How J&J ditched a hundreds-of-thousands-dollar Adobe contract, without losing analytical capability

Most consultants would have extended the Adobe contract forever. We migrated to a free tool without losing a single analytical capability.

The reason most consultants extend the Adobe contract is structural. Every renewal is a paid line item. The consultancy that recommends Adobe gets implementation work, training work, and a relationship that compounds. Recommending the cheap option means recommending less of yourself.

We did the opposite. We migrated J&J’s analytics stack from Adobe Analytics to GA4, which is free, and made sure not a single analytical capability was lost in the process.

That last clause is the only test that matters. Stakeholders don’t care which platform serves the dashboard. They care whether the number they trust on Tuesday matches the number they trust on Wednesday. When the migration finished, every report that mattered was running on the new stack. The bill went away. The analytics didn’t.

What the work actually looked like

Unglamorous. We mapped every Adobe report to a GA4 equivalent and identified the gaps where GA4 didn’t match one-for-one. We designed measurement to close those gaps, sometimes via custom events, sometimes via a different metric that meant the same thing. We rebuilt the data layer where it had drifted from the original spec. We ran both stacks in parallel for two months and reconciled deltas before cutting over. We trained the analytics team on the new vocabulary so the same question got the same answer regardless of who asked it.

No magic. Lots of unsexy alignment work.

Why it worked

Governance, not tooling. Stakeholders came into the room early, not to bless a deck, but to sign off on the success definition. The Horizon: every existing decision-grade report still ships, in GA4, with definitions matching the Adobe ones. Once that was on paper, the rest was execution.

I have skin in your outcome, not in any vendor’s revenue. No preferred partners. No reseller margins. If the right answer is a free tool, that’s the answer.

If your stack is mid-migration or one renewal away from a contract you can’t justify, the Trusted Number Audit is a free 5-minute read on whether the problem is the tool or the governance underneath it.