Adobe, Omniture and Integrated Analytics

Submitted by: Dave Ward on Mon, 11/09/2009 - 15:49

Imagine if your tools could talk. And they're smart too.

What if the hammer you used to build that shed in the back yard could tell you how to improve your hammering ability, reducing the number of whacks (and time) it would take to drill each nail, thus making you a more efficient builder.

With last month's acquisition of Omniture, Adobe will be sure to reinvent the hammer. By hammer, of course, I am referring to content creation tools.

In the early days of web marketing, content creation and analytics were two disciplines that had trouble getting their relationship off the ground. This has changed dramatically in recent years as marketing automation platforms have done quite well at connecting content with reporting. However, content creation has for the most part remained siloed.

My personal struggle with content development and tracking arises from the conflict between wanting to create clean, simple, easy-to-maintain code and needing to have as much information as possible about user behavior. When delivering media, web links would ideally be of the form:

<a href="[the content]">Click here to view content</a>

However, lately they've been more like:

<a href="http://www.domain.com/tracking_script.htm?redirect=http://www.domain.com/[the content]" onClick="tracking_function_1('parameter_1','parameter_2',...); tracking_function_2('parameter_a',parameter_b',...);">Click here to view content</a>

...and don't forget the tracking scripts. On every page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="[link to script #1]"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="[link to script #2]"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="[link to script #'3]"></script>
...etc.

Now, Adobe has the power to make content smarter. Analytics can be directly built-in to the content being developed and it can even be configured with some intelligence. The need for links that run off the page or span multiple lines can be a thing of the past, which makes for happier developers. And everyone knows a happy developer is a productive developer.

In this new world of self-aware content, you could make changes to existing assets while viewing their histories as well as the effects of your changes. Furthermore, A/B testing could be built-in and, after a period of time, it could decide to permanently serve up the winner, or even trigger additional actions.

For content developers, the process of creation, delivery, observation, analysis and optimization will become a continuous cycle, manageable from the development platform itself.

It's clear that this acquisition will be a game-changer in a number of ways. And as this new way of thinking about metrics and analysis becomes the norm, we will surely see new ideas and applications we couldn't have imagined before. What do you think?