Likelihood to Recommend Silverpop is a powerful and comprehensive tool for digital marketers, and is apprprioate for companies of varying sizes, as well as both B2B and B2C models. It's particularly well-suited for companies with large, accurate customer databases and the ability to track customer actions on their websites to use as marketing automation triggers.
Read full review Google Analytics is particularly well suited for tracking and analyzing customer behavior on a grocery e-commerce platform. It provides a wealth of information about customer behavior, including what products are most popular, what pages are visited the most, and where customers are coming from. This information can help the platform optimize its website for better customer engagement and conversion rates. However, Google Analytics may not be the best tool for more advanced, granular analysis of customer behavior, such as tracking individual customer journeys or understanding customer motivations. In these cases, it may be more appropriate to use additional tools or solutions that provide deeper insights into customer behavior.
Read full review Pros Automated Messages - we currently have over 70 automated messages going out on any particular day through feeds and API calls that we pass to Silverpop. We rely on these automated messages to communicate to our customers and can rely on Silverpop to always be up and running to get these messages out. Robust query building - We can target customers easily based on a combination of demographic profile data, as well as email and site behavior and purchase behavior, allowing us to finely segment our audience Deep dive reporting - the UI reporting, as well as the available reports to download through the API give us tremendous insight into how our subscribers are responding to email. Read full review Multiple reports to see website use and behavior Allows you to customize reports with days, weeks, months, and years You can build out a dashboard to easily view stats from multiple websites in one place You can share analytics reports via the dashboard, automatically emailed PDFs or in other formats Read full review Cons Data syncing and errors - Silverpop does not do a great job of getting data to sync regularly with our CRM (Salesforce.com). The data had to flow back and forth several times before being added to campaigns and in some instances, it took days to update leads! Also, failed lead syncs get stuck in an alert list but it does not notify you otherwise that a lead failed the sync. Design issues - we use custom HTML to build emails and landing pages, and we were unable to render background images on our campaigns. Also, once you toggle between design and source (code) view to make edits, it often broke the code and threw off the design. Administrator alerts - when sync fails altogether between systems, there is no email alert sent to the system admin (me/my team) so we at times have found that we have gone 18 hours until we stumble across the fact that the system sync has failed. Reporting - it is not very comprehensive and we had difficulty generating the level of reporting that we need to have. Support - there are a few gems in the support team who know what they're doing, but largely calling support is a lesson in frustration. Product bug fixes - in two instances, my open support tickets were identified as product bugs. One related to incorrect cookie tracking which was causing our leads not to be scoring properly. They determined that this wasn't critical enough to build into their product fix road map. This is core to an automation system working properly. Read full review Data sampling is somewhat inaccurate on the free tier - this is addressed in premium but is expensive. Some of the UI is very similar in naming when presenting different data, some in-situ information might be useful. Gotchas around filtering and data validation. Implementation can be tricky, it can take a lot of time and expertise to get a full, accurate picture of your metrics. Read full review Likelihood to Renew SilverPop is a great marketing tool that integrates with Salesforce to provide customers and employees a great buying and selling experience. The software takes some very difficult tasks and makes them easy to accomplish. With proper setup and management, Silverpop gives you the tools to gain insight into the productiveness of campaigns.
Read full review We will continue to use Google Analytics for several reasons. It is free, which is a huge selling point. It houses all of our ecommerce stores' data, and though it can't account for refunds or fraud orders, gives us and our clients directional, real time information on individual and group store performance.
Read full review Usability This is a little bit difficult to rate because Silverpop is gradually updating its interface to improve usability all around. I know users are able to do their job with minimal assistance. However, some of the interface is dated, and the Programs interface, while functional, has a bit of a learning curve.
Read full review Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, down to minute levels. That is it's greatest detriment: find the right information when you need it can be a cumbersome task. You are able to create shortcuts, however, so it can mitigate some of this problem. Google is continually refining Analytics, so I do not doubt there will be improvements
Read full review Reliability and Availability While several of the other reviews have mentioned poor performance in this department, we have only had one situation where the system was down (although it was down for several hours). Silverpop segments its clients on different servers, and I know that the problem we experienced only occurred on our specific server (maybe other servers have had their own problems?) but our service has been reliable otherwise.
Read full review We all know Google is at top when it comes to availability. We have never faced any such instances where I can suggest otherwise. All you need is a Google account, a device and internet connection to use this super powerful tool for reporting and visualising your site data, traffic, events, etc. that too in real time.
Read full review Performance The throttle time for sending emails would vary depending on how many other campaigns were going out that day, which I found inconsistent
Read full review This has been a catalyst for improving our site's traffic handling capabilities. We were able to identify exit% from our sites through it and we used recommendations to handle and implement the same in our sites. We have been increasing the usage of Google Analytics in our sites and never had any performance related issues if we used Analytics
Read full review Support Rating The Salesforce Integration support team is fantastic. I'd give them greater than a 10 if possible. The rest of the support team can be extremely frustrating to work with. Too often they try to blame something obscure and refuse to escalate or look into the issue. And on occasion when you find system glitches they don't seem to care about fixing them
Read full review The Google reps respond very quickly. However, sometimes they can overly call you to set up an apportionment. I'm very proficient and sometimes when I talk to reps, they give beginner tutorials and insights that are a waste of time. I wish Google would understand my level of expertise and assign me to a rep (long-term) that doesn't have to walk me through the basics.
Read full review Online Training The online trainings are very detailed (for the most part) and really walk through the entire system. They are a little dry, but they are usually broken up into segments to allow you to skip to the parts you need.
Read full review Read full review Implementation Rating Based on recommendations from Silverpop we made some implementation decisions that we later regretted pretty substantially. In hindsight we should have started a pilot implementation earlier so we could learn and then start over. The big issue for us was that Silverpop recommended a non-keyed database, or at least a database that doesn't use email address as primary key. This is resulted in a large number of duplicate email addresses so that the end user is forced to unsubscribe multiple times to stop receiving emails.
Read full review I think my biggest take away from the Google Analytics implementation was that there needs to be a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it before you start. Originally the analytics were added to track visitors, but as we became more savvy with the product, we began adding more and more functionality, and defining guidelines as we went along. While not detrimental to our success, this lack of an overarching goal resulted in some minor setbacks in implementation and the collection of some messy data that is unusable.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We evaluated alternate providers less than a year into our IBM Watson Campaign contract because the system was so clunky to use (and we wanted a system that would include or better integrate with our SMS provider).
Bluecore and
Klaviyo were the front runners at the time, and we came close to moving forward with
Bluecore . The pricing model and overall the cost of
Bluecore was much higher than IBM for us though, and the timing of this was right when the IBM to Acoustic changes took place. We decided to give Acoustic a shot and are optimistic it will be enough to keep us on board once all the dust settles, though I find it unlikely we will renew with Acoustic when our contract is up again. My main email specialist is a
Klaviyo expert and finds that platform very easy to use in comparison-- it might be a better fit for a team of our size.
Read full review I have not used
Adobe Analytics as much, but I know they offer something called customer journey analytics, which we are evaluating now. I have used
Semrush , and I find them much better than Google Analytics. I feel a fairly nontechnical person could learn
Semrush in about a month. They also offer features like competitive analysis (on content, keywords, traffic, etc.), which is very useful. If you have to choose one among
Semrush and Google Analytics, I would say go for
Semrush .
Read full review Scalability Google Analytics is currently handling the reporting and tracking of near about 80 sites in our project. And I am not talking about the sites from different projects. They may have way more accounts than that. Never ever felt a performance issue from Google's end while generating or customising reports or tracking custom events or creating custom dimensions
Read full review Return on Investment we have not experienced any currently but moving to lead automation and lead scoring could change that. i'm not sure how increased employee efficiency would ever be a benefit b/c lead importing and visibility, along with setting up email templates is quite cumbersome. Read full review It has helped us gain understanding of what is going on on our website. It has helped us determine areas that need fixing (i.e. pages with extremely high bounce rates may need to be redone). It has helped us understand our biggest avenues for bringing traffic to the website and business in general. It has helped guide our website redesign. Read full review ScreenShots Acoustic Campaign Screenshots