Whether you see it as an upgrade, a beneficial transition, or just progress, many companies are making the switch to Adobe's Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) tool. Both Adobe Analytics (AA) and CJA are powerful tools, but they have very different approaches in how they work. While there are many technical differences, in this article we will look at the key changes an analyst would see as they are working in workspace.
From Visits to Journeys
The first and most glaring difference an Analyst would see as they enter into a CJA workspace is the change in terminology. While on the surface this may feel like a change for change’s sake, there is a purpose behind it: that is the change in perspective from Visits to Journeys. AA primarily focuses on web analytics, leveraging metrics like "hits," "visits," and "unique visitors." While valuable, this perspective may sometimes feel limited. CJA, however, uses more customer-centric terminology. CJA employs much broader such as "people," "sessions," and "events," to better define the entire customer journey across all touchpoints, both online and off. This shift in perspective enables a more holistic view of the customer, moving beyond just website traffic analysis.
From Suites to Views
Directly at the top of the panel is the Data View selector. This one doesn’t look as different in CJA; however, because the use case may be a bit different, it is worth noting. While AA utilizes report suites, CJA uses Data Views. On the surface this seems like two terms for the same thing, but Data Views in CJA are a bit more dynamic. Direct from Adobe, "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." While a Report Suite in AA was generally a different dataset, a Data View in CJA allows you to look at you dataset from a different angele quickly in the same report. In the Data View setting, you can set up different attribution models, bot traffic filtering, or experiment with new configurations before releasing them into your organization. All of this at no additional cost.
Beyond the Processing
Moving right along, we see the introduction of derived fields. Not only do these take the place of AA's processing rules, but they expand upon them. Generally speaking, processing rules are a list of "IF - Then" statements that help you classify data. Derived fields do the same, but with much greater diversity. Derived fields allow you to use many additional functions like Classify, Concatenate, Duplicate, Find and Replace, as well as many others. I mention this as something that analysts may notice in workspace because you now have the ability to edit all your components from workspace much like you can with calculated metrics and segments in AA workspace. This capability brings a lot more power and diversity into your analysis without the need to exit or reload your workspace.
Evolving Beyond eVars and Props
eVars and Props are the basic building blocks of Adobe Analytics and workspace, but in CJA the need for these is no longer there. Now, in CJA's Data View settings, a user can easily set or adjust a metric’s attribution settings or a dimension’s persistence settings on the fly. In the same way a user would edit a derived field from workspace, a user may also make adjustments to attribution and persistence. By selecting a component in you desired data view, you will see all your familiar attribution models in your metric settings and a variety of persistence settings available in your dimension settings.
It is important to note that users can pull a component into a data view more than once so they can have the same data with different settings behind it.
A Whole Journey
The largest and most important difference between AA and CJA is, without a doubt, the integration of Adobe's Identity Service. While this isn't a tool you will see in workspace, you will definitely see the results of it at work. This technology allows Adobe to create graphs for each unique person and tie their journey together using multiple key identifiers. Not only does this tie a group of Visits together into a Unique Visitor, but it also allows visits from different devices and datasets to be combined into one data view to get a holistic view of the user’s journey. (Going back to the first point, this is a primary reason for the changes in terminology.)
For many, a key selling point to CJA is its ability to pull in a multitude of offline data sets and tie it all together in workspace. Identity Service is what allows this to work. It is relatively easy to setup a new schema and upload whole datasets into Experience cloud and tie it into your existing online dataset. This can be a very powerful asset that expands an analyst’s view of their users or customers.
Wrapping it up
While I have been told that CJA is not supposed to be "New Adobe Analytics" or a replacement for AA, it does represent a significant evolution in Adobe's analytics offering. There are a lot of exciting changes both under the hood and in workspace, making it easier and more intuitive analysis. CJA allows an analyst or marketer to look beyond just website data and get a deeper look into their customers and their journey; too bad they didn’t think about that while naming the product…