2024 Greatest Hits:
Adobe Customer Journey Analytics Feature Releases
Adobe Summit 2025 is just around the corner, and as always, I’m excited to see all of the innovations and fresh insights into the future of solutions and strategies for data driven marketing!
As we gear up for this year’s event, it’s the perfect time to reflect on some of the game-changing advancements from the past year.
In that spirit, I’m diving into what I consider some. of the “greatest hits” from Adobe’s feature releases in 2024 — updates that have redefined how businesses can analyze, understand, and act on data.
For this post focused on CJA, whether you’re a seasoned user or just exploring its potential, these highlights are worth considering in anticipation of this year’s announcements.
Countdown to Adobe Summit 2025!
Journey Canvas Visualization
For years, I’ve talked to colleagues about the way we visualize data, across all of the touchpoints in a customer journey. When CJA introduced the “people” metric, I saw the opportunity for all of us to get closer to this view within the Adobe Analytics ecosystem. Flow and fallout visualizations were fine, but they didn’t get to quite the right view of what is needed to really tell the story. The journey canvas is truly a game changer.
For those of us who use Journey Optimizer (AJO), the canvas is familiar territory, but having the opportunity to leverage this within CJA itself has materially changed how we can assess the success of customer touchpoints so we can facilitate a better customer experience and derive more value from our investments. Watch the video below to see this feature in action.
AI Assistant
We all know that the industry is rapidly adopting AI capabilities wherever possible, and AI Assistant in CJA is no exception. I did a presentation at the first in-person Adobe Skill Exchange in NYC a few years ago, about the Data Dictionary, and the benefit of having features/documentation embedded directly in a platform for use. I’d say the same for AI Assistant. Sure, we can use external AI assistants to get some similar details, but the privacy considerations around entering data into open AI models are significant, and it doesn’t fully contextualize the way the insights are identified. AI Assistant allows you to use natural language prompts to identify trends within the data for reporting in CJA, and activation in other AEP related solutions (AJO, Target, etc…).
A key benefit of Analytics and Customer Journey Analytics that I’ve spoken about many times, is the idea of enabling self-serve access and ease of use for data that might otherwise require specific skills to access. AI Assistant also allows for easy fine-tuning, where users can ask a variety of iterative questions, refining the analysis until they get the desired output.
Worth noting that AI Assistant can make analytics more user-friendly for non-technical users by providing guided recommendations. I will always work to champion accessibility and ease of use.
Graph-based Stitching
Graph based stitching is an update to data stitching capabilities in Customer Journey Analytics that connects data across multiple sources for a unified customer view. CJA has it’s own data lake, and previously only had the ability to utilize a single ID to stitch to (unlike Profile in AEP that allows for dynamic updates to a profile as the customer continues along a journey), Data Distiller was required to stitch additional IDs. Now, with Graph-based Stitching (GBS), data can be stitched across more than one ID, specifically for CJA.
Graph-based stitching can reduce data duplication and errors, improving the quality of unified profiles. It can also provide a more complete view of the customer journey across multiple touchpoints. It’s also scalable, allowing for more efficient handling of large datasets and complex relationships, making it well suited to handle diverse customer data.
Intelligent Captions
Clearly I’m a bit obsessed with operational efficiency, but let’s be honest: who doesn’t want to work smarter, not harder? I also continue to note how the more time we free up from manual/administrative tasks, the more time and effort we can put into launching more revenue driving content, and more innovative solutions.
Intelligent captions does exactly what the name says. You create a visualization based on a table of data, and then hit a button and it surfaces key data points, in a summary, to highlight anomalies, correlation, trends, spikes, etc… Watch the below video for more info. It’s a really elegant solution to reducing time to insight.
Alerts in CJA
Last, but certainly not least, are alerts in CJA. A key benefit of CJA is the ability to combine a multitude of data types, including Analytics, CRM, offline and other types of data sets. One of the challenges of this, however, is the idea that sometimes data doesn’t land exactly as expected – OR – as we see with Adobe Analytics, sometimes the data appears to be out of the expected range. There are nuances on how this feature operates differently than in Analytics, and you can read more about those details here, but even with those considerations, this was a highly awaited feature that released in 2024.
If you have questions, or just want to talk analytics, activation, and anything in-between, reach out to me at Katie@DataOnTrend.com.
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Empowering Businesses with Data-Driven Insights. At Data on Trend, we help businesses unlock the full potential of Adobe Analytics, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Real-Time CDP, and Adobe Experience Platform. Our expert insights, strategic frameworks, and hands-on guidance empower organizations to optimize marketing performance, enhance customer experiences, and drive operational efficiency. Explore our latest blog posts on marketing technology data strategy, book reviews, and productivity tools to stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Get in Touch: Have questions or need expert consulting? Reach out at katie@dataontrend.com. Follow Data on Trend on Instagram, Linked In and Facebook, for real-time updates and industry trends!
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