Adobe Expands Its Social Analytics Lineup With Adobe Social

Must be something in the air. Less than a day after Google announced that it’s adding social media reports to Google Analytics, Adobe is unveiling its own social analytics tools.

Even though the company is best known for design software like Photoshop and development technologies like Flash, Adobe also pitches itself as a digital marketing company — a point that the company emphasized in its most recent earnings announcement. This week Adobe is hosting its Digital Marketing Summit in Salt Lake City (near the headquarters of Adobe-acquired analytics company Omniture), where it’s announcing the new product, called Adobe Social.

One of the big challenges, according to Product Director Matt Langie, is the fact that the social analytics landscape is currently made up of “a lot of point solutions” focused on a specific social network or only providing limited types of data and functionality. Adobe Social, on the other hand, brings together a company’s data and tasks from multiple social networks, so Langie calls it “the first solution to integrate all of the key roles and responsibilities in social marketing.”

Adobe actually offers a social analytics product already, predictably named Adobe Social Analytics, but Product Director Matt Langie says the new Adobe Social is more comprehensive. Instead of just providing basic “listening” tools to help marketers see what people are saying about their companies, it also manages the process of creating and publishing social network content and advertising. It also includes features for tracking whether social network traffic actually leads to purchases on your website (something that Google was also touting).

The company is making a number of other announcements at the Adobe Digital Summit. Probably most interesting is the fact that it’s now promising “predictive marketing” capabilities across multiple Marketing Suite products. So instead of just looking at reams of data and hoping for the best as they make marketing and advertising decisions, companies can now run scenarios based on that data. So if they’re wondering “What if we changed our advertising mix to X?” they can actually see the likely outcome before spending any money.