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.
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.
3 Scenarios where Sitecore Experience Platform is well suited: 1. Customized AI/ML Model development - Developing and deploying ML/AI models to automate tasks related to the process. e.g., image classification, sentiment analysis or text classification, etc.2. RPA & Chatbots - RPA scripts to automate simpler tasks and integrate with legacy systems (UI path, opensource RPA scripts). Implementation of chatbots training by human agents to respond to redundant queries 3. Data Enrichment - Structuring and enriching data using automated techniques in ML as well as human agent labeling
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.
Sitecore has a decent supply of out of the box components and capabilities that can be fairly easily styled to meet business needs without much customization needed. This often helps speed to market.
Sitecore has had the flexibility of offering on-premise hosting or cloud hosting to meet different needs of clients, though recently they have strongly pushed their cloud-based hosting. This is in alignment with the industry and very helpful for organizations that aren't looking to add another product to the portfolio of packages that their internal IT teams need to manage
Sitecore has a capable UI for editing content. Though some competition may do better in this regard, Sitecore's editing interface is fully capable.
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.
While the UI is capable, some other products in this space have a much more intuitive editing interface. Sitecore could do better in providing an easy to use editing UI.
It would be nice to see a fully managed Sitecore instead of just cloud hosted
The price falls more to the premium side of things. Making the value proposition a bit harder to justify
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
Implemented for various projects such as:›Market and sales intelligence Competitor tracking Management moves Social media tracking Customized information sourcing. Use web-scraping and parsing for data harvesting where the search is keyword-based and, the content and data extractions are required from various websites•Implemented for diverse requirements:›Social media tracking›Image recognition›Pricing comparison›Competitor content mapping›e-Commerce products’ cataloging, etc.
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
1. Customized software development & maintenance. 2. Technology Consulting - Consulting-based services for technology solutions data engineering or cloud solutions. 3. Used for tapping into multiple data sources such as CRM and marketing automation systems and, creating automated data extracts with a high-end visual representation of data. 4. Implemented for scheduling an existing report to automatically refresh and be delivered to specific users at a specific regular interval.
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.
All of these platforms have their pros and cons. Selecting the best fit is a matter aligning corporate need vs features provided. Have a .NET shop with an advanced marketing team looking to push UX forward and willing to pay a premium, then Sitecore may be the right fit. Have an organization centered around Java and only looking for basic CMS capabilities or looking for a budget-friendly option, then there may be better options beyond Sitecore.
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.
For mature marketing organizations, the analytics that Sitecore allows you to capture have been valuable in pushing forward marketing objectives and giving insight into how to tailor content for the best UX
