Executive guide to success with Adobe Analytics

Share Your Vision

Share Your Vision

As an executive level sponsor, your role is critical to the overall success of your analytics program. You define long-term goals, allocate resources, and build partnership and alignment across teams to grow the practice. But to ensure a successful Adobe Analytics rollout, you must also share your vision for analytics both inside and outside your organization.

Inside your organization: When your team knows the primary objective, it will guide many of their implementation decisions, and later it will guide their adoption and usage. Part of this includes an understanding of how your analytics strategy will support the overall business objectives and KPIs. Soliciting feedback will build trust & ensure everyone is executing toward common goals.

Outside your organization: You will have many stakeholders and collaborators who may not fully understand the power of analytics and what it can do. This is a great opportunity to share what your team does, set expectations for analytics, and lay the foundation for upcoming alignment meetings. Once they see the larger vision and the benefit to their departments, you’ll quickly have champions throughout your organization. In turn, this will boost the widespread adoption of Analytics, which creates a data-driven culture.

_______________________________

ACTION:  Write down 2-4 sentences about “Why Adobe Analytics” and how it will: 1) help deliver on overall business objectives and 2) help individual departments achieve their own performance goals. Share this with your team and stakeholders in other departments. Solicit feedback often to keep a pulse on how well Adobe Analytics is delivering on your vision.

_______________________________

Assemble the Team

Assemble the Team

Successful Adobe Analytics teams have several key members:

A strong analytics owner. This person is fundamental to your success with Adobe Analytics. They will:

• Be the key contact for executives and business partners
• Own digital analytics within the organization
• Work closely with the executive sponsor (which could be you)
• Focus on corporate-level issues while maintaining visibility into regional or business unit issues
• Drive cultural change and product adoption within the organization
• Create a training plan that helps each business unit become self-sufficient in Adobe Analytics
• Look for opportunities spanning across business units
• Manage the core team, helping them support the organization’s KBOs

Ideally this candidate will be strategic, web & tech-savvy, an Analytics expert, have excellent communication skills, and is comfortable leading cross-functional projects. If they have marketing experience too, that’s even better.

_______________________________

ACTION: Identify one of your employees or hire a seasoned analytics owner to take on the role.

_______________________________

Business analyst(s). They focus on business partner KPIs and analyze these across business units. They proactively reach out to business partners to understand end users’ changing needs, ensure adequate reporting, and deliver new user training to the organization. They also document and socialize analytics success stories.

A technical architect. They coordinate technical aspects of analytics for all business partners with technical leads. This includes identifying optimal ways to design the implementation to answer business questions, maintaining a library of implementation documentation, and administering new accounts and permissions.

Technical lead(s). They are the contact for technical aspects of analytics for assigned business partners. They provide detailed tagging instructions to Implementation Developers, make sure corporate standards are followed, and assist in QA efforts on data collection for business partners’ projects to guarantee ongoing data integrity.

Implementation developers. They code needed changes to meet business requirements. They also do initial testing of analytics tagging. Most Adobe clients find that a centralized team performs this function better than attempting to get disparate IT teams to understand Adobe tagging.

_______________________________

ACTION: Set a meeting with your analytics owner to identify and assign staff to these roles.

_______________________________

Measuring Success

Measuring Success

Adobe Analytics will provide value to your business in a variety of ways depending on your organization’s goals and objectives. The most impactful benefits fall into the following categories:

• Productivity gains from ability of users to quickly and efficiently discover CX insights across digital experiences to inform business decisions and understand marketing results. Analyses that previously may have taken days or weeks to complete can be accomplished in minutes in Adobe Analytics. Self-service across business units will not only result in more timely access to key data points, but it will free up the digital analytics team to focus on more complex analyses to uncover high-impact business opportunities.
  • MEASURE: Number of monthly active Adobe Analytics users, faster time-to-insight by leveraging Adobe Analytics, reduction in support requests to analytics team.
• Business KPI optimization via CX changes from data-driven customer behavior insights. Adobe Analytics will allow your organization to quickly and easily establish KPI benchmarks and which key user flows and actions influence those KPIs most. Uncovering these relationships will inform which elements of the customer experience to prioritize resources to optimizing, and your organization can measure the impact of those optimizations on KPIs relative to the benchmarks.
  • MEASURE: Improvements in key metrics such as leads generated, conversion rates, increased self-service, call volume reduction, etc..

_______________________________

ACTION: Establish benchmarks now before you launch Adobe Analytics at your organization so that you can easily compare efficiencies, measure KPI improvements, and generate savings calculations.

_______________________________

The Importance of Governance

The Importance of Governance

Adobe finds that a strong data governance model is critical to maximizing data integrity, trust, adoption, and workflow efficiency, and ultimately achieving operational excellence with your Analytics program.

We recommend a 4-part data governance model to ensure that all aspects of your Analytics program are accounted for:

1. Org & Team Readiness: It’s not enough to assemble the right team of experts to run & operate the solution. Adobe also recommends creating a steering committee with leadership representation from all key stakeholder groups. Additionally, establishing a Center of Excellence (COE) will set up the analytics organization as a service to the enterprise. The COE will govern the standards, processes, and practices integral to building and sustaining a strong analytics culture across the business. Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) will naturally emerge across key stakeholder groups and will become champions of Analytics to their own teams.
2. Data Collection Strategy: First and foremost, an analytics solution must be designed to address business goals and key performance indicators in order to deliver value. It should also adhere to organizational & government data compliance policies like GDPR. Solution documentation should be created and updated regularly to reflect the evolution of the analytics solution. Developing a formal tagging intake process will also ensure requests are prioritized and executed appropriately.
3. Data Health Collection Strategy: Trust in the data is imperative in digital analytics and having well-defined, thorough testing & validation processes will ensure high levels of data fidelity. Without strong governance of data health, there will inevitably be data integrity issues that will dilute the trust of the implementation within the organization, resulting in low/no adoption of reporting and insights.
4. Data Democratization: This pillar is critical to ensuring that the right data and insights are available to the right business partners at the right time. Organizations thrive most when Adobe Analytics can be self-service and insights can be derived at the speed of thought. Without data democratization, customer experience optimization opportunities are missed, and the organization is unlikely to embrace a culture of data-driven decision-making.

_______________________________

ACTION: Ensure the Analytics Owner develops a well-defined governance plan for Adobe Analytics that encompasses the 4 pillars of the Data Governance Maturity Model.

_______________________________