Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics – The Differences

In a fast-paced business environment, it is essential to adapt to technology that offers effective business solutions.

For instance, analytics platforms help you operationalize analytics.

Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics are two popular analytics tools enabling businesses to analyze digital performance.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how you can leverage these platforms for digital success. Let’s dive in!

Introduction to Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) helps you track and understand customer behavior.

It enables you to understand user experience and device functionality, and mold marketing strategies by deriving actionable insights.

GA helps you maximize the impact of marketing efforts by providing you:

a. Actionable Insights to Increase ROI
b. Improved Understanding of User Behavior
c. Targeted Marketing With First-Party Data
d. Opportunities to Invest in Effective Content

Introduction to Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics (AA) is an analytics tool and leading solution that fetches data based on user behavior and preferences.

It provides you with in-depth understanding of your audience and helps you apply detailed segmentation across marketing channels.

Adobe Analytics enables you to harness the power of customer intelligence and upscale your business.

It can be applied by different teams to focus on specific marketing initiatives.

You can create custom dashboards to use the metrics for your campaigns. Its benefits include:

a. Understanding Customers
b. Discovering Insights
c. Determining Website Issues
d. Real-Time Data Collection
e. Easy-To-Read Visualization

Key Differences Between Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics

1. User Interface & User-Friendliness

Google Analytics has a very simple and easy-to-use interface. The latest version of analytics, GA4, is also very navigable.

It is not just about graphs and tables, but it comes with a hassle-free reporting style and detailed menus.

Standard tracking in GA is compiled into a small JavaScript snippet.

This can be placed on the website and the tool can be installed easily, which makes implementation easier.

On the other hand, the user interface in Adobe Analytics is customizable from business to business.

The complexity of its user interface requires you to learn key implementation and reporting skills.

Using Adobe Analytics requires you to have skilled programmers and expert assistance.

2. Attribution Model

An attribution model allocates value to each touchpoint in the customer journey.

Google Analytics has attribution models that support multi-channel funnels.

It enables you to combine online and offline user behavior to get a holistic view of the user journey across devices and platforms.

GA4 properties provide enhanced attribution features. They offer a revamped ‘Conversion Paths’ report and property-level attribution modeling.

Adobe Analytics, on the other hand, offers two attribution models, i.e., the ‘First Touch’ and ‘Last Touch’ reports.

‘Workspace’, a reporting and visualization tool built into Adobe Analytics has an Attribution IQ feature.

Here, you can select from multiple attribution models such as U-shaped, J-curve, and Participation.

3. eCommerce Tracking

Structured reporting is important for eCommerce businesses.

Google Analytics provides a complete eCommerce tracking setup with features such as ‘Enhanced eCommerce’ to track the user journey.

Its implementation should be done properly to leverage the benefits of predefined reports such as:

a. eCommerce Overview
b. Shopping Behavior
c. Checkout Behavior
d. Performance Sales
e. Product List Performance

Adobe Analytics provides predefined, structured, and detailed reports including eCommerce click count, conversions, and potential prospects generated.

You can also create a Fallout report in Adobe Workspace, however, it does not present a detailed analysis like Google Analytics.

4. Reporting

Google Analytics offers pre-configured out-of-the-box reports to measure website performance and acquisition patterns.

It provides you with a dedicated reporting and visualization tool called Google Data Studio to analyze website performance and user behavior.

This is a cloud-based tool that can be used to build dashboards and reports.

Adobe has a set of advanced reporting and visualization tools such as Report Builder, Adobe Workspace, and Ad Hoc Analysis.

They directly connect Adobe Analytics and enable you to create customized reports.

The drag-and-drop functionality for adding metrics, dimensions, and segments requires training to be used.

5. Integration

Google Analytics enables integration with Google Ads, Display & Video 360, BigQuery, Search Ads 360, and Google Optimize.

These products play a significant role in capturing user attributes. GA can also be integrated easily with Salesforce to collect unified CRM data.

Adobe Analytics can be integrated with performance monitoring tools such as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Advertising Cloud, and Adobe Target.

However, it is difficult to integrate with advertising platforms such as Google Ads.

Why Businesses Run Adobe Analytics & Google Analytics Simultaneously

1. Marketing & Attribution

Since Google has a robust marketing suite, it helps analyze conversions and the user journey at every touchpoint.

The integration capabilities it offers help marketers build targeted media audiences as per their online behavior.

Adobe Analytics has a unique setup that helps you with customization and creating dimensions and metrics to achieve marketing objectives.

2. Analytics Implementation

An effective implementation is the foundation of any digital practice.

Therefore, you need to have a strong GA implementation that helps you maximize business potential.

For Adobe Analytics, it’s important to have skilled professionals that can help you with initial implementation and maintenance.

3. Reporting Customization

Both analytics platforms help you collect user data and convert it into actionable insights. These insights are helpful in driving engagement and ROI.

Google Analytics is helpful in pulling insightful reports about customer acquisition, behavior, and measuring conversions.

It can be easily integrated with GDS, which eventually expands Google’s custom reporting capabilities.

The structured reporting interface and freeform reporting in Adobe Analytics enable you to solve complex business challenges.

4. Audience Segmentation

With GA, audience segmentation is a quick process. You can create multiple conditions to determine your target audience and then implement native GA and marketing integrations. You can also export these audiences into BigQuery and run data science models to predict customer behavior.

Adobe Analytics helps with advanced audience segmentation such as time-based pathing. This enables you to segment groups based on a sequence of interactions done on your website.

Key Takeaway

Google and Adobe Analytics are top-class reporting tools that help businesses utilize user data.

Deciding which analytics platform to implement depends on business type and requirements.

Build a clear understanding of your marketing analytics roadmap and also if you are equipped to operate the platforms.

Once you have this in place, you can also migrate from Adobe Analytics to Google Analytics.

This will help you save costs, increase flexibility, and democratize data within your organization.

Learn More About Google and Adobe Analytics. Contact Us.