Acoustic Tealeaf vs. Ensighten Pulse

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 Pulse is particularly well suited to the type of work Ovative/group does in the marketing attribution space, but is also very well suited to drive the data collection efforts for personalization on-site as well. Pulse is also extremely well suited in scenarios where a client may want to track individuals across many domains or touchpoints

• 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.

• Pulse is the ultimate tracking tool. Almost anything you want to do with it is enabled and capable.
• Pricing for Pulse was very aggressive as an early buyer.
• The support team for Pulse is always very quick to respond and adapt their product roadmap to meet customer feedback.

• 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.

• Documentation - While Ensighten Pulse itself and the implementation process of the core components are documented rather well, the peripheral implementation steps, i.e. how to use this with a specific marketing platform, are not well documented. That said, the Ensighten support channels have been hugely beneficial in making these steps happen.

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.

• With the specific KPI's we report on, Tealeaf has helped shine a light on metrics we would not have seen in a normal analytics reporting tool.
• Tealeaf has helped us pinpoint areas of user struggle and vastly improved our website experience.

• We identified over 20M impressions that should have been re-allocated due to frequency caps and have utilized our modeling to push more adaptive frequency caps by marketing message through our ad network.
• We will pilot a program where we block 'saturated' users and those exhibiting 'bot-like' behavior through our ad networks to further improve our advertising effectiveness.
• We do have a resource cost in maintaining a separate server and a systems developer to maintain our environment. Where I'd prefer to pay for a full SaaS application and utilize that resource in another area.