Adobe Analytics is a fairly robust Web analytics platform but not one that's particularly user friendly or visually compelling. The company has been making an effort of late -- its Analytics Workspace, while not quite as drag-and-drop easy as I initially hoped, at least gives users the option of more modern visualizations. Next up, expected to roll out this week, is a revamp to its visual "ClickMap" plug-in that allows customers to see analytics overlaid on pages of their websites.
The new "Activity Map" works in all modern browsers, I'm told -- ClickMap needed either IE 6.0+ or Firefox 3.0+ (with some users running into Firefox security setting problems). On the back end, it requires either enabling within Adobe Analytics' Dynamic Tag Manager or adding some additional code from the Administrator console.
The plug-in has been updated to understand clicks on more complex JavaScript pages, which can be important for navigation menus, and will allow on-page visual exploration broken down by segments and time periods. There will also be visual on-page pathing analysis, making it easy to see on any specific pagewhere users are coming from and where they're going to.
In addition, Activity Map will include a "live view" that can auto-update by minute -- functionality that competitors such as Chartbeat and Google Analytics have offered for some time. While the initial rollout will not include data on page scrolling -- that is, seeing what percentage of audience for a page scrolls down beyond a certain point -- such functionality is planned for the next release.
Activity Map will be included for standard as well as premium analytics customers at no extra cost.