Adobe Target vs Monetate

• The features and navigation are very intuitive.
• Reports are very informative with ability to create custom segments to help analyze results from different angles.
• Setting up campaigns is very straightforward. Anyone could do it with basic training of the tool. And Adobe offers assistance for questions when setting up campaigns.
• Adobe also offers assistance for technical support for setting up offers, but it's limited.

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• You can test virtually ANYTHING on your website. Once you know what you're doing, it is really easy to upload assets and really customize the details of your test.
• If you have multiple websites, you can keep all of your website tests separate - for example, we manage two separate brands, both which have 3 environments we can set up tests in: development, staging, and production environments. So, we can easily manage 6 separate test groups and store the various content in the proper section, very easily.
• The design is really clean and easy to navigate. It is easy to organize and filter your experiments, you can tag them to make filtering a lot easier (especially when you have a bunch of experiments running at the same time), and the simple function of duplicating an experiment makes minor changes to a grand experiment SO much quicker.
• The Monetate Inspector tool (I could be using the wrong word, sorry!) also allows you to far more easily identify the unique ID of an experiment so you can find it in Monetate and make any desired changes rather than sifting one by one through your various experiments trying to figure out which one you mean to edit.

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• It relies on mbox and depending on how they are implemented, you may need to rely on your IT team to implement additional mboxes for certain tests.
• To set up test offers, most of the time you will need to have knowledge of html and css. And depending on how the mboxes are implemented, you could be heavily relying on jQuery to manipulate the elements on your site for test offers.
• There is no WYSIWYG interface for you to highlight elements on your site while creating offers, which could be useful for users with less front end development experience.

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• The learning curve is a little steep, especially if you're unfamiliar with HTML/CSS. The tool is so powerful but can be overwhelming at first. The intro instructional videos/content is helpful but it doesn't cover everything. We needed to partner with an optimization company to better understand the tool and get started.
• Setting up an experiment for the first time isn't simple when you're a marketer who is inexperienced with any sort of web development or even just HTML/CSS. While you can easily select the area you want to create a test with, you don't have a way to easily manipulate that section without the use of HTML/CSS.
• The first optimization company Monetate recommended us to was horrible - it really was awful working with them. We had dedicated (paid for!) hours that got wasted after the company wasted our time in each meeting (when we did have one - they often needed to reschedule) and they barely knew what our company even did despite multiple meetings. Those hours, despite the awful experience, were never fulfilled, never reimbursed, never carried over to the new (and far better) company. This left a bad taste in my mouth. While I really like this product and it does everything we need, this awful experience and lack of ownership on their end was highly disappointing. We are moving forward though - and happy with our results.

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• The product has definitely led to increased conversion, as eCommerce is the base of our organization.
• The product also allows us to see what our users want in a product. It allows us to better market to specific regions of the world in specific ways as well as understand cultural boundaries.

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• Monetate's direct contributions, such as carousels and other inserts, have had little effect compared to other options.
• However, their A/B testing has allowed use to more accurately know how our own contributions stack up. If you took the loss of conversion rate from every test we thought would be good and turned out not to be as an effective gain on their part we could easily say +15% CR in relative terms. (Most of what we think are good ideas actually are, in which case Monetate is just confirmation and didn't gain us anything vs just going with the change right away.)
• Their Badging consistently bumps purchase rates on tagged items, but I find it hard to say this is a good ROI for that specific feature alone, as it would be quite cheap and easy to implement it in-house. A nice free add-on as part of a package, though.

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