Adobe Analytics vs. Smartlook

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Analytics
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Adobe acquired Omniture in 2009 and re-branded the platform as SiteCatalyst. It is now part of Adobe Marketing Cloud along with other products such as social marketing, test and targeting, and tag management. SiteCatalyst is one of the leading vendors in the web analytics category and is particularly strong in combining web analytics with other digital marketing capabilities like audience management and data management. Adobe Analytics also includes predictive marketing capabilities that help…N/A
Smartlook
Score 8.2 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Smartlook is an analytics solution tool for websites, iOS/Android apps, and various app frameworks, that answers the "whys" behind users' actions. It helps users understand precisely how customers interact with website and app — watch recordings, create heatmaps, use automatic tracked events, and build conversion funnels. Data is seen on one central dashboard, which enables sharing and collaborating with colleagues. This is to support clear, data-driven decision-making for product managers,…
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Pricing
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Pro
$55
per month 5000 sessions
Free
Free forever
per month 3000 sessions
Enterprise
Custom pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional DetailsAll Smartlook packages support both web and mobile app platforms.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Features
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Web Analytics
Comparison of Web Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Analytics
8.6
Ratings
7% above category average
Smartlook
-
Ratings
Lead Conversion Tracking8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Bounce Rate Measurement8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Device and Browser Reporting8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Pageview Tracking8.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Event Tracking9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting in real-time9.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Referral Source Tracking8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable Dashboards8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
User Ratings
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.1
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
3.6
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
1.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.1
(0 ratings)
7.3
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe AnalyticsSmartlook
Likelihood to Recommend
Maybe for a small company with small products for their thing, Adobe may be bit of an implementation too much for them, but when it comes to companies like us, like a life sciences or large enterprises and even small enterprises, but with more products, more analysis that they need to make their marketing experience better, maybe Adobe product is the best suitable.
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Smartlook is best for screen recordings. Especially when you are running MVPs. However, its pricing is very high. If your daily visitors are too much then either you will have to lose many of your recordings or you will have to pay too much money.
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Pros
  • eVars (love, wish there was more but I heard they are unlimited in AJA)
  • Projects. The transition from Reports to Projects was easier for me to navigate than I thought it was going to be.
  • Adobe Templates. Again with the love. Nothing helps me more than copying a template and then deconstructing it to see how it works and reconstruct to how I want it to be.
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  • Funnels are both easy to configure yet comprehensive enough to detect complicated customer journeys.
  • Real-time recording provides exceptional insights to our design & engineering teams.
  • Session recording is surprisingly lightweight and seems to cause no substantial performance degradation for our customers.
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Cons
  • Our site has about 250,000 definitions pages on dictionary.com. We've got about 150,000 synonym pages across the source.com. So very high volume of pages. As you can imagine, most of these are pretty low traffic. You've got maybe that top 5%, 10% are really driving a huge amount of traffic, but then you have all these really obscure things out there. There's still a lot of important information you can get there and oftentimes in our Adobe Analytics reporting suite, it'll kind of bundle things at low traffic at a pretty low threshold for us to get to. So that can be a limitation when we're trying to do some really detailed keyword analysis. The way we've gotten around that is we make use of the data feed and the export. So we make the data available to our analyst in more of that raw state. So when they really do need to truly get into that weeds data, we don't run into that low traffic limitation.
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  • Events -- but I think this is something that we could improve ourselves in our system.
  • Create some suggestions for funnels and heatmaps.
  • Give general insights for a certain period of time, e.g. from Oct. 7th to 12th, 75 users left the checkout step and 60% of them left due to a payment issue. IDK just bringing some ideas!
  • Send an e-mail with main insights.
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Likelihood to Renew
  • New pricing models are very expensive compared to old pricing model, even though it includes several additional tools, most of which seem to be beneficial
  • Horrible support experience despite working with escalation teams to try and resolve
  • Several bugs in recent releases which remain unresolved for many months at a time
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As my ratings show, I have been absolutely delighted with Smartlook in terms of usability, cost, support, and its benefit to our organization. I have given it such high ratings because I think it has really benefitted our organization and I think it could do the same for other companies too.
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Usability
Sometimes the processing times are very long. I have had reports or dashboards time out multiple times during presentations. It could be improved. It is understandable since there is a huge data set that the tool is processing before showing anything, however for a company that large they should invest in optimizing processing times.
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Smartlook is very intuitive and simple for an average programmer (I don't know if it will be as simple for a normal user). We have never had to resort to looking for information on the web or ask for help for something we didn't understand or didn't work as expected.
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Reliability and Availability
I do not ever recall a time when Adobe Analytics was unavailable to me to use in the 8 or so years I have been an end user of the product. My most-used day-to-day analytics tool Parse.ly however, generally has a multiple hours planned offline maintenance every two to four weeks, and sometimes has issues collecting realtime analytics that last anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour, and happen anywhere between 1 to 5 times a month.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
Overall, Adobe's servers seem responsive. Like any
large-scale SAS provider, they can have occasional slowdowns where, I
presume, a node is not available and other servers get bogged down with
the user load. I have noticed this with both large and small data sets
and reports.
On that note, Adobe Analytics can take a long time to run reports and pull various data points, depending on the period of time, number of metrics and segments applied. As you create reports, particularly in Workspace, the data are pulled in real-time while you're creating the report. This can often cause issues while trying to drag more metrics into the interface when certain elements of a table are grayed out because data is being pulled in.The more data points and segments involved, the longer it takes to update. When you look at larger windows of time, it takes even longer. If one were to compare to Google Analytics or one of the open source products like Piwik or Motomo, Adobe seems much slower. However, Adobe also supports far more variables than other web analytics products.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
I barely see any communication from Adobe Analytics. The content on the web is also not that great or easy to read. I would recommend a better communication about the product and the new addons information to come to its user by a better mean.
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I am always very happy when a company offers the option to use online chat, as I do not like to call customer support and writing an email is just too slow and cumbersome. I did not even expect a reply right away, yet it took the customer support team less than a minute to respond to my problem.
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In-Person Training
It was a one-day training several years ago that cost the organization several thousand dollars. There were only about 10 people in the training class. Adobe tried to cram so much information into that one-day class that none of our users felt like they really learned anything helpful from the experience. Follow-up training is too expensive
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No answers on this topic
Online Training
The online training for Adobe SiteCatalyst consists of short product videos. These are ok, but only go so far. For a while Adobe charged a fee for this, but recently made these available for free. There are many great blog posts that help users learn how to apply the product as well.
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Implementation Rating
It is a large effort to implement. Throwing a developer with zero experience with Adobe Analytics with no support is a REALLY BAD IDEA!!! Having experienced developers working as a team is crucial to a strong implementation. I say this because I have experienced both scenarios. I was the only developer on an implementation project and I had no experience with Adobe Analytics. As a result I made many architecturally bad decisions which lead to a rigid fragile implementation that eventually was scraped. It took some hard lessons to learn that Adobe Analytics was not as simple as their sales reps make it sound. Using the Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager made sequential implementations incredibly STRONG. Having a DTM to manage the code was a miracle and a life saver!!! If you plan on doing a big enterprise level implementation, please seriously consider using the Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager!!! it made code maintenance super slick and easy which is super important for a developer!!!
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Alternatives Considered
Historically I've looked at a lot of different products. More recently I'd say Mamo and Google Analytics. Those are probably the two big ones that I've seen around, so yeah. It's more feature rich. It provides more dimensions, more breakdowns, and it also scales data better
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Like I mentioned, Smartlook is younger than FullStory and it seems like they're trying to improve. The dashboards are lacking. I wish I had more control over what I see there instead of the standard. We use the API to determine customer name and company and I'd like to see some custom dashboards.
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Scalability
My organization uses Adobe Analytics across a multitude of brand portfolios. Each brand has multiple websites, mobile apps and some even have connected TV apps/channels on Roku and similar devices. Adobe can handle the multitude of properties that have simple, small(ish) websites and the larger brand properties that include web, mobile and connected TVs/OTT devices.
Each of those larger brands has multiple categories and channels to keep track of. We can see the data by channel/device or aggregate all the data together. This gives our executive teams the full picture and the departmental teams the view they need to see their own performance.
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Return on Investment
  • Adobe Analytics impacts nearly every aspect of a billion plus dollar revenue eCommerce business. From measuring the impact of new build features to marketing campaigns.
  • We are saving substantial money and resource effort by consolidating all of our properties to Adobe Analytics from alternative solutions, at which point we will finally be able to report on Total Digital, rather than disparate reports.
  • We support experimentation on every platform and the performance is only known through Adobe Analytics tagging.
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  • We have increased the conversion rate from the beginning till now with 120%.
  • We redesigned our landing pages and decreased the bounce rate by 41%.
  • We rethinked and redesigned our menu structure and internal site linking to increase the time users spent on our site based on the data we got from Smartlook analysis.
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ScreenShots

Adobe Analytics Screenshots

Screenshot of the Alert Builder in Adobe Analytics.Screenshot of an Analysis Workspace Training Tutorial in Adobe AnalyticsScreenshot of attribution in Adobe AnalyticsScreenshot of the Segment Builder in Adobe AnalyticsScreenshot of anomaly detection in Adobe AnalyticsScreenshot of the Alert Builder in Adobe Analytics

Smartlook Screenshots

Screenshot of HeatmapsScreenshot of RecordingsScreenshot of DashboardsScreenshot of EventsScreenshot of FunnelsScreenshot of Analytics for websites & mobile apps