Who's truly a leader in the web analytics space?

The Web analytics domain is very crowded with multiple players playing in the field. Some of these are smaller analytics companies which provides some specific capabilities, like heatmaps; whereas others are technology behemoths that have tools that cater to the all the needs from digital analytics perspective and more.

Of all the names -  Adobe Analytics, IBM Coremetrics, Webtrends, AT Internet and Google Analytics are the ones that come out on top. Forrester in its wave report did an independent study of this market in May 2014 and have rated these vendors on their current offerings, strategy and market presence. You can get an access to this report here. The report has rated vendors on a total of 75 metrics.

Adobe Analytics comes out as the top performer in this category and is categorized as a leader. It leads the competition in over 60 of those 75 metrics. Also Adobe dominates the market with the largest number of web analytics clients. 

Adobe analytics, earlier used to be a set of different products - Site catalyst, Discover, Genesis, Dynamic tag management, Data warehouse, Report builder and Insight. To simplify its offerings in the market, Adobe has combined all of these into a single solution called Adobe Analytics Premium and made this solution as a part of its bigger Adobe Marketing Cloud.

Adobe marketing cloud has one common user interface through which one can have an access to all of its six solutions - Anlaytics, Target, Media Optimizer, Social, Experience Manager and Campaign.

 

  

Adobe's answer to audience management

                                               


Adobe Audience Manager , more commonly known as AAM, is a leading Data Management Platform. Independent research firm Forrester lists it as a leader in its report published on Q3 of 2013. You can access this report for free here.

Data Management Platforms or the DMPs are the hottest(although they have been around for a while now) buzzwords in the world of programmatic advertising.

A DMP sits right at the center of advertising ecosystem and acts as a repository of data from various streams- Websites, Analytics tools, Email marketing systems, CRMs, Social systems etc.

The collected data is then formed into intelligent reusable segments that are then exported to various platforms(called DSPs) for advertising and driving website personaliszation.

AAM is the leading DMP in the market which along with Adobe Media Optimizer(AMO), achieves display and search retargeting. AMO is paid media management platform which works across Search, Social and Display channels.

Audiences from the AAM gets available in AMO and then are targeted over the entire RTB inventory. These audiences can also be targeted over Google Search with the help of remarketing list for search ads(RLSA) feature.

Another attribute of AAM is that it acts as a marketplace for you to buy 3rd party data from various 3rd party data providers like Bizo, Exelate etc. Many successful marketers are leveraging AAM's capability to derive success in an increasingly digital world.