Adobe Target vs. Appflow vs. AWS Data Exchange

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.

Incentivized

AWS Data Exchange fits best for scenarios where you have datasets that you would like to sell and you want to deliver it to anyone who would like to purchase it. It really beats having to set up downloads via your own website or portal. However, it can get complicated to manage if you're trying to deliver a dataset a client has already paid for.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Simplified data delivery
• Ability to create any amount of data products
• Ability to integrate payment plans with data products
• Tracking data downloads and users
• Integration with other AWS data services

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Integration with more data sources
• Ability to deliver data to clients without AWS accounts
• Inclusion of direct data downloads in addition to asynchronous methods

Incentivized

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

There have been a lot of problems with ADX. First, the entire system is incredibly clunky from beginning to end.First, by AWS's own admission they're missing a lot of "tablestakes functionality" like the ability to see who is coming to your pages, more flexibility to edit and update your listings, the ability to create a storefront or catalog that actually tries to sell your products. All-in-all you're flying completely blind with AWS. In our convos with other sellers we strongly believe very little organic traffic is flowing through the AWS exchange. For the headache, it's not worth the time or the effort. It's very difficult to market or sell your products.We've also had a number of simple UX bugs where they just don't accurately reflect the attributes of your product. For instance for an S3 bucket they had "+metered costs" displayed to one of our buyers in the price. This of course caused a lot of confusion. They also misrepresented the historical revisions that were available in our product sets because of another UX bug. It's difficult to know what other things in the UX are also broken and incongruent.We also did have a purchase, but the seller is completely at their whim at providing you fake emails, fake company names, fake use cases because AWS hasn't thought through simple workflows like "why even have subscription confirmation if I can fake literally everything about a subscription request." So as a result we're now in an endless, timewasting, unhelpful thread with AWS support trying to get payment. They're confused of what to do and we feel completely lost.Lastly, the AWS team has been abysmal in addressing our concerns. Conversations with them result in a laundry list of excuses of why simple functionalities are so hard (including just having accurate documentation). It was a very frustrating and unproductive call. Our objective of our call was to help us see that ADX is a well-resourced and well-visioned product. Ultimately they couldn't clearly articulate who they built the exchange for both on the seller side and the buyer side.Don't waste your time. This is at best a very foggy experiment. Look at other sellers, they have a lot of free pages to try to get attention, but then have smart tactics to divert transactions away from the ADX. Ultimately, smart move. Why give 8-10% of your cut to a product that is basically bare-bones infrastructure.

The recent UI update is a complete mess. It is difficult to navigate and find features that previously existed. The reactiveness of the page depending on window size is also ridiculous and it is absurd that depending on how large your window is, entire columns of functions will disappear with no indication that they are missing. The usability of the tool has fallen off a cliff.

Incentivized

i don't think we use the full functionalities of the tool, but to use the full functions, it's almost impossible (Too hard)

The bottleneck is never the software program

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

Incentivized

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 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Reduced time to publish datasets for sale by more than 80%
• Increased net profit from dataset sales by ~10%
• Reduced data delivery time to clients by 15%

Incentivized