adapt at every stage of the digital transformation journey. Despite the different approaches taken, the first step is always the same: “We really look closely at the business goals,” he says. “Are they looking to reach their clients more quickly? Improve their message? Streamline their processes?” By aligning business goals with market changes, here is how Goodman and his team help brands focus their efforts and transform at speed.
Fill the Capability Gap Between Tech and Creativity
In his keynote address at this year’s (digitized) Adobe Summit, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen noted the importance of aligning creative teams and IT to unite such disparate experiences and the data that powers each, with both sides ultimately focused on the customer experience. “In the past, the CMO brought marketing and communications expertise, while CIOs knew how to architect systems and unite data,” he said. “But IT is becoming more customer-centric and marketing is becoming more data driven. They are working together more than ever. Your C-suite must be aligned around this customer-centricity.”
At MediaMonks, we’ve always believed in a confluence between creativity and technology, and how both work in tandem to deliver the experiences that customers need. Right now, there is a strong desire for emotionally resonant, relevant experiences in digital—and if brands aren’t prepared to offer them, then they must find a partner who can fill in those capability gaps.
Monk Thoughts
Your C-suite must be aligned around this customer-centricity.
Strategic Partnerships Keep Brands Current to Market Shifts
As an Adobe Platinum Partner and having won the Adobe Partner of the Year award nearly every year since its existence, the MediaMonks Solutions team is ideally situated to support brands as they aim to adapt and transform. It’s led by Goodman, who holds the record of most individual certifications (ten) and is the only individual in the Adobe Partner network globally to hold four Architect certifications (Adobe Experience Manager Forms, Adobe Experience Manager Sites, Analytics, and Campaign).
“In working with Adobe, I’m most proud of the trust we have built up together,” says Goodman. “We’ve built trust in their products, in their teams, in their understanding of the needs of the market. They’ve built trust in us to understand their technology, to implement it the way it’s meant to be implemented, and to make sure we give our clients the best advice that’s right for them.”
This close partnership and expertise has led the team to often break new ground, implementing new features from Adobe before anyone else. For example, we were the first organization in the world to implement the Adobe Experience Manager Asset Share module for a major Australian brand. This is just one of the benefits of how we keep a continuous process of learning to help brands adapt to rapidly changing market needs.
Monk Thoughts
In working with Adobe, I’m most proud of the trust we have built up together.
Making these adaptations can be challenging for brands, which is why it’s important to put them at ease through testing and clear communication. “Before we implement a new feature, we make sure that we’ve tried and tested it in labs before we let it loose in the wild,” says Goodman. “We also ensure that key Adobe engineers are engaged directly, because they want to see the success of these features as well.” Crucial to this process is communicating core software disciplines, including proper quality control, to marketing teams in plain English.
Translate Random Acts of Digital into a Consistent Ecosystem
Online behaviors have rapidly changed since the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, but many brands have an initial foundation to build off of for digital transformation and a more connected customer decision journey. Right now, your digital experiences may primarily function as “random acts of digital”: individual experiences that build brand love or fulfill a specific business goal, but are ultimately self-contained and disconnected from other touchpoints along the customer decision journey.
Monk Thoughts
We help build a strategy for organizations to move through their digital transformation in the stages that are right for their business.
Brands looking to accelerate their digital transformation in lockstep with emerging user behaviors can save time and efforts by connecting these already-existing digital experiences together—either serving the right content for the right context or carrying user data from one touchpoint to another. Tools like Adobe Experience Manager are critical for synchronizing data to and enabling this level of contextual relevance, resulting in unique, personalized experiences.
“A unified message is critical, and this often means unifying the silos within the organization,” says Goodman. “Whether it’s moving to cross-channel communications, or multi-tenant solutions, or a Data Management platform that streamlines the audiences for the right messages, Adobe has the answer.” Goodman suggests that brands first start with the quick wins rather than boil the ocean. “We help build a strategy for organizations to move through their digital transformation in the stages that are right for their business.”
Quick access to MediaMonks’ vast, global team of creative expertise enables brands to identify opportunities to embark on overarching transformation initiatives. “Not only do we have Tim, the most-certified Adobe expert,” says Tom Nelms, Head of Partner Growth at MediaMonks. “In total, we have 188 certifications across our network. When we combine that tech ability with our creative, front-end approach, we can help brands transform at speed and scale across their ecosystems.”
Focused on system, people and process, the MediaMonks Solutions team is well versed in helping brands overcome the creative challenge of integrating experiences along a single coherent journey. Critical to the process is that creativity and technology work together to enable the experiences that consumers crave throughout the total brand experiences. And when brands are better equipped to optimize and transform at speed, they’re able to build lasting customer connections and adapt to future changes in the market.
Adobe adobe experience manager adobe analytics adobe campaign tim goodman biztech mediamonks solutions digital experience digital transformation digital ecosystem