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.
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Bluecore
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Following $6 million in series A funding from FirstMark Capital and others in 2013, the rapidly growing company along with its rapidly and broadly adopted product known as TriggerMail became Bluecore. But its function is as it was before the rebrand: an ecommerce focused trigger marketing product that uses email to retarget vacillating or distracted customers and grow online sales.
Essential to Bluecore is customer behavior, assimilated in an automated fashion across disparate sources. Once…
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.
Bluecore is fantastic for building and sending email campaigns. They're also spectacular at providing insight on where your subscribers actively are vs predictive behavior. This is particularly helpful in sending the right message at the right time to the right person, all with product recommendations. I don't think they would be particularly appropriate for building something in SMS (we've found a lot of success with Attentive) and I don't think Bluecore helps much with social media analytics
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.
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 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 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.
Bluecore impressed us from the start because of their focus on the email. I got the sense from SmarterHQ that they viewed themselves more as a segmentation tool. While also very useful, Bluecore made it easier to close the circle and take that segmented list all the way through creative process to the actual send, with a consciousness of how we secure the conversion. Since becoming a customer, Bluecore has continued to blow me away with their innovation and professionalism, leaving no doubt that we made the right choice.
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.
