Adobe Target vs. Intellimize

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

Intellimize has done a great job of targeting our highest trafficked pages. For a demand generation organization it helps provide a lot value for places like the homepage or various high value funnels. Where Intellimize falls short is where we have a specific technology stack that often causes issues for us being able to run tests at scale because some experiments break or fail to run. Please do yourself a favor and evaluate this tool with your development team before purchasing. Single Page Applications do have re-rendering issues given some experiments which lead to run-time issues that need to be heavily QA'd before launch. For teams that are ecommerce or have a typical technology stack (e.g. wordpress and static pages), then Intellimize will probably work without any issues.

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

• CSM and Engineering resources are available with Intellimize and allows us to spend more time thinking about new ideas to implement.
• AI/Machine Learning allows winning personalizations to continually run or switch between variants for users that may convert better based on firmographic data
• The CSM is a wonderful collaborator and acts as a liaison between Intellimize's engineering team. With their help, I am able to better refine my own testing roadmap.

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

• No WYSIWIG Editor
• Limited to only 5 tests a week
• QA of larger tests that require heavier engineering effort can often run longer than a week and can block the already limited number of tests you can run

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

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

Intellimize is a league above products like VWO and Google Optimize. Simply having the support from an external engineering team gives your web team the freedom and bandwidth to do more. The level of support for Google Optimize is entirely limited, especially if you're using the free version of that product, and I am skeptical of paying Google for the paid version of it since the largest value of the paid version of Optimize, is to simply run more tests. VWO has amazing heatmap and reporting, but severely lacks any Machine Learning or firmographic data. While their support is exceptional, it's not the same as having a dedicated CSM to help plan a roadmap. It's also helpful to note that VWO, Google Optimize, and Intellimize have issues with single page applications. Static websites are likely to run entirely fine without issue.

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.

• Increased revenue
• Helped us build out many tests that had the impact of many years of learnings
• Contributed to more MQLs influenced

Incentivized