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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Sitecore Experience Manager
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Sitecore Experience Manager is an enterprise-grade CMS competing with Oracle WebCenter, IBM Web Content Manager and Adobe. It presents a fairly wide and comprehensive swath of inbuilt features. In Sitecore WCM editing takes place from within the page with its inline editor, allowing editors and authors to create display rules and content within the context of the page in an integrated process. It allows the creation of blogs, wikis, polls, integrates with social media, and is mobile…
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.
Great for companies that are looking to create customized, tailored content solutions and be willing to put in the hard work and effort to maximize the value out of the tool. If your company is just looking for very basic content management without all the bells and whistles, I'd recommend looking elsewhere for less [money].
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.
Personalisation of advertising banners based upon knowledge of the customer, like location or previous searches enables us to target customers with products and offers that they are more likely to engage with, which has been done to good effect.
The use of Sitecore for content management enables the business and design team to perform changes to things, like images, content and page structure, which would otherwise have required a code release, which is costly in terms of man power.
The A/B testing in Sitecore is good because it allows us to statistically verify minor changes to the site - like advert changes or component ordering on the page - as to whether or not they positively impact conversion.
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.
Sitecore is Customer Engagement Platform. It comes with lots of features (e.g. Authoring, Analytics, personalization, A/B Test, Webforms for marketers etc), But, most of them are not being used by many clients. If you are really looking for just CMS (only authoring and publishing), then I don't think Sitecore is a way to go.
You need to have a strong Sitecore certified developer base to manage the Sitecore platform (if you are using all features). It's the same case with others. But, finding a Sitecore certified (costs $$) developer is tough in the market. Now the market is growing (thanks to Sitecore promotional events) and Sitecore is gaining popularity, It may be easy to find such developers in the future. If you want to leverage most out of the Sitecore community you need to be a Sitecore certified developer.
Sitecore comes with lots of built-in features and marketplace components. I feel this puts in a little tricky situation. It gives an opportunity for a normal developer to use some of the free marketplace module, which may or may not be supported in a future version of Sitecore. which may put the entire platform in risk to upgrade to latest Sitecore version. You need to have a proper process to control and validate the marketplace components before using them.
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.
Sitecore has proven that it can deliver on its promise of a robust, reliable enterprise CMS solution with plenty of features. Also, they keep updating it with more and better features. Now that we are highly trained on it we have started on getting the most out of it and we plan to keep doing more of that in the future.
With any platform that offers so much capability, usability will naturally be more challenging. Sitecore does an admirable job and made massive strides in version 8, but at some times offers too many ways to achieve the same task allows users to sometimes take a path less efficient than the preferred path.
Sitecore Support is very knowledgeable and helpful. We have raised a number of issues with them and they rarely fail to come up with an acceptable solution.
Sitecore captures and remembers every single interaction your customers and prospects have in any part of the system, allowing you to build comprehensive, ever-learning profiles of each individual. From email marketing, to social media, to online shopping, Sitecore remembers where each interaction left off so you can automatically continue the conversation. Sitecore helps you manage your content for each and every experience your customers enjoy. Customize what content you want and the system will take care of how it's displayed.
Make sure you work with a partner that can help you take advantage of the entire platform. Specifically we see a lot of customers not taking advantage of Sitecore DMS and thus missing a huge opportunity. Sitecore is a platform that is meant to be constantly optimized and improved upon.
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.
The decision to select Sitecore was not ultimately mine, but the fact that we were able to leverage in-house Microsoft .Net (C#) experience on a platform that had a library of extensions, but also allowed us to customize and keep private our confidential IP has been a big help. When you see a SharePoint site or a Drupal site you can usually tell "oh this is a MS SharePoint site", but with Sitecore the ability to customize and have different views even different components based on device type makes Sitecore a clear winner.
ROI depends so much on implementation. Its would be difficult to comment in a positive or negative regarding CMS product to direct ROI. A non-technical user would be surprised at what a basic installation of Sitecore looks like. "Hello World" comes to mind. With that in mind we can look at two things, Sitecore Support and Sitecore Partners.
Certified Internal Developers and Sitecore Support: This depends on the qualifications of your existing departments regarding implementing a enterprise CMS. No experience to some experience, this is a no brainer, rigorously vet top and middle partners and hire one to lead this effort. If your experienced still hire a partner and vet them but hire a middle to small partner and have them help, not lead.
"Sitecore Window": You could equate Sitecore in some implementation as throwing expensive parts at a car problem. If your business requirements and data consumption needs are not within this cost window then in the end on paper it will be difficult to see ROI or that there just wasn't a return. Then it will be time to look at other lower cost alternatives The initial cost is just the start. Over engineering and expensive horizontal integration partners can cost someone a promotion or job.
If your content workflows are complex, sites rendering data requirements are large and performance and scalability are paramount. Sitecore should be in your top 3.
