How investment management companies are using Adobe Experience Platform for effective web analytics and insights

Published on November 28, 2024 by Vihanga Perera

The heart of all digital marketing practices is still rooted in the web. Accordingly, web analytics are as crucial as they have always been. While it is no secret that digital marketing has progressed rapidly to a complex world of interaction between the user and the web through a number of channels, many companies are still making use of web metrics with the likes of page views and visits in the same way they did a decade ago. Today, however, reporting the number of visits and measuring page views are no longer enough. Effective web analytics go beyond simply reporting basic metrics such as who is visiting a website or how many visitors there are. It provides deeper insights on user behaviour and interests. By analysing patterns in user activity, such as how they navigate the site, what content they engage with and where they drop off, web analytics can reveal why visitors are acting in a certain way.

For instance,

• Are users visiting your site because of a specific marketing campaign?

• Do they engage with certain content because it resonates with their interests?

• Why do they leave without submitting a form or downloading a report?

Adobe Experience Platform plays a crucial role in providing answers to these questions to help investment management companies understand not just the demographics of their audience but also their intent and behaviour, enabling better decision-making, personalised marketing and optimisation of the user experience.

Meet Adobe Experience Platform, the powerful analytics tool transforming customer journeys of asset management companies

To realise the full potential of the web, financial management companies could use Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), as it serves as a central platform where all customer data converges, enabling comprehensive analysis and strategic marketing decisions based on real-time data insights. AEP benefits users in several ways:

- Real-time customer insights: While many competitor platforms may provide surface-level customer journey tracking to provide insights, AEP taps into their capabilities in tracking customer pathing and traffic sources in real time, across devices and across channels. This helps financial institutions understand their clients’ behaviour and preferences that much more, leading to a more tailored experience throughout their journey.

- Integrated data management: AEP, with the help of Adobe Audience Manager, provides a complete customer data management tool that helps financial companies get a 360-degree view of their customers. It is adept at merging all data sources – from first-party data (point of sale, CRM, web and email) to second-party partner data and third-party purchased data, while handling the challenges of delivering data security and access control, enabling you to focus solely on your customer.

Adobe Analytics (AA), the cornerstone of AEP, is where web and marketing analytics data is collected, processed and visualised, helping firms interpret web content and understand how effective their campaigns are. Two key features that make AA stand out for financial companies are

- Data-driven decision-making: AA ensures companies are able to collect and store their clients’ behavioural data from any digital touchpoint in the customer journey, enabling them to make informed analytics-driven decisions to tailor the customer experience.

- Performance monitoring: Enables elevating marketing strategies through real-time assessment of web performance and customer engagement. With the help of ad hoc reporting, users can draw conclusions they can quickly act on.

Adobe Data Collection (ADC), the proprietary technical framework that works hand in hand with Adobe Analytics, ensures that users can make use of complete and optimised data-capture strategies, while employing plugins and extensions.

Key benefits of ADC:

- Streamlined data integration: ADC can integrate data from external sites and third-party data providers, helping users connect to different sources – from DoubleClick Floodlight tagging and video tracking plugins to social media site tags such and LinkedIn and Facebook.

- Customisation and flexibility: Firms can comprehensively modify their data collection and tag management, depending on their specific requirements, with the help of Data Elements, Rule Builder and Enterprise Publishing.

Data Elements are simply the building blocks that enable you to map your data across Adobe’s tag management system. A Data Element is a variable that can store JavaScript variables (e.g., page name, language), query strings, URLs, user IDs, session timestamps, cookie values, JavaScript variables, etc. These can be used to dynamically record static user information or interactions. For instance, a Data Element can capture the “language” the user is viewing the content of the webpage in. This streamlines the tagging process by ensuring a consistent framework that can be repurposed across other pages and triggers.

Firms can employ Data Elements to do the following:

- Standardise data capture: By consistently using defined variables, financial companies will be following Adobe best practices across platforms and customer interactions, which would ultimately result in more accurate data capture.

- Achieve flexibility and control: Adobe provides users with full control of how each variable is defined, where it is stored and how it is accessed, giving them the flexibility to set up their data infrastructure.

Rule Builder is the key component of ADC that enables users to create and manage rules, with the help of Data Elements. These rules can be set up to dictate how the data will be captured, ultimately resulting in performing actions accordingly, such as content adjustments or firing third-party marketing tags such as DoubleClick Floodlight. For example, a rule can be set up to track all literature downloads in the client’s product pages and record the name of the product and the user’s session ID. Rule Builder is crucial for ensuring that the data being captured aligns with your long-term strategic business goals and short-term campaign-related goals and KPIs.

Firms can employ Rule Builder to do the following:

- Improve data-handling efficiency: Tracking implementation and the data analysis process is made more reliable, while reducing manual coding in the webpage and ultimately minimising the risk of error.

- Automate workflows: Rule Builder can be used to streamline complicated workflows that run depending on your customers’ interactions and behaviour, such as by triggering personalised emails, tailoring product offerings and fine-tuning contact. This allows for more real-time responses that companies can act on in a timely manner.

Enterprise Publishing is the final phase of the ADC setup. This is where you can publish the rules and marketing tags you have created, manage and deploy data-collection configurations and approve them for production. Ultimately, it enables financial firms to effectively revise and maintain their data-collection strategies without interrupting data collection or the user experience.

Firms can employ Enterprise Publishing to do the following:

- Increase speed and reliability: By minimising downtime and increasing the reliability of data collection, firms can easily streamline publication of analytics and marketing tags across their web and mobile environments.

- Enhance scalability and governance: It delivers a proprietary, scalable tag and data-collection publication solution across financial clients’ large and complex websites, while meeting compliance and data governance standards.

Adobe Workspace, the in-built data visualisation and reporting tool

Another key component of AEP is Adobe Workspace, a simple yet powerful browser tool that enables asset managers to build both detailed and ad hoc analyses and subsequently share useful insights in a visual manner. The drag-and-drop interface helps you customise analysis, curate datasets depending on user access levels and share and schedule projects with anyone involved in the team.

Users have multiple options when initiating an analysis; they can decide to start with a blank project from scratch or make use of pre-built templates – an Adobe-provided standard template or a customised template created by their company. In a typical project, the building blocks provided are panels, tables, visualisations and components. These elements are the canvas upon which your data is painted.

Panels are the foundation of any project in Adobe Workspace and are used by asset managers to organise their analysis within a project according to time periods, report suites or analysis use cases. They can contain many tables and visualisations to generate visual representations of data, such as freeform tables, bar charts, donut charts, histograms, line charts, maps or scatterplots. Components consist of dimensions, metrics, segments and date ranges that you can drag and drop onto a project; they are crucial in helping marketers to begin answering your business queries and in fine-tuning and empowering data analysis.

Users can take this a step forward and create customised, complex segments and metrics based on specific characteristics or website interactions to identify visitor attributes and actions across visits and page hits. Segment Builder can be used to provide a rich workflow, enabling financial marketers to isolate marketable audiences from real-time customer profiles. If you need to ask questions of the data without having to change the analytics implementation, you can use Calculated Metric Builder to create customised metrics that can provide further insights.

Why do asset managers prefer Adobe Analytics to other free analytical tools?

Adobe Analytics (AA) provides users with wide-ranging possibilities for obtaining in-depth insights on data. The only drawbacks facing asset managers are the level of complexity and the considerably high cost. Nevertheless, it has consistently proven to be a useful tool for large-scale corporations, able to deal with high levels of web traffic, unlike many other freely available analytical tools (e.g., Google Analytics). While AA is limited to first-touch and last-touch attribution models by default, users can implement the Attribution IQ feature for deeper analyses, where multiple models – such as Linear, U-Shaped and Participation – can be applied. Hence, long-term customers still prefer it, considering its comprehensive user pathing and reporting, despite similar tools providing multi-channel attribution.

AA offers users several other crucial benefits:

- Extended data storage: Lifetime data storage and 15 years of cookie storage enable businesses to maintain long-term insights and focus on their clients over an extended period of time.

- Enhanced and compliant customer information collection: Access to hashed personally identifiable information (PII) such as email addresses enables asset managers to gain deeper insights without compromising on compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other data-governance laws, safeguarding the privacy of individuals.

- Detailed and effective targeting: With this additional source of personal information on their targeted audiences, businesses gain a richer understanding of customer profiles and are, hence, able to advertise more effectively through other marketing channels, such as email marketing and pay-per-click advertising, ultimately boosting ROI.

Adobe Sensei, the artificial intelligence (AI) layer within Experience Cloud, can be integrated to automate tedious or repetitive tasks and make real-time predictions using AI and machine learning. It can logically compare customers and audience segments to detect anomalies, discover meaningful differences, attribute conversion factors, and more.

How exactly AEP helps asset managers

With AEP, asset managers can swiftly analyse website data from anywhere in the customer’s journey through effective reporting and predictive intelligence. When users gather data on their customer engagement through Adobe Data Collection, tags can be assigned to register key data, such as which pages were visited, their IP addresses (location) and the devices they used. This information can help you discover who visited your website and what they were looking for, where they went and the content that kept them engaged. Moreover, if your engaged users agree to the use of cookies, you can also record how many times they visit, their favourite webpages and the time they spend on the website. You can also track specific events on your webpages with the likes of clicks on certain links, images or videos, literature downloads (press releases, white papers, etc.) or when someone completes a form.

Asset managers can also make use of the integration between Adobe Analytics and Adobe Audience Manager (DMP) that enables audience data such as demographic information, psychographic information, customer relationship management (CRM) data and advertisement impression data to be incorporated seamlessly into analytics workflows. The Segment IQ feature helps you discover the most statistically significant differences across an unlimited number of segments. You can also create groups of customers with shared characteristics and compare them over time to recognise and analyse trends.

If you employ a third-party data visualisation tool with the likes of Tableau, you can use Adobe Data Warehouse (ADW) to effortlessly export analytics data in the specific format you require. ADW is a versatile repository that offers extended storage, data reprocessing and reporting capabilities for customer data, all in one place. It can process an unlimited number of rows of raw data in a single request for individual scheduled and downloaded reports.

In summary

Every web analytics and reporting strategy relies on an effective web analytics platform. Despite how well your content management system has been set up, web analytics are key to an organisation’s assessing whether its website’s content is bringing in the right web traffic. Moreover, a company’s profitability and marketplace resilience are too crucial to leave to approximation. AEP brings the hard data and context that help you improve your website’s UI and UX, ensuring visitors return.

How Acuity Knowledge Partners can help

We provide complete digital marketing solutions for asset managers, wealth managers and other financial sector service providers. Our web analytics and reporting experts’ knowledge gained over the years enables them to support maintenance of web analytics, develop web analytics strategies and provide visualised analytics reports.

We help financial clients expand their digital footprint through personalised strategies that may encompass multiple avenues of marketing, in addition to web and data analytics. These include email marketing and marketing automation, web content management, SEO, CRM and creative design. Our experts also specialise in key financial marketing services such as RFP support, consultant database (CDB) support, production and distribution support across marketing material, client reporting, seismic support and delivering expert content-creation services, including market insights, thought-leadership articles and white papers, tailored to engage target audiences and drive business growth.

References:

• Adobe Attribution IQ – The Next Level of Attribution

• Adobe Analytics overview

• Google Analytics 4 vs. Adobe Analytics: Which One’s Best for You

• What is Adobe Analytics Used For? A Comprehensive Guide

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