What is Customer Journey Analytics?
Experience Businesses are brands that are hyper-focused on crafting customer experiences that resonate with their audiences. Nothing is more vital to these businesses than a clear understanding of their customers’ needs and interests: past, present and future. Therefore, a critical capability for the Experience Business is placing customer insights—derived from data—in the hands of every person who touches the customer in time to influence the micro-moments that constitute experiences. These insights come from analytics that think experience first.
To meet this need, Adobe has developed the next generation of its Analytics offering. Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) allows you to analyze your customer's journey across channels using any data available to you in Adobe Experience Platform, leveraging the power of Analysis Workspace for rapid insights. Customer Journey Analytics lets you control how you connect your online and offline data in Analysis Workspace on any common person ID, finally allowing you to do attribution, segmentation, and journey analysis across your entire customer experience dataset in Adobe Analytics.
Key Use Cases
Customer Journey Analytics enables you to:
- Move beyond digital: With CJA's flexible data schema, you can dive into both online and offline channels, which have traditionally been difficult to explore in digital-only analytics products.
- See the customer in a journey context: You can view and analyze data sequentially, spanning multiple channels. Data from call center, point-of-sale systems, and online properties can be combined into a single reporting view.
- Bring team together & make insights available to everyone: Democratize data access and let more people make business decisions with data-derived insights. Anyone in the organization with responsibility for the customer experience can make real decisions faster, based on more complete data.
- Harness the power of data science for your analysts: CJA lets any business user apply data science to unlock deep insights and analysis.
- Visualize and interact with your datasets using adhoc reporting: CJA can access any dataset from Adobe Experience Platform (that conform to some basic rules), and make it available within Analysis Workspace for flexible, freeform reporting.
- Exert greater control over your data manipulation: Change data you've uploaded, create new datasets, and import them into Analysis Workspace. Adobe Experience Platform provides querying, extracting, transforming, and loading tools.
On the remainder of this page, you will learn about:
- CJA compared to other analytics tools
- Prerequisites for CJA
- How CJA Works: Datasets, Connections and Data views
- Analyzing Cross-Channel Journeys in Analysis Workspace
- Adobe Product Analytics add-on to CJA
- Frequently Asked Questions
You can also watch a recording of our Adobe Summit Customer Journey Analytics presentation below:
CJA Versus...
CJA vs Traditional Digital Analytics Tools
CJA enables you to dive into both online and offline channels, which have traditionally been difficult to explore in digital-only analytics (including Core Adobe Analytics). CJA unlocks capabilities above & beyond traditional digital analytics tools by:
- Connecting online (digital) and offline data together in a cross-channel view
- Removing dimension and metric limits: The concepts of eVars, props, and events no longer exist. Datasets focus on dimensions and metrics and there are no limits.
- Removing unique value limits: Adobe Experience Platform is not constrained to any unique cardinality limitations, such as the 500k unique value limit in Core Adobe Analytics. You can now see every cookie ID, IP address, and customer ID directly in Analysis Workspace.
- Enabling restatement or insertion of historical data: Using Adobe Experience Platform, data can be removed or corrected.
- Enabling dataset merging: Data from disparate datasets or multiple report suites can be combined into a single CJA connection.
- Not requiring new implementation: The Adobe Analytics source connector seamlessly prepares your data in Adobe Experience Platform, for use in CJA.
CJA vs Business Intelligence (BI) Stacks
CJA brings the ease and flexibility of Analysis Workspace to deeply integrated, cross-channel data. Data points are not merely connected by day, they are tied together down to timestamp and person ID. CJA unlocks capabilities above & beyond BI stacks by:
- Enabling rapid data exploration with freeform tables
- Providing attribution, segmentation, and journey analysis (e.g. Flow, Fallout, Cohort, Sequential segmentation) capabilities across any customer experience touchpoint
- Removing the burden of constructing SQL queries by providing users with an interactive & visual data exploration tool
- Connecting insights to action through Adobe Experience Platform integration
Prerequisites for CJA
CJA is available as an add-on for existing Adobe Analytics Select, Prime, or Ultimate customers or as a standalone application that can be purchased without an existing Adobe Analytics contract. Please contact your Adobe account team for further details.
How Does CJA Work?
Adobe Experience Platform Datasets
The first step of CJA is to bring your data into Adobe Experience Platform. Ingested data becomes an Experience Platform dataset, from which a CJA connection can be built.
Experience Platform offers lots of ways to ingest data for both streaming and batch use cases including APIs and a graphical interface for data upload. Experience Platform can bring in data from things like:
- S3 Storage
- Azure Blob Storage
- Kafka Streams
- SFTP Transfers
- CSV File Uploads
- JSON File Uploads
Experience Platform also has out-of-the-box data connectors that make it easy to bring over data you already have in the Adobe ecosystem, such as Adobe Analytics data. Data can be backfilled into Experience Platform historically, as well as streamed to make sure your data is always up to date. You can even tag your digital properties to send data directly to Experience Platform, or have Adobe Launch send the data directly to Experience Platform as well.
Connections
A CJA connection allows you to combine multiple Experience Platform datasets into a single analysis environment in Analysis Workspace. CJA connections leverage the power of the Experience Data Model (XDM) to manage identity and to combine datasets together into a cohesive whole.
There are 3 dataset types that connections can be built from:
Restate Your Data Into A Person ID
CJA allows you to restate all of your event data at the person-level to give you a true cross-channel, cross-device representation of your users. CJA does not depend on cookies (although you can certainly use them) and can work with any identity you specify in your data, whether you set it yourself, use the Adobe Analytics source connector, or allow Adobe’s webSDK to set it for you.
Data Views
Data views sit on top of your connections and act as a metrics/events layer for your data. They give you a consistent view of dimensions and metrics with the right transformations applied in just the right way so that anyone accessing data through CJA can speak the same language and use the same data.
Data views also allow you to filter and permission views of the data with distinct session, timezone, and attribution, persistence, and transformation settings. Multiple data views can be created from a single connection. For example, you could have one data view where all dimensions are set to "Last Touch" and another data view with all dimensions set to "First Touch".
CJA Workspace projects are based on data views, allowing you to toggle to different data views much the same as you would report suites today.
Derived fields
Derived fields allow you to create (often complex) new fields on-the-fly, through a customizable rule builder. These fields can become data view dimensions or metrics which can be used like any other collected component in Customer Journey Analytics.
Analyzing Cross-Channel Data
After you have created your data views, you are ready to analyze the data using the power and flexibility of Analysis Workspace.
More Data Than Ever Before
With CJA, you can dive into both online and offline channels that have traditionally been difficult to explore in digital-only analytics products.
Multiple Data Sources in a Single View
In a single data view, you can analyze & visualize many data sources together - e.g. web/app behavioral data, ad impressions, point-of-sale, email deliveries, and call center.
Cohesive Data No Matter the Source
During the creation of a connection, like-data columns are combined together to create a cohesive view of your data from one source to the next. For example, if your customer can make a purchase in-store, through the call center, and on your website, the 'orders' metric across these 3 sources of data will be combined.
This allows for cross-channel views of your most important dimensions and metrics.
Person-Level Data Integration
Event datasets are stitched together by timestamp + a common person ID that you determine; the data is not simply combined at a summary level. Because of this, CJA journey analysis tools can help you visualize any brand touchpoint in the exact order that it occurs. For example, you can see customers that call into a call center, see a display ad, and then visit your store.
The deep integration of data sources extends to every facet of Analysis Workspace. For example, the Venn visualization can be used to explore people that purchase through multiple channels.
Enriching Your Analysis
Lookup & Profile datasets can further enrich your event data analysis. For example, profile attributes can be added as dropdowns that let you slice & dice your visualizations.
Sequential Journey Filters
Filters (formerly called segments in Adobe Analytics) can be created on-the-fly as you dive deeper into your cross-channel datasets. Sequential filters, in particular, become even more powerful in CJA because they account for the entire customer journey, no longer just digital.
Turning Insight into Action
Insights can be turned into action with audience publishing capabilities. CJA allows you to publish audiences you for segment activation using Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform, or for more personalized journey orchestration using Adobe Journey Optimizer.
Adobe Product Analytics
Adobe Product Analytics enables product teams to self-serve data and insights about their product experience through guided analysis workflows, built on the same cross-channel data of Customer Journey Analytics. Teams can:
- Understand patterns in user engagement overtime
- Analyze the growth of their product’s user base
- Identify friction in the experience
- Measure the impact of feature releases
- Discover meaningful segments to engage & nurture customers throughout their lifelong journey with your product
- Open into Analysis Workspace for deeper analysis and collaboration with Analysts
- and much more
Adobe Product Analytics is an add-on to CJA. Reach out to your Adobe Account team to learn more.
Visit our Adobe Analytics YouTube channel for more inspiration on the cross-channel analysis made possible by CJA.
FAQs
Visit our documentation for a list of frequently asked questions & answers related to all things CJA.
Ready for more content?
Visit adobe.ly/aaresources for a full list of Adobe Analytics Express pages & other helpful resources.