Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. Tealium Customer Data Hub

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.

Incentivized

Well suited: Any company that has a variety of data interspersed across multiple systems and is trying to get a more unified understanding of their customer profile—that enriched customer view of having all these disparate data sources and wanting to bring them together in a relatively seamless manner, and then having that more nuanced understanding of the entirety of the customer and being able to action off of it. Which again, I feel like is a core marketing use case.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Activation in real time - it's really good and you can literally see the information being activated in all other technologies that my clients use, like TikTok, Facebook, Google, et cetera. At the time that a client arrives on your website, you have instant data to enrich the profiles and activate on this channel. So this is really good and it's something that Tealium give us the control in order to do that.
• The other thing is that you have the power to choose what data you want to collect and what data you do not want to collect. Tealium is particularly very good on doing that.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Audiences—don't they technically exist in Tealium? They are just streamed—no count, no backfill, etc.
• Working backward to identify issues involves lots of clicking in the UI, going from audience to audience attribute, badge to event attribute, and so on.
• You have to wait for a Real-Time event to see the payload. There is no sample or other option.

Incentivized

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

I already know that my company has no plans to discontinue use of Tealium. We are heavily reliant on it due to a huge number of product teams and developers we would have to work with to place tags across many pages. Tealium is already there on the pages, and our application/product teams are familiar with how to integrate it. It is just the simplest way to ensure that new data requirements are implemented in a timely manner.

Incentivized

Very easy to implement and use.

Once you understand how it works and how to implement things, it is a dream and very user friendly. There is the initial learning curve but there are oceans of helpers available to you to help you bridge that initial gap and get going. Take the time to learn it up front and you will never have any problems. And support is great and available to answer questions

Incentivized

Never had any issues

It's been flawless as far as I am concerned.

Incentivized

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.

Sometimes publishing can take longer than expected

Incentivized

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 support team often is so quick to respond and so helpful when it comes to working with the needs of my clients and being able to resolve potential shortcomings or technical issues or surrounding the tool. There have been times more recently that I’ve gotten more generic service rather than the tailored experience that I have come to expect.

Incentivized

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.

Did what we needed to onboard us onto the platform

Incentivized

See previous comment: reading and understanding the encyclopedic implementation guide is a must.

Implementation had some bumps in the road and it was new for all of us, but for the most part, it was easier than many other implementations we've done with other technologies.

Incentivized

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.

Tealium Customer Data Hub can do it all in one. Whereas, I think by using multiple Tealium Customer Data Hubs, we can utilize what each tool is really good at. In an ideal world, we'd like to use Tealium Customer Data Hub for everything, but one thing that we struggle with is Audience Segmentation, and we are looking for a one touch solution, without a lot of the work since the data is already there.

Incentivized

Like anything it could be cheaper but we still feel we get value from it.

Incentivized

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.

Never had an issue, scales as we use it.

Incentivized

Very easy to work with and relatively cost effective

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• There has been a near immeasurable return on customer data and improvement of our quality for our physical products due to be in tune with the customer. This has changed our way of doing things for the better to gain a better flow and overall workplace experience.
• A negative is that Tealium AudienceStream becomes harder to manuever and use data analytics for when a database has been existing for a fairly large amount of time. It goes from an agile ship to a huge vessel that takes many components to be able to move.

Incentivized