Acoustic Tealeaf (formerly Acoustic Experience Analytics and before that IBM Tealeaf; Acoustic has restored the former branding), is an AI powered application providing site visitor session recording and replay, anomaly detection, and struggle analytics.
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Ensighten Manage
Score 6.8 out of 10
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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.
Tealeaf is a must for any site that has a key business process that drives revenue for a company. It is not limited to only capturing a small percentage of visitors to your site, it captures every visitor to your site. A lot has changed to the last year for Tealeaf for the good. There are many more options to for capturing data including a cloud and SaaS offering. Take a look again if you haven't seen it in a while.
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
Speed of searching for web sessions and users. This particular feature seems to impress me the most. When researching incidents where users report to have difficulty on our site, all we need is any of the unique identifiers of a user (email address used, IP address, user id) and we can locate their session(s) almost immediately in TeaLeaf.
Multiple conditional events - I really like how we can have events contain already existing events. This helps a great deal if issues being researched become even more complex.
IBM is still working out a solution for seeing Mobile App traffic in Tealeaf. What they have now allows you to see the response and request, but it doesn't show where the customer is actually clicking. They've promised that newer versions will be better with this.
Tealeaf is pushing a web based viewer, trying to make this the standard over the more robust and extremely useful desktop based Tealeaf Viewer. the Web Based viewer is slow and clunky and just not as flexible, but IBM insists on pushing customers towards it. Last I heard, they plan for their mobile solution to only work in the web based viewer.
Recently IBM moved all the support documentation for Tealeaf to the IBM Support portal instead of Tealeaf.com where it has been for years. This completely broke the in application Tealeaf Help. At the time of my last use of Tealeaf near the end of November 2013, when you tried to search help from the Tealeaf web portal, you were sent to the IBM support site, and once you logged in, the search request was lost and you had to start the search again. The search of the help files is also nowhere near as good as the original tealeaf.com help site. Also, if your users tried to use help, they were out of luck because only the Tealeaf Admins have access to the IBM support portal. At first they insisted that they were not going to fix this for older versions of the software, but instead only release a fix when the next version of Tealeaf was release. There was a large discussion about this on the LinkedIn forum and IBM has said they're working on a solution, but I'm not sure when/if that will get release.
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
Tealeaf is a scalable product that works with complex user-facing environments. It is one of the leading products in the market that helps identify user pain points and increases defect identification. The user interface is simple, clean, and easy to use. Lastly, Tealeaf Support provides good customer service and is eager to help solve chalenges we face along the way.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
