The Measurement Blog is curated content from the Evolytics staff, bringing you the most interesting news in data and analysis from around the web. The Evolytics staff has proven experience and expertise in analytics strategy, tagging implementation, data engineering, and data visualization.

KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM ADOBE SUMMIT 2018’S OPENING GENERAL SESSION

ADOBE BLOG | BLOG

The theme of Adobe Summit in 2018 was simple: 

People buy experiences, not products.

The main ingredient in creating cohesive, amazing experiences is data.

“Data was a bigger theme across all sessions this year…more than ever before. Since  Adobe’s platform breadth of the Experience Cloud includes Creative, Analytics, Advertising, Marketing, and Document Cloud products there have historically been a lot of sessions that didn’t speak to the importance of data.” Evolytics President, Carey Wilkins, told the team after returning. “However, most sessions this year emphasized the importance of data – better data collection, better integration for experience creation, and better integration of data for machine learning, which Adobe showcased often with Sensei integrations across the cloud platforms. It’s exciting to be in the data and analytics space right now.”

A particularly bold prediction made at Summit is that artificial intelligence, AI, will have a larger impact than the Internet or smartphones. While your organization may or may not be consciously aware of how Adobe Sensei powers new AI features, you’re likely already seeing the benefits. Adobe is dreaming big with Sensei, aiming to “blend the science of data with the art of creativity.”

One of the new initiatives announced at Adobe Summit is Adobe Experience League, an enablement program to help Experience Cloud users get a better ROI from the platform.

Want to make sure you’re getting everything you can from your Adobe Stack? As an Adobe Solution Partner, we can help.

In short, it’s all about the customer experience, and good experiences need good data.

ADOBE LAUNCH IS ENTERING BETA TESTING

ADOBE | PRODUCT PAGE

Our analytics developers were most excited to see Adobe Launch, a new tag management system, finally come to fruition.

While we’re excited about Launch’s new features, we’re also happy to hear that Adobe plans to keep its tag management product free for Adobe Experience Cloud customers.  

According to Adobe, Launch is more than just an updated DTM.

“Launch is an entirely new product with a new code base,” Adobe’s blog states. “The system has been re-architected from scratch using modern front-end development practices and an API-first approach — everything is built upon a robust set of APIs, making the system very powerful and very flexible.”

The new platform is as close to open source as we’ve ever seen from Adobe. The new platform will allow organizations and vendors to create third-party integrations without relying on the Adobe Engineering team.

Adobe is excited about four new features that exist in Launch, but not DTM:

1. Quick and easy deployment of non-Adobe, client-side browser technologies
2. Precise organizational and management libraries
3. Robust approval workflows
4. Granular Rights Management

Contact our developer team to stay in-the-know about Adobe Launch updates and get help making the switch from DTM.

NEW ADOBE TARGET ENHANCEMENTS UNLOCK THE POWER OF AI IN PERSONALIZATION

ADOBE BLOG | BLOG

Everyone who attended Adobe Summit came back talking about Adobe Sensei. Our A/B Testing team was particularly excited about updates to Adobe Target, which is evolving beyond just a testing tool into a powerful personalization tool.

The black box typically associated with machine learning makes us nervous. As analysts, we naturally question the answers provided by the machine, and we want to understand it for ourselves. Adobe understands and has responded by creating a Personalization Insights report to show which visitor attributes were most influential in Sensei’s predictive model. We look forward to seeing these reports when they launch in beta this spring.

Adobe Target Premium will now allow customers to enhance its recommendation engine with custom criteria, essentially uploading data models to increase the impact of recommendations. In Adobe’s words:

“Using Custom criteria, the movie streaming brand can apply the results of a propensity model that scores the customer based on his or her propensity score for romance, comedy, horror, action, documentary, or drama categories of movies. If that customer’s affinity changes from action to comedy, at run time, the company can now deliver recommendations for comedies.”

We’re excited to see Adobe taking an approach similar to Evolytics, combining the capabilities of predictive analytics and A/B testing to drive value through Adobe Target. All of this, of course, is preceded by solid analytics strategy and fueled by trustworthy data.