A Review of IBM Digital Analytics
Modules Used
- Digital Analytics
- Explore
- Recommendations
- Livemail
Overall Satisfaction with 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.
- Using IBM Digital Analytics has allowed us to optimize marketing spend for our clients and provide us the insight to reduce the spend on vendors that are not performing well or not bringing in qualified traffic.
- Using IBM Digital Analytics data to power on-site product recommendations has increased the percentage of total sales from recommendation zones to around 10% compared to around 1% with manually merchandised zones.
- Using IBM's TruePath Funnels to analyze the checkout process for various clients has allowed us to see where visitors are dropping out of the checkout process and make improvements to increase conversion rate.
Google Analytics is great low cost alternative to IBM Digital Analytics for smaller, low traffic sites but does not offer the in depth product performance reports we require for our retail clients. IBM can add notes on Google's user interface but Google should really add additional e-commerce capabilities. Google should also reevaluate their policy on the use of PII data.