Many companies are adopting Adobe's Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) for a comprehensive view of customer interactions. CJA focuses on Journeys instead of Visits, uses Data Views over Report Suites, and offers flexibility with derived fields and identity stitching. These features provide deeper insights, making analysis more intuitive and efficient.
Many companies are transitioning to Adobe's Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) tool. While both Adobe Analytics (AA) and CJA are powerful tools, they take fundamentally different approaches. This article focuses on the key changes analysts will encounter when working in the workspace, rather than diving into technical differences.
From Visits to Journeys
The first and most glaring difference analysts encounter when entering a CJA workspace is the shift from Visits to Journeys. While this may seem like an arbitrary change, it serves a specific purpose. AA primarily focuses on web analytics, using metrics like "hits," "visits," and "unique visitors." Though valuable, this perspective can be limiting. CJA, by contrast, uses more customer-centric terminology, employing broader terms such as "people," "sessions," and "events" to better capture the entire customer journey across all touchpoints, both online and offline. This shift in perspective enables a more holistic view of the customer, moving beyond simple website traffic analysis.
From Report Suites to Data Views
The Data View selector is located at the top of the CJA Workspace panel. While it resembles its AA counterpart, it serves a distinct purpose. AA relies on report suites, whereas CJA uses Data Views. Although these concepts may appear similar, Data Views in CJA offer greater flexibility.
As Adobe states, "Data views let you spontaneously change schema element settings, without having to change the schema in Adobe Experience Platform or re-implementing your Customer Journey Analytics environment." Unlike AA's Report Suites, which typically contain distinct collected datasets, a Data View in CJA enables you to analyze multiple datasets from different perspectives within a single report. Through Data View settings, you can instantly test various attribution models at the component level, filter bot traffic as a general setting, or experiment with new component configurations before implementation—all at no additional cost.
Beyond Processing to Report-Time Processing
CJA introduces derived fields—an evolution of AA's processing rules with expanded capabilities. Unlike processing rules that rely on simple "if-then" statements, derived fields offer enhanced flexibility through powerful functions including Classify, Concatenate, Deduplicate, and Find and Replace. CJA Administrators will welcome a significant workspace enhancement: all components can now be edited directly within the workspace, similar to calculated metrics and segments in AA workspace to streamline workflows.
Evolving Beyond eVars and Props
While eVars and Props have traditionally served as the fundamental variable building blocks in Adobe Analytics Workspace environments, CJA eliminates the need for conventional allocated variable structures. Through CJA's Data View settings interface, administrators have flexibility to modify and customize various component settings. This includes the ability to adjust a metric's base attribution settings or fine-tune a dimension's base persistence settings—with all changes being applied retroactively and non-destructively to preserve data integrity. This flexibility allows CJA administrators to adjust component attribution and persistence settings as business needs change. Additionally, users can add the same component to a data view multiple times, each with different settings, to analyze the data in various ways.
A Whole Journey
CJA provides two identity stitching options: Field-based stitching and Graph-based stitching. These systems work behind the scenes to match user identities across different touchpoints using shared identifiers. The stitching process can combine multiple user sessions into a single unified user experience by merging data from various devices and sources. This creates a complete Data View that shows the full user journey, giving organizations clear insights into how customers interact across journeys.
Wrapping it up
Although CJA isn't meant to be a "New Adobe Analytics" or replace AA, it represents a significant evolution in Adobe's analytics platform. The product features many exciting improvements, both in its underlying technology and workspace interface, making analysis more intuitive and efficient. CJA empowers analysts and marketers to look beyond website data for deeper insights into customer journeys—too bad they didn’t think about that while naming the product ;).