We are excited to announce that Adam Greco is joining Search Discovery as Senior Director, Technology Solutions. Mr. Greco is one of the world’s most renowned digital analysts and an Adobe Analytics expert, he will play an instrumental role in the growth and development of our recently launched Apollo solution and related service offerings.
I am excited to announce that today is my first day at Search Discovery! I have joined the Technology Solutions Practice and will be working on the recently announced Apollo product. As I begin this new role, I wanted to share some background on why I am making this career change and why I am so excited about it.
For much of the past fifteen years, I have traveled the world (750,000 miles to be exact!) as a consultant helping organizations fix and improve Adobe Analytics implementations and providing education classes to help people learn how to have good Adobe Analytics implementations. Back in my Omniture days as “The Wolf,” my job was to help turn around troubled client situations which were typically the result of bad implementations. I would visit client after client and see the mistakes they had made with their Adobe Analytics (then called SiteCatalyst) implementations. Many customers would blame the product, but most problems were with the way the product had been implemented. I quickly learned that a key determinant of whether a company had a good implementation or not was how much experience the person doing the implementation had with the product. If you had an implementation consultant or internal team that asked the right questions and had been through several implementations and knew the correct way to solve those questions, your implementation would be fine. But if you didn’t have an experienced consultant or team, the implementation would often be sub-par and lead to problems down the road.
As I have helped organizations with their implementations over the past fifteen years, my clients have noted that my approach to business requirements and solution architecture helped positively transform their use of Adobe Analytics. My approach pushed them to do more with Adobe Analytics and resulted in them receiving more value from the product. Over the years, I have seen that many Adobe Analytics implementations are inconsistent and can be improved. That was great for me as a consultant for hire, but terrible for Adobe and the analytics industry as a whole.
At Omniture, I had always thought that there had to be a better way to implement based on proven best practices. Our consulting team tried this a bit with “Fusion” playbooks, but those were very basic and still required a lot of manual implementation (tag management tools weren’t around back then). What if there was a way to apply a proven approach to Adobe Analytics business requirements and solution architecture at scale? What if the things I have done for clients in the past could be taken advantage of by any Adobe Analytics customer instead of only the organizations I had the bandwidth to work with? What if any Adobe Analytics client could have an implementation that is built upon both my best practices and those of hundreds of experts? And what if that productization could also drastically reduce the time it takes to implement by leveraging new tools like Adobe Launch? It turns out that I was not alone in thinking that there had to be a better way! The folks at Search Discovery, who have a proven track record of building products to solve analytics problems, have built a way to productize digital analytics implementations. They decided to take the most common business challenges facing each industry vertical and automate the best way to implement solutions for those questions. They call it Apollo.
Apollo is an implementation management system that allows organizations to identify what business requirements they wish to address and then use proven, best-practice solutions to answer those questions while also expediting the implementation of those solutions through Adobe Launch. There is no reason for every Adobe Analytics client to start from scratch and reinvent the wheel. Apollo provides economies of scale, speed, standardization and best practices, which allows for the re-use of key implementation elements such as documentation, training, dashboards, and more. So when I found out that Search Discovery was taking on the audacious challenge of improving Adobe Analytics implementations at scale, I wanted to be part of it. If I could lend my experience to Apollo in a way that scales to allow any organization to take advantage of what I have learned about Adobe Analytics over the years, that was something I could not pass up! While I have always tried to share all that I know about Adobe Analytics via my book and blogs, Apollo represents the way for me to help as many Adobe Analytics clients as directly as possible.
So as I board the Search Discovery rocket ship, I am excited to take all of my experience and expertise and collaborate with the great team at Search Discovery to create the ultimate product for managing and implementing digital analytics tools like Adobe Analytics. The team at Search Discovery has already created an amazing product and I look forward to contributing to something that I believe will be transformational for the industry. Since many organizations are currently looking at updating their Adobe Analytics implementation to migrate from DTM to Launch, now is a great time to consider migrating your Adobe Analytics implementation to Apollo. Or, you should check out Apollo if you are simply not happy with the way Adobe Analytics is implemented at your organization. Either way, if you would like to learn more, please visit the Apollo site and complete the form to speak with me and get more information.
