• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 21, 2012

Adobe Systems will push deeper into online marketing, adding features in the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite that can predict consumer behavioral patterns. Some of the capabilities come from its acquisition in January of Efficient Frontier, previous code name Project Midas.

Adobe, which captures more than 6 trillion transactions yearly for more than 5,000 digital customers, collectively represents more than 27 petabytes of data. The company runs software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings through 23,500 servers and networked devices in 19 data center co-location sites.

Aseem Chandra, vice president of marketing for Adobe's Digital Marketing Business, calls the new feature "predictive marketing" to analyze events throughout the entire funnel to help marketers analyze the data to determine any concerns.

Marketers can look at patterns -- with about 100,000 variables -- and estimate probability to address issues before they arise. The feature goes into beta during the second half of 2012, and into production later this year.

The statistical model analyzes past performance and forecasts probability. A predictive marketing dashboard allows marketers to change key metrics in various what-if scenarios to see how those changes will potentially impact business outcomes, such as orders and revenue.

Testing the tool with one unnamed electronics manufacturer and retailer, Adobe gathered historical data from its Web site and ecommerce store and built a model around that testing, claiming 98% or 99% accuracy. "We then used models to predict what the next few weeks would look like."

Around Black Friday, when revenue should peak, it showed a shortfall against the electronics company's plan. That led the company to shift their ad spend, based on the anomaly, and come in at about 1% difference from their original revenue plan. "If they hadn't made the shift immediately, they would have missed the opportunities during the biggest shopping day of the year," Chandra said.

Adobe will also release several other marketing tools, such as Adobe Social, for ad buying that combines social publishing with monitoring and analytics. The tool builds on the social media management technology acquired earlier this year as part of Context Optional and Efficient Frontier.