The digital analytics team at a major technology solutions provider, on a journey toward complete digital transformation, wanted to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the customer journey across three main — and disparate — web properties.

An analysis of the company’s Google Analytics instance by longtime media and tech partner Adswerve uncovered that their data layer wasn’t performing correctly, leading to errors and incomplete tracking. So, from a functional, fundamental level, the team wanted the ability to accurately track all clicks and report de-duplicated activity across the three main properties, giving them a unified data set to work from across the organization.

As the tech solutions provider moves toward a more holistic approach that unites its lines of business, clean, accurate data is more critical than ever for decision-making. The company’s then senior manager of data science and analytics, worked with our Adswerve team to explore options that would solve their short-term challenges and scale to work across the business for years to come. 

The solution? Adobe Customer Journey Analytics (CJA), an analytics platform that connects customers and interactions across channels and devices.

Getting Buy-in
Convincing a large organization to invest in a new analytics tool is no small feat. The company’s senior manager of data science and analytics got to work, connecting with stakeholders across digital, cloud services and intelligence solutions to share how they could use CJA to enhance their business lines now and in the future. Adswerve VP of Digital Strategy Charles Farina gave several tool demos and answered questions to help support the initiative. Our team also identified use cases to share with the stakeholders.

The promise of CJA was powerful, and the groups all worked together to request — and receive — approval for the CJA investment.

Implementing CJA
Adswerve provided the client with a thorough tagging assessment, which included a phased tracking plan to help the company implement tag changes across the identified web properties, collecting accurate, complete data in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) while implementing CJA. Because Google deprecated Universal Analytics (UA) during this time period, we simultaneously managed both the migration from UA to GA4 and the addition of CJA.

We also created a solution design and roadmap for the organization and presented it to key stakeholders. After we agreed on the process, we got to work implementing CJA, meeting once a week with their team (at a minimum) and collaborating with both them and Adobe. Our close partnership allowed us to work as an extension of the client’s team.

After the successful CJA implementation, the client can trust their data and dig deeper into it to uncover valuable insights. Instead of answering “what?” they can now answer the elusive “why?” They have several new capabilities, including:

Journey mapping
The organization can map every activity in a user’s session and build a diagram of touchpoints to understand where they fall out of the journey. Did they make it to checkout and review shipping costs before exiting? Did they not make it past a particular product page? Instead of only learning about people who completed a sale, they can now find those who didn’t make a purchase and investigate why. 

The mapping helps the company not only understand potential pain points and customer roadblocks, but it helps them understand which webpages aren’t generating pageviews or revenue — all helpful insights for their upcoming site redesign.

Connected online and offline journeys
Once the client deployed CJA, their digital analytics team could export data to their data warehouse to understand the customer’s offline data. Are digital customers also purchasing products in person with sales reps? They can now explore more of their customers’ journeys, which can help them more accurately target them for future campaigns.

The tech solutions provider also supports third-party aggregator sites. Historically, tracking their success has been difficult. CJA has helped them better understand those sources and channels and drill down to a detailed level to determine where to invest more resources.

Self-serve analytics for senior leadership
The unified data set in CJA allows everyone, from the C-suite to individual contributors, to take action and answer questions. A vice president is even creating her own dashboards in CJA and finding new ways to make smarter business decisions. Other team leaders who were initially slow to invest attention in CJA see the value and are adopting it for their use cases, too.

Faster time to insights
In 2024 (before CJA was up and running), the client’s Power BI marketing dashboard had ~4,000 views. From those views, the digital analytics team received nearly 200 intake tickets requesting general analytics data pulls or other dashboards. On average, the digital analytics team would take seven business days to fulfill each request. Now, with CJA, users can pull their own data or build their own reports. And if they need the digital analytics team’s help, it’s a dramatically lower two-day turnaround.

A more holistic view
Before implementing CJA, the client could analyze only one web property at a time. Now, it can analyze five business units across multiple URLs together — at the same time, in one place — to understand customer overlap and synergies.

What's Next
The tech solution giant’s data transformation journey focuses on increasing user adoption and activating on the data they’re collecting in CJA. They’re starting to use their strong data foundation to forecast revenue and make more informed decisions about media campaigns and budgets. 

One example? Connecting CJA to Eloqua to help better target and engage customers with email. They’ll be able to determine the best days and times to send cart abandonment emails in different global regions and then see what actions the users take or don’t take.

They’ll also work on segmenting audiences by digging into the data to build cohorts for ecommerce customers that they can more efficiently target and convert. In the past, they may have outsourced this work to third parties, but with CJA, they can bring it in-house.

Retention analysis is on the agenda, too. Now that the company has more accurate insights into their customers, they can understand retention and determine how and when to intervene to prevent churn. 
 
Finally, implementing CJA has uncovered a need for more formal data governance, and the main project stakeholder, who was the organization’s senior manager of data science and analytics, is in a new role, building out the company’s new data governance office.

With CJA and Adswerve, the tech solution provider has advanced further down the digital transformation path and gained the ability to move from reactive to proactive, saving time and unlocking new growth opportunities. They continue to explore additional Adobe solutions, too.