Improving Content Strategy through Drupal and Adobe Analytics integration

Adobe Analytics or SiteCatalyst (called Omniture before being acquired by Adobe) is a leading industry solution that collects website statistics and applies real-time analytics and detailed segmentation across all of your marketing channels. It is used for the measurement, collection and analysis of web traffic data. The data collated can be used to discover high-value audiences. It can provide customer intelligence for your business.

Adobe Analytics can be integrated with Drupal 8. Once the integration capability is built between Adobe Analytics and Drupal 8, the client has the Adobe Analytics website to refer to for the traffic data. The client can log in to this site to view a dashboard with website statistics, and gain insights into customer behavior. This data can then be used to optimize the website to improve user experience and conversions.

Srijan has integrated Adobe Analytics with Drupal  successfully many times for its clients, allowing them to manage their content better.

Key Features of Adobe Analytics

The tool allows the capture of real time data that allows understanding of current and relevant business scenarios.Source: Democratizing Insights with Analysis Workspace

Apart from website traffic statistics like number of hits on each page, number of unique visitors to each page, total hits, exit links, click maps, number of page not found instances, etc. the tool also shows the devices used to visit the website, along with details such as screen size, screen height, screen width and audio/video support on the device. It also gives details of referrals, next URL visited, etc.

Adobe Analytics provides drill down facilities to get precise and comprehensive views on the customers to understand most valuable customer segments or segments that can give business opportunities. The business can categorize customers into personas using the intelligence that the tool provides in terms of product preference, geo-demographics, and behavioral attributes. 

It provides mobile analytics intelligence with which you can understand the mobile app user base and review performance of mobile marketing campaigns launched. It provides rules based decision making tools. Visitor statistics include the number of users by geography, users by language and users by time zone. The client can generate reports for web traffic, based on time parameters.

This data is represented visually as well. Data for multiple websites can be viewed on one Adobe Analytics/SiteCatalyst website. On the home page, the dashboard can be set up to show important/critical indicators from the different websites configured under that account.

Custom data specific to a particular use-case can be captured—this is of great help for enterprises. For example, if an organization wants to capture data on its employees visiting the site, variables to capture employee data such as Employee ID can be included if this data is available in the network. Also, if there are videos on the site, events like 'play video' can be recorded. All this data is valuable in helping clients gain insights into customer behavior and manage their content better.

Integration Challenges

Srijan did face some challenges while integrating Drupal with Adobe Analytics. Since Drupal 8 has a completely different architecture from Drupal 7 and since there was no available module for Drupal * our teams had to work on porting the module to Drupal 8. The implementation had to be modified to ensure that there is no change in the functional performance of Adobe Analytics.

Srijan also had to be careful while handling data. With enterprises, a lot of data is available—both private and public data, which could include a lot of sensitive data that cannot be stored. The integration module had to effectively manage data privacy wherever applicable as per the enterprise confidentiality policy

Benefits

Clients who have opted for integration of Adobe Analytics with Drupal have benefited from the improved website analytics in various ways:

Improved content strategy and content management - The integration helps clients understand which pages are visited more often and which not. Downloads and payment mechanisms can be tracked. The client can then devise a content strategy based on users' behavior on the website, and provide them with the right information at the right time. This gets more engagement and conversions as per online goals.

Improved customer retention - The tool provides data related to user navigation. It gives details about access mechanisms. The user journey and user map can be understood. This knowledge helps in refining the flow of data on the website, and allows the client to deliver content based on user needs. Better content strategy and improved information flow translate into better customer retention.

Better digital marketing strategy - The statistics provided by the tool helps a client understand how web traffic has changed since the launch of a promotion campaign, and to determine the success of their digital marketing campaigns.

By allowing the client to make better decisions around content and the flow of information on their website, the solution helps them achieve their marketing objectives.