Two Reasons to Evolve to Adobe's CJA

Is your organization considering switching from Adobe Analytics (AA) to Customer Journey Analytics (CJA)? Or maybe you’ve made the decision already but are now faced with working out how to get value from the effort of transitioning? If so, below we’ll discuss two key aspects of CJA that differentiate it from AA and think about what that means for your migration.

Firstly, let’s not get confused. Marketing professionals use the word “journey” to describe a broad array of customer states including awareness, purchasing, championing the brand, and more. On the other hand, Adobe uses it in the name of their products, Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO). Within those products “journey” has a specific, technical meaning, which is what we’ll be talking about here.

In AJO a Journey is something you build. It’s triggered by some kind of event, such as the user abandoning their cart on your website, and from there you can send messages and update data, in whatever sequence you please (see figure #1)

Reason 1: The Journey Canvas

Where AJO makes Journeys, CJA reports on them after the fact, whether or not they were created using AJO. This ability is primarily found in the relatively new feature, the “Journey Canvas”, shown in figure #2.

In the Journey Canvas you can pull in any number of nodes and join them together into a Journey. For example, you might have nodes for visits to the home page, followed by installations of your app, and finally for making a purchase. Such a sequence tells you how many people follow that path and where they drop off.

Let’s consider a few interesting facets of Journey Canvases:

1. Our example Journey is not the same thing as asking for the intersection of all the people who visited the homepage, got the app and made purchases, because the sequence is key. These customers first visited the homepage, then got the app, and lastly made a purchase.
2. Unlike AJO, Journeys in CJA can have multiple starting points. For example, the user could have started either by clicking on a Facebook ad, or by visiting the homepage, before getting the app and making a purchase.
3. Unlike a funnel, Journeys can have branches...you can go crazy with branches if you like
4. Say you have a starting point such as “visiting the homepage”, and an endpoint “making a purchase”, but you don’t know what the path is between those two points. CJA has a feature “Show top nodes between these nodes” (figure #3).

All that is pretty cool and useful, but point number #4 depends on having data for the journey between two node, which brings us to…

Reason 2: All the Data

If you’ve heard anything about CJA, it is probably that it gives you the proverbial 360-degree view of the customer, by bringing in data from many sources, not just from your websites and apps. While this feature may not be news to you, what does it mean in light of the Journey Canvas?

 Let’s say our dream is to ingest the company’s customer data and purchase-transaction data into CJA…OK, as dreams go, it’s not margaritas in Maui, but we’re pretending for a minute.

At some point in the future we’ll have that data ingested…but what then? How will we show our manager that it was worth all the effort? I’d suggest a good place to start is with the Journey Canvas.

Without even having access to CJA we could make a diagram that depicts a Journey, like figure #2 above. The process of drawing that will clarify what data we will need to create the path we want to report on. While we had dreamed of getting the “customer data” what did that mean, exactly? In fact we don’t need all 300 fields in that database, only a subset…and the Journey diagram will imply certain things.

For example, when we want to send an SMS message based on an abandoned cart, we know we need their mobile number – do we also need something called “work phone” and “personal phone” that are also in the customer database? If we want to send a message to prompt them to go back to their cart, we’ll need to have some ID for that cart….uh oh, that’s held in another system – I guess we’ll need to bring in some data from that as well.

A lot of questions will get raised, but we can raise them before we get our hands on CJA, so we’ll have a much more focused path to follow during implementation, and we'll end up with some use cases that everyone cares about.

The Roadmap

After that initial success and a vacation in Hawaii, we still have more left to do – there are more use cases to handle, as senior management now expect every report to be a Journey report.

Since we followed the best practices, we only ingested the set of data we needed at the time, while leaving room for future expansion. We can quickly bring in additional data from the data sources that we have already hooked up, and we’ve developed somewhat of a process for bringing in new data.

If you have experience with CJA, and any thoughts, questions or disagreements with the above, I'd love to hear them. Aloha!