Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and is now part of Adobe Experience Manager. Later versions of AEM include features of Livefyre pre-installed. Livefyre (or the Livefyre Studio app) is a content curation, social media UGC, audience engagement application that enables users to access user generated content that can be streamed in real-time to a customer’s sites, digital billboards, apps,…
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Adobe Target
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Adobe Test and Target is an A/B, multi-variate testing platform which Adobe acquired as part of the Omniture platform in 2009. It is now part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. It offers tight integration with Adobe analytics and content management products.
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
If you're using the Adobe stack and tools to power your website, Target is a great solution to implement. I've utilized Target within two organizations, one running on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and the other on Adobe Magento. I don't see how companies could harness the full capacity of Target without also having Adobe Analytics integrated. This is their 'secret sauce' and might not be a good solution for companies who are invested in Google Analytics 360. Integration was straightforward but did require support from the Adobe team to implement successfully. While Target is a great tool for digital teams to support, you'll need your tech team aligned and available to support implementation.
This application gives us an incredible integration with Adobe Analytics that allows its operation to be the best and determine the performance of our website.
It offers us an analysis based on user behavior and a web page customization option to adapt and meet the needs of those users.
Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.
This is something a lot of testing tools struggle with, but I think the WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") editor - or Visual Experience Composer (VEC) in Adobe terminology - could definitely use some work. It's a struggle to execute many tests beyond simple copy, color, placement changes, and even the features that do exist are often clunky if not altogether broken.
The interface itself can be a bit counterintuitive in certain parts. If you are familiar with other tools, it's likely middle of the road in this respect; think much easier to understand than Monetate for instance, but a far cry from the simplicity of an Optimizely.
It can be a bit buggy from time to time. The worst example is the frequency at which the tool will fail to save due to an error, but not inform you of this until you try to save, at which point your only option is to log out, log back in, and make all of your updates once again. It can become an extreme pain point at times, and I personally have just gotten into the habit of saving every couple of minutes to avoid a massive loss of productivity.
We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.
We have a team of people trained on how to use the application and it integrates well with the other Adobe products we use. Our future roadmap of testing will require some complex scenarios which we hope Target will be able to accomplish
On several occasions, we have had the need to ask for help from the Adobe Target support team, and I must say that they have provided us with an excellent experience, as they take care of solving the problems quickly and with high precision
The instructor that came to train us was awesome and this training was very useful. I would recommend it for anyone who is going to be using this software. I only mark it lower because it is an added expense to an already expensive product, and a lot of the training covered the "Target" portion of the software (which again, we didn't use)
The training was very easy to understand, however it would have been more useful to my development team than me. It was also primarily over-the-phone, which is never as easy to follow as in-person. We ended up scheduling and paying for an in-person training session to supplement the online/phone training because it wasn't helpful enough.
Implement using a global mBox on the page so you can change any and everything over the traditional method. Traditional method is good if you do not have technical web dev resources, do not know Javascript/jQuery, or you have money to blow on mBox calls. Global deployment reduces mBox calls and allows you to touch many parts of the page easily. A lot more customizable
We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.
We seriously considered another software but because we use so many other Adobe products this made the most sense for us. If you are not dependent on other Adobe software and are a smaller company, in my opinion, Target may not be the best fit.
We have been able to run specific A/B tests that have shown an increase in conversion, which in turn has led to very large banked sales numbers for the year.
We have been able to prove that using and automated Merchandising process did not decrease conversion. This allowed us to greatly increase efficiency by opening up resource time.
