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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Pega Customer Decision Hub
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Pega Customer Decision Hub optimizes customer lifetime value by providing an “always-on brain” to unify data, analytics, and channels into one connected experience. Customer Decision Hub collects data from every interaction as it’s taking place, combines that with the customer’s full interaction history to determine their current context, and then delivers nextbest-action recommendations. Pega aims to enable users to pivot between selling, serving, retaining, and nurturing in real time.
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.
PRPC is a BPM and Case management suite from Pega Systems. Pega is a comprehensive suite which offers a unique theme of BPM development in the market. A no-coding approach based on rules with inheritance makes Pega a very powerful product but is very difficult to learn. Even, if we go to Pegasystems for training, we have to work on a project at least for a year to have some confidence. Areas where it requires improvements: 1) One of the first things that client's IT department questions about is proprietary BLOB column in PRPC, for them, it is a disadvantage, but as we all know BLOB is what makes the highly complex data model of any BPM application fit inside to a common schema which eliminates the help of a DBA. 2) Another area of improvement is: when using the wizards to generate rules (such as the connector wizards) you have to be careful about the level of coupling between the work object's data model and the interface's data model. This can also create maintenance issues. 3) The complete Pega suite of products have a long time to develop and deploy and it can be easily done using other low-cost software.
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.
Pega Customer Engagement Suite is ready to use out of the box with several features, but custom development is always needed.
Although new features can be quickly implemented, they have to go through a screening Business analysis process, QA screening and SCRUM based development.
Pega eliminates the need for custom code, but there are rare cases where an specific requirement has little to no support from Pega, and implementing custom code can break OOB functionality and make the system unstable.
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.
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.
