Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
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.
N/A
Ensighten Manage
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
Ensighten Manage is a popular tag management system used globally, promising to increase page loading speed, accelerate tag deployment, and facilitate omnichannel 1:1 customer engagement across platforms and devices. Ensighten provides tag control by visitor, session, and page, and harmonizes data collection.
The company’s Tag Delivery Network serves billions of tags annually for familiar brands like Sony, Staples, Symantec, T-Mobile, and United Airlines.
N/A
Pricing
Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)
Ensighten Manage
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)
Ensighten Manage
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)
Ensighten Manage
Considered Both Products
Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)
No answer on this topic
Ensighten Manage
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Ensighten Manage
We did not compare to any other companies, Ensighten was bought without any due diligence being completed, which I raised as an issue when we first got Ensighten but it was too late at this point.
Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)
Ensighten Manage
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
IBM analytics has continued to improve upon the days of being the original core metrics. After using the updated version for quite some time, it has been great at providing the needed analytics to measure ROI and goal performance for our quarterly KPI's. It has resulted in a great increase in web engagements although we are a midsize company, smaller outfits may not need such an expensive option.
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
IBM CXA comprises an acquisition called Tealeaf. This tool has deep heritage and this is evident in its present-day capabilities.
The Universal Behaviour Exchange or UBX puts the concept of personalisation at the forefront. The ability to combine physical (analog) and digital transactions to create the complete picture of a customer journey, is a stand out benefit.
The solution does not have to involve the purchase of software. IBM CXA can be sold as a service bundled with analytics as a service. This not only lowers the cost of ownership, it gets around one of the principal issues. Strong staff with design and analytical capability to drive the solution and deliver tangible benefits.
The seamless integration of Watson AI services to help with the heavy lifiting. Watson reinforces the analytical focus this solution has and can learn to recognise situations specific to a company.
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.
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
IBM Digital Analytics is a great solution for our clients and I believe they offer the best solution for the retail space. We have access to IBM support via email or live chat and they can answer many of the reporting questions that come up. IBM is receptive to our feedback of the product so I am confident they will continue making improvements
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.
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.
As reports are templated, the system is pretty quick. Sometimes you have to wait a bit for a report to render. Or you might have to re-load the page. But there is no real issue here and the system is on par with other similar systems.
Overall, the level of support is very good and I would say it is a strong asset of the solution. However, you can sometimes feel that there is a difference of level among the support team.
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.
Online training is really great. One of the best assets that they have. Lots of great videos, pop quizzes at the end of each module. Fantastic. Other tools have similar features, but not as good.
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.
Much of the work we did in IBM Digital Analytics could have been answered through Google Analytics, a much simpler, agile and FREE solution set. Not mention, given the vast number of Google Analytics USERS, free and actionable support is simply a click away ... this compared to IBM Digital Analytics fractured and often absent support service.
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
This solution can support large amount of data and transaction. The way that user management features are built, it shows it is meant for large organizations.
We spend too much time trying to work around bugs on the new UI.
We spend too much time trying to figure out how to make certain segments work because support and the knowledge center are lackluster.
Our sales rep is very unresponsive and leaves us searching for a lot of answers on our own, including what other products we may benefit from that IBM offers.
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.
