Adobe Target vs. Marketo Web Personalization (Marketo RTP)

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

Marketo RTP is great for companies in later stages that require greater customization or API integrations with their own marketing/sales tools. The integration with Salesforce also makes it worthwhile for companies that already have Salesforce setup in some workflows. As stated before, Marketo is quite expensive, so it might not be suitable for earlier-stage companies and startups that are just getting started with marketing and sales.

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

• Segment website users into qualifying groups.
• Target segmented groups based on multiple aspects.
• Campaign generation through their UI.
• Measurement of campaign success.
• AB testing of campaigns.

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

• Building segments is harder than it should be and you can only create simplistic segments.
• Building overlays (pop-ups) needs to be done outside of the tool and default selections look dated.

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

I'm not the person in charge of this.

Can be difficult to learn, but once you understand Mboxes and the nuances of the system it's very user friendly

It is complex to set up and maintain and not intuitive.

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

We actually had a very good onboarding process. The rep from Marketo was very knowledgable and set up regular meetings with us to make sure we understood how to use everything. He gave us ideas for potential personalizations and had best-practice tips. Unfortunately, his knowledge was not enough to overcome some of the biggest issues with the solution.

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

I'm well-versed in Marketo's RTP module and HubSpot's smart content offering, and HubSpot's smart content has ultimately become my personalization tool of choice. Here's why:

• HubSpot's smart content tools are simple to grasp and easy to implement from start to finish. There's a lot of room for improvement when it comes to ease of use and overall user experience within Marketo's RTP module.
• For less tech-savvy marketers, HubSpot's training documentation and support team is an absolute lifesaver. Marketo has failed us time and time again on this front, despite the fact that we pay an additional fee for Premier Support and quarterly consulting.
• Marketo's tool is more robust and more powerful, but they don't take the time to create supporting documentation to help end-users leverage RTP, nor do they take the time to train their support staff on how it works. HubSpot's smart content does what we need it to do, and we don't burn time in the process trying to figure out how to use it.

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.

• More leads. Customized content has generated more form fill outs from the target website visitors.
• Personalization of the website - more unique experience and feel of our brand for different website visitors.
• Named account analytics - we can now track how we are doing against the goal of increasing awareness of our products among our named accounts.