Likelihood to Recommend If you're using the Adobe stack and tools to power your website, Target is a great solution to implement. I've utilized Target within two organizations, one running on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and the other on Adobe Magento. I don't see how companies could harness the full capacity of Target without also having
Adobe Analytics integrated. This is their 'secret sauce' and might not be a good solution for companies who are invested in Google Analytics 360. Integration was straightforward but did require support from the Adobe team to implement successfully. While Target is a great tool for digital teams to support, you'll need your tech team aligned and available to support implementation.
Read full review Ensighten manage can be setup to be used by non technical business users. However the product provides a lot of flexibility by the way of custom custom Javascript and HTML tags, and advanced features like events, which needs coding experience as well as understanding of web technologies. Ensighten mobile is also a promising tool, but so far we have not had any luck setting it up, mainly due to challenges with Android setup
Read full review Pros This application gives us an incredible integration with Adobe Analytics that allows its operation to be the best and determine the performance of our website. It offers us an analysis based on user behavior and a web page customization option to adapt and meet the needs of those users. Read full review Supports typical software development life cycle (SDLC) process by facilitating DEV, QA and PROD deployment stages through spaces. Roles and security can be thoroughly defined. Very good selection of tagging technologies. Site is stable, no availability concerns. GUI in general is straightforward. Read full review Cons This is something a lot of testing tools struggle with, but I think the WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") editor - or Visual Experience Composer (VEC) in Adobe terminology - could definitely use some work. It's a struggle to execute many tests beyond simple copy, color, placement changes, and even the features that do exist are often clunky if not altogether broken. The interface itself can be a bit counterintuitive in certain parts. If you are familiar with other tools, it's likely middle of the road in this respect; think much easier to understand than Monetate for instance, but a far cry from the simplicity of an Optimizely. It can be a bit buggy from time to time. The worst example is the frequency at which the tool will fail to save due to an error, but not inform you of this until you try to save, at which point your only option is to log out, log back in, and make all of your updates once again. It can become an extreme pain point at times, and I personally have just gotten into the habit of saving every couple of minutes to avoid a massive loss of productivity. Read full review While the code templates that are already existent provide an easy interface to leverage existing code sets, custom codes still need to be written a lot of times since the templatized versions apply them to a global scope only and not for individual URLs or regex's for specific use cases for pixel vendors. Also, the library needs to be updated more frequently with new pixel vendors injecting their own variations of codes Professional services (both the shared and dedicated model) definitely needs a lot of improvement since this is something that we have been immensely challenged with as a client of Ensighten in general. General response times and availability of support hours both from an account management standpoint and professional services/support standpoint have been quite challenging in the past year or two and there has been no real progress on this front Ensighten Manage uses its own best practices to modify certain code sets from say JavaScript to Jquery for instance as it may be more compatible within its platform. This needs to change so that the tool is more nimble, agile and flexible in accepting and executing on different vendor codes Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have a team of people trained on how to use the application and it integrates well with the other Adobe products we use. Our future roadmap of testing will require some complex scenarios which we hope Target will be able to accomplish
Read full review For the volume of tracking pixels that we plan to implement it only makes sense for us to continue. At this point, development is benefiting significantly from not being bogged down with writing tracking pixel code and the marketing team(s) enjoy being able to stay connected to their tool deployments. As the portfolio of tracking methods increases, the usage of Ensighten will increase with it.
Read full review Usability Can be difficult to learn, but once you understand Mboxes and the nuances of the system it's very user friendly
Read full review The GUI looks professional and is overall very usable. Menu and buttons are laid out well and easy to view. Wizard-like tag configuration is pleasant. Color scheme is pleasant to view, lacking fatiguing colors. Page load progress indicator is reassuring. Filters on past-visited screens are remembered, very handy. Filter options are flexible.
Read full review Reliability and Availability i don't think we use the full functionalities of the tool, but to use the full functions, it's almost impossible (Too hard)
Read full review Performance The bottleneck is never the software program
Read full review Support Rating On several occasions, we have had the need to ask for help from the Adobe Target support team, and I must say that they have provided us with an excellent experience, as they take care of solving the problems quickly and with high precision
Read full review The Ensighten Manage support team has been helpful and dedicated to assisting us solve problems that come up with tag deployments even when the issues are completely unrelated to the core Manage product itself. They seem to have the right mix of tag-specific subject matter experts and general support resources.
Read full review In-Person Training The instructor that came to train us was awesome and this training was very useful. I would recommend it for anyone who is going to be using this software. I only mark it lower because it is an added expense to an already expensive product, and a lot of the training covered the "Target" portion of the software (which again, we didn't use)
Read full review Online Training The training was very easy to understand, however it would have been more useful to my development team than me. It was also primarily over-the-phone, which is never as easy to follow as in-person. We ended up scheduling and paying for an in-person training session to supplement the online/phone training because it wasn't helpful enough.
Read full review Implementation Rating Implement using a global mBox on the page so you can change any and everything over the traditional method. Traditional method is good if you do not have technical web dev resources, do not know Javascript/jQuery, or you have money to blow on mBox calls. Global deployment reduces mBox calls and allows you to touch many parts of the page easily. A lot more customizable
Read full review Ensighten is a great tool, and as good as any in the industry with strong workflow capabilities, an admin API and a friendly interface. It does have some limitations and is not entirely "marketer friendly" as they claim. Also, note we've experienced some performance/load time issues with the Ensighten data layer, which we are addressing with them.
Tom Arundel Director, Program Management, Tagging & Performance
Read full review Alternatives Considered We seriously considered another software but because we use so many other Adobe products this made the most sense for us. If you are not dependent on other Adobe software and are a smaller company, in my opinion, Target may not be the best fit.
Read full review We've used Ensighten Tag Management since 2013 - before this, we used Adobe's out of the box dynamic tagging solution. Since Ensighten is a purpose-built tool, it provides a great deal more flexibility than that of Adobe. Rule-drived spaces and conditions were not available in Adobe's tag container. Ensighten's visual tagger is unique in its ability to place MBOXes on the page for A/B testing. Finally, mobile tagging is simply not possible without going through the release process, which Ensighten has freed us from
Read full review Return on Investment We have been able to run specific A/B tests that have shown an increase in conversion, which in turn has led to very large banked sales numbers for the year. We have been able to prove that using and automated Merchandising process did not decrease conversion. This allowed us to greatly increase efficiency by opening up resource time. Read full review Increased complexity when debugging so bug are taking longer to fix when they are related to Ensighten Our sites are loading about 10 seconds faster and have opened our eyes as to how much javascript we are rendering onto our sites which is no longer needed. Read full review ScreenShots