AB Tasty is a SAAS application created for e-marketers that enables them to optimize their website and conversion rate without technical knowledge. They can test several versions of their pages to identify which one has the biggest impact on their business objectives, e.g. click-through rate on a call to action button, add-to-cart rate, global conversion rate of their website.
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Sitecore Experience Manager
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Sitecore Experience Manager is an enterprise-grade CMS competing with Oracle WebCenter, IBM Web Content Manager and Adobe. It presents a fairly wide and comprehensive swath of inbuilt features. In Sitecore WCM editing takes place from within the page with its inline editor, allowing editors and authors to create display rules and content within the context of the page in an integrated process. It allows the creation of blogs, wikis, polls, integrates with social media, and is mobile…
A/B Tasty tool allows us do easy testing without burdening our limited developer resources all the time. Reports are simple enough to interpret. Support has been excellent and proactive, also the onboarding was successful. It is also an advantage that we have the possibility to drive all our traffic to the test versions rather than being limited to specific user amount per month. We can recommend A/B Tasty for testing purposes, as the platform keeps it’s promises, doesn’t require too much technical knowledge and the support is excellent.
Great for companies that are looking to create customized, tailored content solutions and be willing to put in the hard work and effort to maximize the value out of the tool. If your company is just looking for very basic content management without all the bells and whistles, I'd recommend looking elsewhere for less [money].
Customer-focused. Over the past year, AB Tasty has worked with us to overcome many obstacles (e.g. tracking hurdles, ITP issues, etc.). The team always finds a solution in a timely manner to ensure we're able to execute on experiments.
Reliability. One of the biggest hurdles earlier this year were the ITP regulations set out by Apple. Over 40% of our ad traffic was Safari users. AB Tasty was using 3rd party cookies but quickly migrated over to a local session storage solution that circumvented the issue.
Personalisation of advertising banners based upon knowledge of the customer, like location or previous searches enables us to target customers with products and offers that they are more likely to engage with, which has been done to good effect.
The use of Sitecore for content management enables the business and design team to perform changes to things, like images, content and page structure, which would otherwise have required a code release, which is costly in terms of man power.
The A/B testing in Sitecore is good because it allows us to statistically verify minor changes to the site - like advert changes or component ordering on the page - as to whether or not they positively impact conversion.
Sometimes the platform is a little glitchy and requires a refresh.
Would be great to be able to see the experiments and projects on a timeline with their status and main result to have an immediate view of ongoing and completed projects.
Email notification for when an experiment reaches a certain confidence level.
Sitecore is Customer Engagement Platform. It comes with lots of features (e.g. Authoring, Analytics, personalization, A/B Test, Webforms for marketers etc), But, most of them are not being used by many clients. If you are really looking for just CMS (only authoring and publishing), then I don't think Sitecore is a way to go.
You need to have a strong Sitecore certified developer base to manage the Sitecore platform (if you are using all features). It's the same case with others. But, finding a Sitecore certified (costs $$) developer is tough in the market. Now the market is growing (thanks to Sitecore promotional events) and Sitecore is gaining popularity, It may be easy to find such developers in the future. If you want to leverage most out of the Sitecore community you need to be a Sitecore certified developer.
Sitecore comes with lots of built-in features and marketplace components. I feel this puts in a little tricky situation. It gives an opportunity for a normal developer to use some of the free marketplace module, which may or may not be supported in a future version of Sitecore. which may put the entire platform in risk to upgrade to latest Sitecore version. You need to have a proper process to control and validate the marketplace components before using them.
AB Tasty's tool as well as the support team completely met my goals on A/B Testing. Editing a test is really easy and AB Tasty made the marketing team free to launch nearly any test. Reporting is also easy to set up and give us the information needed to keep improving transformation on landing pages and forms
Sitecore has proven that it can deliver on its promise of a robust, reliable enterprise CMS solution with plenty of features. Also, they keep updating it with more and better features. Now that we are highly trained on it we have started on getting the most out of it and we plan to keep doing more of that in the future.
With any platform that offers so much capability, usability will naturally be more challenging. Sitecore does an admirable job and made massive strides in version 8, but at some times offers too many ways to achieve the same task allows users to sometimes take a path less efficient than the preferred path.
Support is good, but it would be better if it was quicker or if AB Tasty provided a quicker SLA. At times, you require stuff urgently but AB Tasty support isn't as quick as I personally like it to be.
Sitecore Support is very knowledgeable and helpful. We have raised a number of issues with them and they rarely fail to come up with an acceptable solution.
Sitecore captures and remembers every single interaction your customers and prospects have in any part of the system, allowing you to build comprehensive, ever-learning profiles of each individual. From email marketing, to social media, to online shopping, Sitecore remembers where each interaction left off so you can automatically continue the conversation. Sitecore helps you manage your content for each and every experience your customers enjoy. Customize what content you want and the system will take care of how it's displayed.
Make sure you work with a partner that can help you take advantage of the entire platform. Specifically we see a lot of customers not taking advantage of Sitecore DMS and thus missing a huge opportunity. Sitecore is a platform that is meant to be constantly optimized and improved upon.
We selected AB Tasty mostly because we got a sense that their dev and customer service teams were going to go above and beyond to help us out. We were right! The cost was also a factor as they came in a small bit lower, but cost wasn't the only factor.
The decision to select Sitecore was not ultimately mine, but the fact that we were able to leverage in-house Microsoft .Net (C#) experience on a platform that had a library of extensions, but also allowed us to customize and keep private our confidential IP has been a big help. When you see a SharePoint site or a Drupal site you can usually tell "oh this is a MS SharePoint site", but with Sitecore the ability to customize and have different views even different components based on device type makes Sitecore a clear winner.
Since we use AB tasty our conversion rates have significantly increased on the Watch pages.
We can report positive comments about the evolutions of our interfaces, from our expert users. And so improved customer satisfaction.
The solution allows us to validate or invalidate without taking major risk while gaining in reactivity, our proposals relook pages.
Commitment rates are much higher, multiplied by 2 or 3, when we implement customizations that are relevant. These customizations are very relevant insofar as we are governed by the seasonality of events as a media site.
ROI depends so much on implementation. Its would be difficult to comment in a positive or negative regarding CMS product to direct ROI. A non-technical user would be surprised at what a basic installation of Sitecore looks like. "Hello World" comes to mind. With that in mind we can look at two things, Sitecore Support and Sitecore Partners.
Certified Internal Developers and Sitecore Support: This depends on the qualifications of your existing departments regarding implementing a enterprise CMS. No experience to some experience, this is a no brainer, rigorously vet top and middle partners and hire one to lead this effort. If your experienced still hire a partner and vet them but hire a middle to small partner and have them help, not lead.
"Sitecore Window": You could equate Sitecore in some implementation as throwing expensive parts at a car problem. If your business requirements and data consumption needs are not within this cost window then in the end on paper it will be difficult to see ROI or that there just wasn't a return. Then it will be time to look at other lower cost alternatives The initial cost is just the start. Over engineering and expensive horizontal integration partners can cost someone a promotion or job.
If your content workflows are complex, sites rendering data requirements are large and performance and scalability are paramount. Sitecore should be in your top 3.
