Adobe Marketing Cloud is a suite of products including analytics, social, advertising, targeting and web experience management. It comprises foremost the popular integrated web content management and digital asset management (WCMS / DAM) solution Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign's cross-channel campaign management and marketing resource management capabilities (based on technology acquired with Neolane in 2013), the Adobe Audience Manager data management platform, analytics, and other…
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Brandwatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Brandwatch, from Cision (acquired February 2021) is an enterprise social intelligence platform that is designed to allow brands to listen and analyze online conversation to extract meaningful insights, inform their business decisions and understand more about the return on their marketing spend.
If you have a rather large budget and/or several clients to take advantage of the AMC, you would likely benefit from its all-in-one solutions. There are a myriad of excellent tools for digital marketing professionals to take advantage of within the suite, and creating a campaign becomes much more manageable for collaboration and execution through to reporting thanks to the suite's vertically integrated nature.
The user interface is great and is easy to use for social media marketers of all ranges. In regard to planning and scheduling content, it allows all users with access to the capability to view all upcoming on an actual calendar. For organizational purposes, this is great and mitigates any confusion that other team members may have. The tool seems to always be updating which has its pros and cons because once you figure something out, there's a switch and you'll need to relearn how things are positioned but overall, it's not a heavy lift.
Content Analysis - Between the Pages report and the participation metrics which show what percentage of conversions a page was involved with, you get an excellent analysis of what content is important and effective, and what is not. With the ability to add up to ten metrics side by side, drill downs, and power tools like Ad Hoc Analysis, you will know exactly where you need better content.
Pathing - Adobe Analytics captures every single path of every single visit of every single visitor and puts it at your fingertips. There are tools to aggregate common paths so you find out how frequent they are, lots of good page flow reports, and tools to pick out specific paths that will keep you from being overwhelmed. This has been absolutely invaluable to us as we have learned about how our customers are using our sites and which paths are leading to exits rather than converions.
Customization - There are so many custom metrics and dimensions you can add and you can create segments based on all of them, along with the out of the box metrics and dimensions. You truly get an implementation that is specific to your company, your needs, your strategy, and your site.
Clean, beautiful visuals that can be easily incorporated into reports to be used internally and externally.
Customization-- anywhere from the queries you create to adjusting individual report widget/components this tool is very flexible.
Excellent Customer Service and support. My Brandwatch rep is always open to hearing from me for questions and often reaches out to me to check in on my status or see if I would like to participate in beta programs.
Constant innovation. It seems like Brandwatch is constantly updating and adding improvements to their platform--especially with their 2019 acquisition of Crimson Hexagon.
Customer services could be improved for smaller clients. Adobe Marketing Cloud provides great support for most of its customers, however, it may not work well enough for smaller engagements.
Adobe could offer multiple price options based on the usage, which is missing at the moment.
Although a powerful tool, Google Analytics has been catching up in capabilities and is much simpler to use. As analytics move to the spotlight, more sections in a company want to have access to it. However, creating straightforward reports/dashboards and sharing them with different groups is not a strength of Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Brandwatch is a simple tool that is easy to learn and understand. Without any rigorous training, the team can learn to use it and interpret the results in an efficient manner. It saves a lot of work and helps the team to focus on other important time consuming tasks. I would like to continue using Brandwatch.
I've invited quite a few of my colleagues to try Brandwatch, and all of them were able to use its features with no assistance, and most of these had never used a social listening/monitoring tool before, or even a digital analytics tool! Brandwatch is not only easy to use, but filters, widgets, menus and other options are in intuitive places - it just works
Brandwatch craps out sometimes. Pages freeze, data doesn't populate for hours. It's fine if you're not in a hurry but something to keep in mind if you're working in real-time. It's not as bad as Talkwalker but it's impacted timely delivery of work for me, and one of the first things I teach when introducing the platform is the process for closing out and re-logging in to see if it unfreezes
The Brandwatch Consumer Research customer success team is outstanding. Every member of their team has been wildly helpful and remarkably pleasant. These people go above and beyond to ensure you have all the tools and help you need to find success on their platform. I had several calls where we discussed difficulties users where having on the platform that resulted in an overall improvement in reporting across the board. They didn't just answer our questions, they dug deeper to find root problems and helped us build out dashboards to alleviate them.
good knowledge, great tips, although the program seems a bit disconnected. It could improve it they create more free webinars and a good content calendar and tackle little topics in each webinar. Their trainers are top notch and they know a lot about the tool but they fall a bit low on technical level understanding of how the tool actually works
In comparison to other services, Adobe is particularly robust, and the platform is better suited to customers with a high level of maturity in the digital environment, who need a platform to overcome and solve day-to-day problems.
If you're using it to monitor your brand's social presence only, or if you're in an agency and using it to monitor existing clients and provide reports to them, then this is a great tool and you're hard-pressed to find something better. But if you're wanting it more for new business and discovery, there are tools that do this much better, including Sysomos and Crimson Hexagon. So it depends on what specifically you're trying to do. My agency was already using this product when I arrived, so I did not have a choice in the matter, but I've evaluated both of these other tools. Crimson is similar enough that the slight increase in cost doesn't justify switching. Synthesio is the most expensive competitor in the market (no matter what they tell you), but you get what you pay for. If you can afford it, go with Synthesio.
At a high level, the biggest impact the Brandwatch Analytics has had is giving us the ability to quantify the impact of social media for our clients. In the world of social, ROI is defined and interpreted differently across clients (particularly where it's more difficult to apply traditional ROI) - so this may mean reporting on earned media for some, while for others it's measuring increasing engagements or social mentions over time.
