Adobe Customer Journey Analytics vs Google Meridian

Adobe Customer Journey Analytics brings online and offline customer data together to analyze interactions across channels, devices, and time. It combines data, including CRM data, into unified profiles and supports event, profile, and lookup data. Users can adjust data views and fields in the interface. Analysis Workspace provides drag-and-drop analysis across data sets without requiring SQL. Built-in AI can generate insights and captions, create presentation-ready slides, and support natural-language queries. Attribution options include algorithmic, rules-based, and participation models for examining marketing touchpoints. The product can also structure LLM prompts, responses, and conversations into signals such as sentiment, intent, and engagement patterns. It runs on Adobe Experience Platform, where usage policies, sensitivity labels, role-based permissions, and policy alerts apply; Adobe states that platform data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Available capabilities include real-time data refresh, custom dashboards, CRM reporting, pipeline tracking, budgeting, forecasting, scenario planning, ROI reporting, event tracking, conversion funnels, and ecommerce tracking. It is available through web and API. Adobe offers a free-trial option but does not specify its duration; pricing is available on request.

Google Meridian is a free, open-source Bayesian marketing mix modeling library for estimating channel contribution and ROI, modeling response curves and planning budgets. It is designed to estimate causal marketing impact and incremental outcomes for treatment variables. Teams can use geo-level data for media effect estimates, incorporate business knowledge through priors, and include controls such as Google Query Volume. Meridian supports reach and frequency modeling for video and search query volume data to account for organic demand. Its budget optimization and scenario planning features help teams assess channel allocation. Meridian GeoX supports geo experiments whose results can be used to calibrate models; automated calibration and expanded model health diagnostics are also supported. The Scenario Planner notebook requires access to at least one trained model stored in Google Drive or Google Cloud Storage. Meridian Studio is a Google Cloud-powered enterprise platform for managing models, with capacity to run up to hundreds simultaneously. Google describes Meridian as intended for cross-functional measurement teams, including analysts, business users, data scientists and technical practitioners. Support includes community discussions and expert support through Discord, plus technical troubleshooting through GitHub.