Executive guide to success with Adobe Customer Journey Analytics

Lead with Purpose

Lead with Purpose

CJA is flexible and can accommodate many avenues of study, but we find the most successful rollouts begin with a clear intent or set of use cases. Your team needs to understand the goal state to ensure datasets are available and joinable and to create the views in CJA that facilitate relevant analysis.

The level of detail required to convey strategy and use cases for effective adoption will vary. These are samples from real customer rollouts, showing a variety of both general and specific goals that were used to shape the implementation and first use of CJA.

• Create a dashboard which gives the team a view into the customer journey from being a user to a client and their site/app behavior.
• Enable people-centric reporting based on Loyalty ID as People ID in CJA.
• Identify customers who have booked in-app only, web only and both.
• Ability to view joined data from the Global Data Mart and Adobe Analytics to see potential for customer-centric insights in CJA.
• Ability to view KPIs related to retention of customers across multiple tiers. Activity across multiple channels must be tracked to determine potential patterns related to retention and attrition.

Defining your objectives will clarify the path for your team, helping to quickly prove value and build adoption.

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ACTION: Clearly communicate to your delivery team the business objectives that CJA will address. This will allow your team to align to those objectives, efficiently configure your CJA environment, and roll-out appropriate person idenitifers which are critical to long-term success.

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Assemble the Team

Assemble the Team

Typical marketing organizations have teams aligned into roles such as:

• BI Architects
• BI Analysts
• Marketing Operations
• Channel Analysts
• Director or Executive Leadership

CJA presents opportunities for improved cross-functional collaboration and decreases time to insights. Employees in traditional roles listed above may map into key functional roles for CJA, as described below.

Product Owner:   Owns the strategy for CJA

• Defines the use cases or value stories that CJA must solve.
• Prioritizes efforts from data ingestion to deep dive analyses to value realization storytelling.
• Drives cross-functional collaboration and adoption of CJA.
• Without this direction, the setup, adoption, and value of CJA are at risk.
• Typically, this is a Director or executive-level leadership role.

Digital Architect: Owns the data ingestion for CJA/AEP

• Defines and records the schemas and data relationships for AEP.
• May also execute tactical ingestion processes for data entering AEP.
• Without this leadership, it takes longer to properly ingest data in AEP, as careful upfront planning is needed to align the data in a format that supports the strategic use cases.
• Typically, this role is filled by employees with a database or BI architecture skillset.

Digital Analytics & Operations Lead: Owns the reporting for CJA

• Configures and maintains the CJA Connection and Data View settings.
• Directs enablement processes for others to use CJA properly and generate accurate insights.
• Without such guidance, the data and usage processes for CJA may not suit the expectations and requirements of reporting teams.
• Typically, Marketing Operations leaders will oversee CJA tactical direction.

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ACTION: Identify resources that align to key roles of CJA (and Adobe Experience Platform dataset management). Consider resources from all marketing teams that work on customer analysis and activation, not only those within a single siloed group.

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Prepare Your Data

Prepare Your Data

CJA has few prerequisites for usage: it requires that datasets are loaded in Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), with each event dataset containing a timestamp and a field for identifying people in CJA. In practice, this person identifier field is often a CRM number, customer ID/hash, or a loyalty program number.

Choose the best customer identifier that is available across the datasets required for your use case. Ensure the person identifier field is present in all datasets used with CJA. If this field is not present and matching across datasets, your datasets will remain siloed in CJA.

The process of sourcing, transforming, cleaning, and loading data into AEP is not always simple. That said, AEP offers turnkey Data Connectors for some sources, such as Adobe Analytics, to streamline data ingestion. Be aware that additional time is required for custom data sources, as data formats and delivery methods must be established.

Additionally, consider leveraging Cross-Channel Analytics to simplify the person identifier requirement, especially for Web datasets where a known customer ID is sometimes unavailable. This tool provides automatic re-keying of the person identifier and looks at user data from both authenticated and unauthenticated sessions to generate a stitched ID. This built-in capability will save your team dozens of hours in building a custom solution, and improves the cross-channel analysis of CJA. For more details, see product documentation.

Recommended Actions:

1. Share your dataset requirements with your AEP data architects who will manage the appropriation of datasets into AEP. Identify data sources, important fields, and field types that are relevant to your use cases.
2. As part of these requirements, work with your AEP data architects to determine the best person identifier for analysis across your datasets that will be ingested into CJA. Verify the chosen identifier exists across datasets.
3. Your AEP data architects may need to make adjustments to schemas or datasets to meet your requirements. Once they confirm datasets are ready, continue configuring your CJA connection with those datasets and identifiers.

Operational Governance and Excellence

Operational Governance and Excellence

All data platforms require processes for maintenance, quality assurance, education, and validation. CJA must have a strong system of governance established to maximize value and minimize misunderstanding. It requires support like that of a large web analytics program and some BI environments. CJA will provide easy, distributed access to merged company datasets, so there must be systems to ensure proper enablement and usage of the data and tool.

The support structure for Customer Journey Analytics should include:

• User enablement programs
• User self-service resources (documentation, videos, support, and other resources available on Experience League)
• Templates and best practices
• Use case and insight repository
• Access and configuration management
• AEP data architecture management

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ACTION: Evolve your approach to governance by continually updating processes and programs that will maintain overall operational excellence. Leverage the activities in the support structure above and deploy quarterly status checks to solicit process feedback and identify areas for improvement.

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