With more than 17 years of product management experience in the e-commerce and B2B industries, Bill Ingram oversees the strategic direction and development of Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social; two of the six solutions that comprise Adobe’s Digital Marketing Cloud.
While at the Adobe Summit in London, I had the opportunity to interview him on the future of Adobe Analytics.
Nicolas Malo: How do you foreesee the evolution of the digital analytics market in the coming years?
Bill Ingram: Based on what we are hearing from our customers, and observing ourselves, I would expect to see analytics encompass all digital properties (websites, applications, TV, interactive kiosks, etc.) into consolidated analytics platforms that are enriched with customer data. We can already see that by 2015, we will be collecting more analytics data from mobile devices than from desktop devices.
The key shift is movement from a focus on visits and visitors to a purview that thinks more in terms of customers and channels. Today, digital analytics solutions are primarily used by web analytics and marketers to asynchronous run reports. At Adobe, our vision is that data should be immediately put to work to drive experiences not just reports. When you shift your thinking to this paradigm, you can see why analytics is the backbone of our Marketing Cloud solution and the fuel for personalization.
We believe also in the need to provide more visual ways to access analytics data. For instance, rather than simply showing the URL of a product page, think of how much more helpful it would be to see the actual images of theproducts in your analytics reports, dashboards and other visualization.
So the market will move from digital analytics to marketing analytics in the coming years as we evolve from “digital marketing,” to “marketing in a digital world.”
Nicolas Malo: Will digital analytics merge with business intelligence?
Bill Ingram: While it is true that there are overlaps in some aspects of what we do with business intelligence, I strongly believe that marketing analytics will stay independent as a market. Business intelligence is primarily used as an ex post facto snapshot view of the business, while digital analytics will provide live information to drive real time interactions.
Nicolas Malo: What are your current top priorities for enhancing the Adobe Analytics solution?
Bill Ingram: I have three main priorities for my team:
- #1 : simplify the implementation experience by reducing the implementation time and complexity. With the number of similar customers we have in so many industries, there are a lot of things our experience has taught us that we should be incorporating into what we do when we help a new customer get up and running. In many cases, we can apply best practices by industry to new implementations to get customers up and running faster, and in a far more effective manner than doing everything custom for every customer.
- #2 : bring together the experiences with unified role-based workflows. We are creating thoughtfully-designed workflows for our most common user personas—we pay attention to more than 30—the primary personas, however are analysts, data scientists, marketers andexecutives. We think about this design from the perspective of foraging, curating and consuming the insights and analyses.
- #3 : make predictive analytics accessible to users who do not have advanced degrees and/or extensive training by making it easy to utilize statistical modeling andadvanced mathematical algorithms. The anomaly detection capabilities that we shipped in the Fall of 2013 are a great example of very sophisticated analytics that are very easy to use, and drive powerful insights for our customers.
Nicolas Malo: Which innovations have you released recently for Adobe Analytics?
Bill Ingram: We have just announced the following major innovations that will ship in our Spring release due out next week:
- Live Stream: a real time sub-millisecond data API with real time metrics (available right now for Adobe Analytics Premium customers). Live stream will enable marketers to do things like: leverage real time dashboards to display events as they unfold; implement in-session remarketing to help when consumers appear stuck in a browsing session; and build instantaneous traffic visualizations from a specific channel or referral site. We allow our customers to hook approximately 300 event metrics immediately after they reach our servers. There is an example of a dashboard made with our Live Stream API on this site.
- Unified Segment Builder: we are rolling out next week a brand-new UI for audience segmentation. These new segments, called "Audience Segments", are easily created by dragging and dropping key variables, such as gender, region, average order value, and others into the interface.The segments created in Unified Segment Builder can then be made available to any Marketing Cloud application to target that audience. It is also possible to apply any segments you have created to any report without limitations—we call this “stacking”.
- Decision Trees: this new visualization tool is the next generation of a pathing analysis. The reports will be based on users and not on pages or visits. Using new decision trees in Adobe Analytics, marketers can now predict the most likely decisions a customer will make. This helps marketers understand what influences whether they will make a purchase, watch a video, or take another desired action. Decision trees can enable a wide range of things fro marketers from defining the creation ofintelligent rules for website targeting and email offers, to assisting call center agents in personalizing customer conversations as they are happening.
Nicolas Malo: Do you intend to integrate more Social Analytics features directly into Adobe Analytics?
Bill Ingram: Advanced Social Analytics features are already available with our Adobe Social solution, which is focused not just on analytics—or listening—but also on the other aspects of managing your social marketing, including moderation, publishing application development and management and campaign management.
Customers who subscribe to Adobe Social and Adobe Analytics, can access the Social Analytics data directly in the Adobe Analytics interface.
Nicolas Malo: Do you have any plans for waking up the Adobe Analytics users’ community?
Bill Ingram: We have recently launched the Adobe Marketing Cloud Exchange in order to wake up the developer community around our products, including Adobe Analytics.
We are developing new forums, social discussion boards and community sites for fans, marketers and our user community. They will be available for all Marketing Cloud applications, including Adobe Analytics.
Nicolas Malo: Thank you very much Bill for this interview!
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