Manage Targets feature in Adobe Reports and Analytics

In Digital Marketing and E-Commerce, we always compare the actual performance of various KPIs against the benchmark performance on a daily basis, and even hourly/real-time basis, during peak sales seasons like holiday shopping. Generally the actuals are measured using a Digital Analytics application, imported into Excel or Tableau where it is compared against the benchmarks. Benchmarks are typically the forecasted plan numbers based on the historicals, industry and economic performance trends.

Now Adobe Reports and Analytics, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud (@AdobeMktgCloud) provides a new feature Manage Targets using which, benchmarks for virtually any KPI (Traffic, Order Volume, Order Dollars, even custom metrics like Product Views, Checkouts etc.) can be uploaded into Adobe Marketing Cloud. Benchmarks can be uploaded for daily, weekly or any selected frequency including hourly.  Navigating through the reports menu in the Adobe Reports and Analytics application, the report users can view and compare the actual performance of various KPIs with the benchmark performance within a single view on near real time basis (maximum 1 hour lag). This allows the business users including Analysts, Marketing Managers, Product Managers, etc. to spend less time benchmarking the performance, and instead use their valuable time more productively in taking timely actionable decisions.

Navigation to the Manage Targets menu in Adobe Reports and Analytics, is through Reports and Analytics>Targets>Manage Targets

We can set targets for measuring the performance of actuals versus the planned benchmarks, for not only the basic digital KPIs like Visits/Traffic but also for more advanced KPIs like Order Volume, Revenue, Cart Additions etc. Also the actual performance versus planned benchmarks can thus be viewed and measured within a single view in Adobe Reports and Analytics, using Manage Targets feature. 

Segment Manager in Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe Marketing Cloud provides excellent segmentation capabilities with its Segments feature. Once a Segment is created it can be used/reused across each of following products, all part of Adobe’s Marketing Cloud

• Reports & Analytics (formerly Omniture SiteCatalyst )
• Ad-Hoc Analysis (formerly Omniture Discover )
• Datawarehouse (formerly Omniture Datawarehouse )

In this post, I will focus on the Segment Manager feature of Adobe Marketing Cloud. With Segment Manager we can create on-the-fly, advanced segments out of the data stored in Adobe Marketing Cloud. Types of data available in Adobe Marketing Cloud include

• Digital clickstream data collected from websites, mobile and tablet apps and marketing campaigns using JavaScript tags.
• Structured meta-data for Campaigns, Products, Customers, Offers, Pages or any dimension uploaded into Marketing Cloud using SAINT Classifications.
• Structured offline data uploaded into Marketing Cloud using Data Sources.   

Within Adobe Marketing Cloud, the Segment Manager can be assessed  under

Analytics>Reports & Analytics>Favorites>Segment Manager (use the left nav to navigate to Segment Manager)

Once inside the Segment Manager, we can reach the required segment in multiple ways

1. By doing a search  , provided we know the full or partially identifiable name of the segment

2. Click on Show Filters and do either of below

a. Select a tag (for example: all the segments I had created were tagged as Roop_Shared – There were in total 104 segments added to this tag)

b. Select a Owner (for example: all the segments I had created earlier appear under my user name Roopkumar_Tundalam – There were in total 450 segments under this user name)

Once you have reached and selected the desired segment, through any of the means explained above, you can perform a variety of operations on the selected segment. I will discuss about 2 important operations below

1. Share – you can share your segments with other users in your organization who also have access to Adobe Marketing Cloud. Easiest option is to click on All, which will share the segment with every Marketing Cloud user in your organization.

2. Approve – If you are an admin user of Adobe Marketing Cloud, only then this operation will be available. Using Approve, you can review segments created by new or junior users within your organization and approve the segment for larger usage if it’s setup properly. 

In the next blog posts, I will discuss the more important topics on Segments with Adobe Marketing Cloud such as

1. How to create or configure a segment in Adobe Marketing Cloud
2. Discuss a few scenarios in Digital Marketing, where segments in Adobe Marketing Cloud will be highly useful for analytics and optimization.