Exclusive: Adobe today announces new features the Analysis Workspace within the Adobe Analytics Cloud. The changes will enhance the opportunity for non-data scientists to “work with data in an intuitive, interactive, and very visual way,” said Adobe’s Ben Gaines, group product manager for Analytics Cloud.
The Analysis Workspace was introduced in 2015, offering not only a variety of reporting capabilities, but opportunities for employees not accustomed to working with data to drill down into simple dashboards for deeper insights. Today’s announcements are:
- Custom templates, allowing for faster and more flexible visualization and interpretation of data
- Maps, giving users the opportunity to generate location-based visualizations of any trends or metrics, and
- New mobile templates, focusing on the performance of in-app and push messages.
I spoke to Ben to get more background on the improvements. “One of the challenges organizations have is that digital data is often hard for people to understand,” he said. Previously, the templates within the workspace were pre-built, interactive dashboards — “out of the box.” Now brands can create their own custom templates. Analysts can define templates, and pre-populate them with relevant data. Non-analysts, from business unit stakeholders to the CEO, can then manipulate and explore the data, and build their own visual representations, from bar graphs to Venn diagrams to donut charts (and more).
New pre-built templates, he told me, include, for example, analytics related to mobile app acquisition; often overlooked in favor of metrics on downstream conversion.
The new geographic insights feature, he said, “lets you go pretty granular with geo-data.” Users can create maps showing any data trends and metrics (including heat maps). “We capture mountains of data on where people are going, where people are buying, and can visualize it for any part of the world,” down to the level of hot spots within cities. The resulting representations behave like any map app (users can zoom in and out); all the underlying data comes from the Analytics Cloud.
“One of the things customers are really excited about,” he told me, “is the rapidity with which we’re iterating the Analysis Workspace. We’re very aggressively looking to make it more usable and more intuitive.” Especially if that means C-level executive can use it “without any hand-holding at all.”
Ben’s own description of the enhancements can be found here.
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Some other items arriving over the virtual transom:
- Criteo, the eCommerce accelerator, today released its global commerce review for Q4 2017, based on data from over 5,000 retailers in more than 80 countries. Among the main takeaways: a more than 50% YOY increase in in-app transactions; retailers with shopping apps account for nearly 70% of mobile eCommerce transactions; mobile web usage, however, seems to have achieved maturity.
- Bazaarvoice, the UGC marketing platform, this week released an new eBook underlining the importance of getting personalization right. Disgruntled customers vote with their feet. 50% of consumers surveyed headed for a competitor after a bad brand experience; 41% stopped shopping with a company after a bad personalization experience (you can add me to that list); and 38% won’t return to retailers who make recommendations which don’t make sense.
- Finally, Datorama, the unified marketing intelligence solution, announced new offices and a 50% headcount increase planned for 2018. Datorama relates its expansion to constraints on marketing budgets, and increased pressure on brands to show ROI on marketing spend.
