From events to journeys: a lighthouse for your Adobe Customer Journey Analytics transition

Imagine if every time you saw close friends, they spoke to you like they’d never met you – like it was your first encounter, and they didn’t know anything about you. Wouldn’t that be more than a little strange?

Until recently, that’s exactly how brands interacted with their customers. They took a linear, channel-based approach to marketing, starting a new and potentially different conversation with customers at every touchpoint, resulting in disjointed, frustrating customer experiences.

Fortunately, brands are now shifting their approach and interacting with people the way people interact with people. Along the journey from awareness to consideration to conversion, customers use multiple channels, platforms, and devices to engage with brands. Brands strive for consistent, personalized experiences at every touchpoint to propel customers toward conversion.

To support this approach and understand individual interactions and the entire customer journey, brands need a corresponding shift in measurement and analytics. They must be able to recognize customers at each interaction and access information about them to enable a seamless experience. For brands that use Adobe, this typically means a transition from event-based Adobe Analytics to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.

Every part of the Adobe Experience Cloud – from Mix Modeler to Adobe Journey Optimizer – is moving toward a journey-based approach. This shift was evident at Adobe Summit 2025, where major innovations were unveiled to define customer journey orchestration in the AI era.

Analytics has to follow. Suppose everything in a platform executes a journey-based strategy, but analytics measure events. In that case, it’s like having a cockpit where the instruments don’t register the position and progress of the airplane on its journey. Like a pilot, a marketer needs to know where people are in their journey and anticipate where they are going.

With Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, brands don’t just see when customers click an organic search ad on their smartphone and land on their website. They can also see that the same customers visit the website on their desktop, browse products, put something in their cart, and then leave the site. They can determine what action to take to bring customers back to complete their purchase or explore alternative options.

Adobe Customer Journey Analytics unifies data across channels and devices to understand full customer journeys and assigns it to a single profile. From the very first customer engagement, marketers can begin to collect behavioral signals – albeit anonymously, at least initially. They start building an understanding of how customers interact with their brand and how they evaluate different products and services.

When customers provide information that allows them to be identified – often an email address – brands can integrate Adobe’s Experience Platform and Acxiom to link that anonymous data with a known identity. They can enrich their information with Acxiom’s market-leading InfoBase data to better understand who those people are, what interests them, and what motivates them. This understanding enables the personalized experiences that will move customers through the consideration steps and ultimately get them to convert.

Transitioning from event-based Adobe Analytics to journey-based Adobe Customer Journey Analytics can be a challenge. Underlying data mapping between the systems is needed to transition legacy event data, and the dashboards and analytic models of any third-party analytics tools like Databricks or Tableau also need to be adjusted. Moreover, different perspectives and deeper insights will inevitably change attribution alignment, organizational structures, and how marketers allocate budget.

As an Adobe Platinum solution and technology partner, Acxiom can support you with a structured, step-by-step pathway to this transition. We take a lighthouse approach, identifying and transitioning a single journey to begin, measuring it in both systems concurrently. This allows your teams to determine how measurement will need to change and acts as a north star for the rest of the migration. Then, as your confidence in the new approach grows, we’ll help you layer on more journeys until you are fully transitioned to Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.

The transition pathway includes six steps:

Step one: Assess current-state marketing analytics capability

The first step is diagnostics. We use a blueprinting process to understand what measurement tools you’re using, how data is being captured and managed, which metrics are being measured, who is using them, and for what purpose.

Step two: Develop new marketing insights, vision, and goals

The next stage is to define the business outcomes you want to achieve with the new journey strategy and create use cases for the initial lighthouse. Which data signals need to be captured at different points on the journey? Do they exist in the event-based analytics tool, or must the Adobe Experience Platform capture them?

Step three: Optimize the campaign planning process with journey-based insights

Once the lighthouse’s desired business outcomes are defined, we’ll create a future state design for enabling technology, data, analytics, process enhancements, and an agile organizational operating model. This will be validated with you at every stage to ensure the right solution for your needs.

Step four: Design data flows and models for integration

At this stage, we’ll prioritize the tasks that must be completed for the initial transition. This may require a change in operating model, shifting from teams focused on single-channel measurement to cross-functional teams looking at journey measurement.

Step five: Build architecture with a phased implementation roadmap

At this stage, we’ll launch the initial lighthouse and start to capture data. We’ll measure interactions simultaneously in Adobe Customer Journey Analytics and Adobe Analytics to compare and understand the differences.

Step six: Deliver white-glove support through migration and adoption

Once you’re comfortable with the initial lighthouse, we’ll iteratively repeat the process until everything is migrated to the new system and everyone is on the same page. Ultimately, we’ll turn off the old system because the events are still being captured in Adobe Customer Journey Analytics.