Item: Adobe Target
Rating: 1
Author: Ben Reckelhoff

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

This is a great way to blow $15,000+ on a piece of useless junk software. This tool is an absolute joke. Get something different.

Pros and Cons

It lets you pause a test if you want.
You can track pageviews.
It's possible to track clicks on an element.

Like many platforms, Adobe Target has a visual composer to set up A/B tests. The visual composer uses an iframe, so if you want to test anything on your website that is post log-in, and you use proper security that disallows iframe logins, expect that to be useless.
It does not capture revenue out of the box. You need to deploy an additional tool called Adobe Experience Cloud Manager to get conversion data. Oh, and of course you have to pay extra for Adobe Launch to be able to deploy that *required* bit of code. Otherwise they consider it a "non-standard implementation" and you get no support, and need to go through 10 pages of implementation docs just to get started. Have fun IT guys...
You may only choose from a handful of metrics for reporting, even though we are paying over $30,000 for adobe target + analytics. They do NOT share data without tons of back-end manipulation of code snippets PLUS their paid tag manager (which isn't included in that $30k).
Updates typically completely break all tracking. It's a typical adobe product, so there's 10 updates a month as well. One day reporting is functional with mboxes, the next, zero conversion data, because we ran a required update to A4T.js and that no longer supports mboxes, yada yada yada.
All of this could be manageable if we got support. We pay $3,500 per year for 50 hours of "offshore consulting". What is that, you ask? That is a dedicated person to tell you to submit a support ticket. That's it. This person never answered a single question, never gave one suggestion, never fixed any issues. They only ever told us to submit support tickets. Great. Thanks.
Every support ticket was given low priorty, even when I specifically said in one request that I was testing a live CHECKOUT experience that directly impacted sales. I specifically asked for expedited higher tier response times because I was testing my actual checkout on production. I was still given tier 3, with several hours delay between emails, which usually consisted of useless links to support docs. Horrible. Might as well have been a chat bot, except then the responses would have been faster.
The support documentation is convoluted, and is mostly just ads for other services. (one thing always requires another to work properly - nothing is stand-alone). It's also nearly impossible to find what you need on their self-help portals. I usually wind up Googling my request and going to forums for help. It's faster than anything they offer support-wise.

Return on Investment

Used up lots of IT resources and never worked fully.
They auto-renewed us for a year, so now I'm stuck with them and won't use them.
Waste of $13k. Horrible ROI

Google Optimize - Way better than Adobe, even the free version. It automatically work with Google Analytics, and tracks revenue out of the box. Fantastic. Use this.

Optimizely - As a paid service, this is another good option. Tracks revenue out of the box, good heatmapping, most basic features are included and actually work without needing tons of IT help. Customer support is excellent as well - actaully listens, answers questions fully, helps troubleshoot, and they will be happy to hop on a call or chat for instant service.

Adobe Target does none of these things.

Key Insights

Do you think Adobe Target delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Adobe Target's feature set?

Did Adobe Target live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Adobe Target go as expected?

Would you buy Adobe Target again?

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want to pay $15,000 to be able to track two versions of a page that DOESN'T involve a user log-in, and you only need to track simple metrics such as pageviews, clicks on an element, (nothing conversion-related), AND you have unlimited IT resources, this is the tool for you.

If you want to track conversion, any page post sign-in, any metrics other than basic, you have limited IT resources, and you don't like waiting for days to get responses from customer support, then this is NOT the tool for you.

Terrible. A waste of $13k. Get something better. Support lacks. Tool constantly breaks. Incomplete. Not stand-alone.

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Target