symp18At its annual Symposium in Singapore, Adobe once again highlighted its belief that the right combination of relevant data, compelling content, and stunning design are fundamental to delivering outstanding customer experiences.

The leading industry conference for digital experience and business transformation was held again at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, where around one thousand marketing experts and digital leaders met to hear first-hand success stories from the best-known Adobe customers, such as Coca-Cola, Malaysia Airlines or Starhub, talking on-site how Adobe Experience Cloud provides them with a complete set of solutions to run successful Experience Business.

Under the motto "Experience Makers", Adobe presented a group of selected companies that already uses and deploys crucial customer information correctly, enabling them to play the right content, at the right time, via the right channel. After all, it is more important than ever to offer customers a relevant and consistent experience across all channels in order to create inspiring experiences. Adobe wants to get this point across, constantly emphasizing that only with the right ‘Experience’, businesses can meet the increasing demands of customers and successfully set themselves apart from the competition.

I enjoyed especially the short media briefing session with Adobe’s top experts - Brad Rencher, Executive VP & GM of Adobe Digital Experience, Paul Robson, President for Asia Pacific, and V.R Srivatsan, Managing Director, Southeast Asia – who were talking about the Adobe Experience Cloud business direction; as well as perspectives and business momentum in APAC and SEA for 30 minutes. Quintessentially they all highlighted that “experience is the new currency for business success today and that customers expect amazing experiences no matter where and how they are interacting with a brand.”

Consequently, analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning come to the fore. With the acquisition of the Internet analytics expert Omniture almost a decade ago, Adobe laid a good foundation for its second key marketing software, which found its place a few years ago in Adobe’s Marketing Cloud. Today, Adobe Analytics features provide marketers with additional intuitive insights and continuous improvements in audience quality, helping their clients to understand customers in today's jungle of digital channels on different devices. Adobe’s customers need to be able to connect all the touch points and deduce core insights to be able to initiate the best possible actions for an exciting customer experience.

Constantly on the look-out for improvements, Adobe introduced many new advanced analytics capabilities for better audience quality and the consolidation of enterprise-wide data silos. New features include context-based sessions, audience analytics, analysis workspace extensions (Adobe's easy-to-use data collection and analysis tool), and virtual report updates for mobile teams.

These new features enable better collaboration, faster analytics, and improved customer intelligence that can deliver meaningful insights lickety-split and more accuracy on the path to a successful customer experience. All this explains, why the leader in marketing analytics has thousands of brands using Adobe products in a unique and progressive way. The company utterly offers detailed behavioral analysis and unprecedented powerful segmentation at all levels. Nearly two thirds of Fortune 100 companies use the Adobe Analytics Cloud to address today's digital challenges and the number of customers more than doubled in the past three years.

Additional features of Adobe Analytics include:

Cross-Channel Journey Analytics on-the-fly: Context-based sessions in the analysis workspace allow marketers to flexibly define what a "session" should represent to dynamically provide a more in-depth analysis of multi-channel customer journeys. For example, an automobile brand may have multiple points of contact with consumers via a mobile app: one of these could be a very short interaction, such as a remote start of the car; another might be that the user is planning an oil change at a dealer. Both actions differ in the time a consumer spends with the brand. The new context-based sessions now provide app development teams with the ability to define in more detail how long a user interaction with an app takes to create a more meaningful context for analysis. These parameters can be redefined and applied retroactively on-the-fly, enabling brands to gain better insights even faster. Unlike other providers that process sessions based on time-out parameters that are hard-coded on the mobile app client side, Adobe passes all behavior data to the server and applies session configurations to the server side. This helps Adobe to give brands a clearer picture of how users interact with their experiences. At the same time, it helps their customers to understand micro journeys in mobile apps. Most importantly, they retain the flexibility to change session configurations and adapt to current requirements.

Continuous optimization of audiences: Audience Analytics is now available in both Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager, which gives marketers the ability to consistently track audience metrics and optimize valuable customer experiences quickly and effectively. This happens above all through a new bidirectional integration of the products. For example, through deeper integration, a publisher’s personalization team can identify audience segments with the highest exposure to Adobe Analytics and then redirect them to Adobe Audience Manager for use in an ad campaign. After the campaign, these ad groups and their campaign performance data can be re-integrated with Adobe Analytics to further analyze and refine the audience for the next campaign. This ongoing improvement is unique in the industry.

New location context directly visible: New map visualizations in Adobe Analytics allow marketers to easily view their customer interactions in the context of the location of a mobile app user or digital channel visitor. For example, a retailer can see that a promotion within the shop’s mobile app has achieved significantly more in-store traffic at location A or B, allowing brands to optimize their advertising strategies in a targeted manner to control the desired performance.

Adobe Analytics seems to constantly expand its integration within the Adobe Advertising Cloud, that’s part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, which again interrelates the Adobe Creative Cloud and the Adobe Document Cloud for a novel combination of AI and design. Clearly, Adobe’s ultimate goal is giving marketers more visibility into how paid search drives engagement on other channels and helping to overcome the lack of proper attribution that has long been a pain point for brands.

By Daniela La Marca