IBM Digital Analytics - Good enough for most, but high room for improvement
For our clients, IBM Digital Analytics serves as our primary digital analytics solution. We use the CMS platform to construct the …
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What is Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)?
Based on the former Coremetrics, IBM Digital Analytics is a discontinued analytics product. IBM acquired Coremetrics in 2010, and re-branded the platform to the IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Solution. Product support was ultimately provided by Acoustic, but the product is…
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What is Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)?
Based on the former Coremetrics, IBM Digital Analytics is a discontinued analytics product. IBM acquired Coremetrics in 2010, and re-branded the platform to the IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Solution. Product support was ultimately provided by Acoustic, but the product is not a part of the…
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What is Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)?
Based on the former Coremetrics, IBM Digital Analytics is a discontinued analytics product.
IBM acquired Coremetrics in 2010, and re-branded the platform to the IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Solution. This cloud-based solution included IBM Digital Analytics, the core analytical product, as well as several add-on modules, including Benchmark, Product Recommendations, Lifecycle, and Multisite.
IBM integrated the Digital Marketing Optimization platform with other solutions, like WebSphere Commerce and Portal for ecommerce, IBM Campaign and Interact (acquired from Unica in 2010) for cross-channel campaign management, and IBM Tealeaf (acquired in 2012) for customer experience management.
Product support was ultimately provided by Acoustic, but the product is not a part of the company's plans going forward.
IBM acquired Coremetrics in 2010, and re-branded the platform to the IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Solution. This cloud-based solution included IBM Digital Analytics, the core analytical product, as well as several add-on modules, including Benchmark, Product Recommendations, Lifecycle, and Multisite.
IBM integrated the Digital Marketing Optimization platform with other solutions, like WebSphere Commerce and Portal for ecommerce, IBM Campaign and Interact (acquired from Unica in 2010) for cross-channel campaign management, and IBM Tealeaf (acquired in 2012) for customer experience management.
Product support was ultimately provided by Acoustic, but the product is not a part of the company's plans going forward.
Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) Video
IBM Digital Analytics March 2018 Release
Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) Integrations
Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) Competitors
Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Based on the former Coremetrics, IBM Digital Analytics is a discontinued analytics product. IBM acquired Coremetrics in 2010, and re-branded the platform to the IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Solution. Product support was ultimately provided by Acoustic, but the product is not a part of the company's plans going forward.
Piano Analytics, Google Analytics, and Adobe Analytics are common alternatives for Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued).
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 2.3.
The most common users of Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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(87)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-9 of 9)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 06, 2018
Disappointed
It is currently used by the marketing strategy department. We have been using Digital Analytics along with other reporting tools to drive business decisions.
- It's relatively easy to export and schedule reports.
- The new UI has a simple and clean design.
- Currently, the new UI is extremely buggy for a beta release with simple features like deleting reports or renaming workspaces being absent.
- The transition from old to new has been rough especially with an absence of support at times.
- Date sorting is also frustrating when creating custom reports.
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Digital Analytics was used to monitor on-site user behavior, highlight areas of drop-off across key lead capture pathways, provide direction, and historical aggregation of digital marketing initiatives and set performance benchmarks for an ecommerce acquisition channel. Away from the 'out of box' options we leveraged Digital Analytics registrationIDs to capture multi-channel attribution data, which was warehoused and frequently mined to determine the digital marketing mix, that brought successful customers to the business.
- Click pathways provided a robust way to analyze visitor pathways
- TruePath Funnels were essential to learn day over day changes through key lead capture paths
- Ability to accept and table a variety of user & registration IDs allowed us to perform off-UI multichannel analysis
- The JavaScript library sitting at the back-end of IBM Digital Analytics is extremely cumbersome for non-developer, marketing users. While the JS library does provides endless customization, the complexity and ramp-up time to understand the basics can be a barrier when trouble-shooting basic re-configurations.
- IBM Digital Analytics is HEAVILY geared towards online retailers, acting more as a website's cash register as opposed to a tried-and-true web diagnostic and analytics tool
- The support for IBM Digital Analytics was lackluster, we found ourselves often tangled in the bureaucracy that is IBM, when REAL problems occurred.
February 04, 2015
IBM Digital Analytics: Overall product suite, digital ecosystem and marketing priorities should guide your choice
Our clients have traditionally selected IBM Digital Analytics over competitive platforms when they need a robust, enterprise system which can be 1) readily integrated with and provide cost benefits due to chosen CMS (typically IBM WebShere), 2) require reliable, robust data security and data ownership due to heavy regulatory concerns or 3) provide a uniform deployment allowing for the ability to opt into industry/vertical benchmarks.
- Uniform deployments provide for the ability to opt-in to relatively robust benchmarks.
- Technical support teams allow both clients and agencies access to technical subject matter experts to ensure best-in-class implementations.
- Cost structure is often quite favorable, if a company has chosen other products within the IBM family.
- Current and long term integrations with IBM products (including Unica, Tealeaf, etc.) show promise and will continually increase the value of IBM Digital Analytics
- Uniformity of deployment comes at a price, namely flexibility.
- IBM Digital Analytics is a better choice who are focused exclusively on e-commerce, heavily regulated industries, or simply interested in precision marketing and CRM. For those companies which prioritize style, form, and flexibility over precision (aka Art over Science), other solutions may be more effective.
- Competitors are integrating their systems more rapidly than IBM, which is still very siloed.
- It can be difficult to find professionals with technical expertise to implement and support IBM Digital Analytics. The user base from which to draw is significantly smaller.
- IBM technical training can be quite elusive to secure, unless you are already committed to the product and have a service contract in place, unlike competitors where technical training is readily available with registration open to all.
My company resells IBM Digital Analytics for our clients and provides reporting and strategy services along with the tool. The tool addresses our need to provide reporting and analysis on ongoing and one time marketing campaigns as well as overall website performance.
- eCommerce Reporting - unlike GA, Digital Analytics has built in product and ecommerce reporting that is fairly advanced enough to answer most business questions around product performance, basket analysis, etc.
- Marketing Attribution - Digital Analytics has out of the box marketing attribution capabilities including first, last and average click.
- Ad Hoc Reporting - Through the Explore tool, nearly any business questions can be answered through a completely customized report set up functionality.
- User Interface - is lacking. Still flash based so if you want to copy a number or a table, you have to download it to excel first.
- Down time - there have been selective occasions when the platform has been inaccessible for up to an hour, during peak business hours. There have also been delays in year end reporting as well as standard reporting during peak holiday times as the data bases are overloaded, making data unavailable.
- Segmentation - no out of the box segments, and you are limited to 10 one-time segments that can be active at one time and for only 35 days.
May 22, 2014
IBM Digital Analytics Review
We are a reseller of IBM DA where we have many clients engaged with several levels of the IBM product suite. The data is used across many departments for gauging marketing and site design performance. Many of our clients use this data to forecast visitors to their site and their potential actions. We use the Explore tool frequently to setup more in depth reports using custom variables passed in the tags, to build out and answer many of the tougher questions. We also have several clients that take advantage of the LiveMail tool to target and remarket to consumers based on interests or actions (abandoned cart campaigns for example).
- IBM Digital Analytics is a strong offering for retail eCommerce clients, based on the out-of-the-box metrics available around product views, items added and abandoned, as well as the ability to remarke to the individual user based on that information.
- Fairly straight forward implementation compared to the other major tools
- Visitor stitching - I feel the IBM Live Profile is very accurate at creating a full picture of an individual user and provides opportunities to create better messages to them.
- Having IBM Support as a an immediate resource to clarify or troubleshoot any of the system features has been very beneficial as well
- The user interface is in Flash, which can be very frustrating and slow at times. Apparently, this is to be transitioned in a future release.
- Can only segment the last 93 days of data. Any historical segmentation beyond the 93 days must be run in Explore (which is credit based, and has its own limitations with the number of credits per month, based on the initial contract with IBM).
- Reports can only display 93 days of data at a given time for custom date ranges. There are pre-programmed date ranges setup with IBM during implementation (last week, last month, last quarter etc.), but are not flexible enough to answer more specific questions.
- Certain reports cannot have segments applied, making answering some simple questions a bit more tricky. For example, I can create a segment around mobile devices and apply it to the marketing channels report, but I can't create a marketing channel segment and apply it to the mobile reports.
- Built in API calls allows for nice report design and automation.
May 21, 2014
A Review of IBM Digital Analytics
Our organization is a reseller of IBM Digital Analytics. It is deployed across all of our client's websites. As part of our digital marketing agency services, IBM Digital Analytics is used to analyze and optimize our client's marketing initiatives. We leverage visitor behavior data from the tool to implement remarketing programs such as abandoned browse and abandoned cart. We also leverage IBM Recommendations to power intelligent, wisdom of the crowd, product recommendations on our client's websites.
- IBM Digital Analytics is a very powerful tool for retail brands offering many out of the box product and category performance reports. Many features an online retailer would consider standard such as product or shopping cart abandonment are included in this tool but require enhanced or custom tagging workarounds in other tools like Google Analytics.
- The Marketing Attribution reports are great, allowing us to see different attribution logic such as same session, 30 day last click, 30 day average click and others in one report. This allows us to see which channels act as acquisition channels and which are closer to the conversion. These reports have been improved with recent releases adding visitor journey and channel venn reports.
- The Benchmark module with IBM Digital Analytics is very beneficial to us, allowing us to see how our sites are performing across a number of different metrics compared to others in our particular vertical or in US retail as a whole. It is also a great way to see trends in the industry.
- The user interface is dated and flash based which makes it very difficult to use on mobile. The visualizations and graphs are nice but hopefully they will move away from flash soon.
- The custom reporting module, Explore, is powerful and the only place to entirely customize display columns and metrics but it is limited to a certain number of credits each month. Each month of data included in a report uses 1 report credit.
- Inside the Digital Analytics interface you are limited in the number of one time and persistent segments you can create. One time segments must be within the last 93 days and the date range cannot exceed 35 days. Depending on the reporting request that comes up you may run into this limitation.
We use Digital Analytics to share and visualize the performance of the website. IBM Digital Analytics allows us to report on the behavior of the visitors at an individual level - what has been clicked and how it helped our customers buy what they came for. Moreover it allows us to compare different strategies and have the data to help make strategic decisions. Marketing is no longer a 'like/dislike' decision, it is an actual analysis on the performance of the different decisions. The data is shared across all departments of the company to help make predictions across a wide variety of services: in the sales department to see what items are wanted, in the finance department to see what payment methods are most favored, and also in the marketing department to see what promotions are performing best.
- Digital Analtyics works best at analyzing on individual level. Each visitor can be targeted to improve its journey step by step.
- The ability to include many parameters in the tags helps create reporting that totally reflects company challenges. It helps with analyzing all aspects that we come across.
- Most of the reports are defaults and can be easily customizable. The fact that the interface allows the customized views to be placed in the interface next to the default views makes it easy to find them.
- The export functionality helps with exporting raw data to make off line analysis across all departments. This is really helpful when some very specific analysis needs to be made.
- The API is easily accessible and does not need an implementation language to create reports.
- IBM Digital Analytics allows for custom values in the tags, but they can only be accessed by creating Explore reports and there is a charge for each new report created. If the values could be accessed freely that would make a huge difference.
- Segments sometimes take a long time to process, and this slows the analysis quite a bit. Moreover the limit that is imposed is sometimes very restrictive (10 maximum)
- The interface is not very user friendly.
April 09, 2014
E-commerce is real strong point.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- E-commerce is Coremetrics' strong point. The solution is very good at reporting for ecomerce sites. For example, it gives excellent data on products purchased and abandoned cart value and other E-commerce statistics. Omniture is perhaps better for more general content browsing statistics, but Coremetrics is the clear leader for E-commerce sites.
- Easy and well documented implementation
- Fast, easy and customizable reporting UI
- Data mining or AdHoc visit-based analysis: All packages provide a way to do a deep dive on data. Usually you will need a custom report to cover something that is not covered out-of-the-box. For example, you might want to know whether more purchases are coming from people using one browser over another. Coremetrics does provide access to the database to build relationships between objects to construct custom reports. though it is possible to build these ad-hoc reports in Coremetrics, it's not that easy. Once you stray outside the standard templated reports, it's not the best solution for creating custom reports.
- Since it's a flat, table-based analytics solution, there are potential table limits which can be reached on large datasets
August 27, 2013
Solid web analysis product
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Unlike Google Analytics, which provides generic/multi-purpose tags for any kind of implementation you can imagine, Coremetrics provides a set of single-purpose tags along with an implementation strategy to help businesses get the right data in the right format. For example, there are tags specifically for adding an item of merchandise to a cart. Since this is a fundamental action for most e-commerce sites, the straightforwardness of this tagging (and the subsequent e-commerce reports it populates) is very convenient (and in some cases, where customization is required, very limiting).
- As mentioned above, the use case-specific tags populate very specific reports, such as cart abandonment, checkout conversion for e-commerce, etc. These out-of-the-box reports can be very useful if you have a generic implementation that matches Coremetric's expected usage.
- Explore reports are powerful because they allow you to create custom reports on practically any data point, enabling you to answer very specific questions.
- The Coremetrics implementation guide is a thorough document that explains every aspect of how Coremetrics works and the technology should or could be implemented on your site. For an engineer responsible for implementation, it is immensely helpful.
- Compared to Google Analytics, the reporting interface is slower and less user-friendly.
- There is no way to easily manage different sites in a single enterprise (though I think this may have been addressed in a newer version).
- The Impression Attribution add-on module is quite rudimentary and, compared to an ad-serving platform, very costly per impression. (But if you need impression data populated within Explore and not some other third-party, then it's for you.)