Bing Webmaster Tools vs. Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)

I always make sure that we are actively using Bing and Google. There is a tradeoff in your time when you use more tools, but there's also benefit in multiple perspectives. And don't forget that Bing is a very viable search engine that receives 500 million search queries each month. You may find that your business benefits from a relatively small amount of attention paid to Bing because search ranking there is easier (not easy, easier).

Incentivized

IBM analytics has continued to improve upon the days of being the original core metrics. After using the updated version for quite some time, it has been great at providing the needed analytics to measure ROI and goal performance for our quarterly KPI's. It has resulted in a great increase in web engagements although we are a midsize company, smaller outfits may not need such an expensive option.

Incentivized

• Clarity. Bing Webmaster Tools is well-designed and easy to navigate, even for beginners.
• Keyword rankings. Gives more visibility than Google Search Console into how your website ranks for specific keywords.
• In-program SEO editing. Allows you to submit URLs, disavow links, block URLs, control BingBot's crawl, and more.

Incentivized

• IBM CXA comprises an acquisition called Tealeaf. This tool has deep heritage and this is evident in its present-day capabilities.
• The Universal Behaviour Exchange or UBX puts the concept of personalisation at the forefront. The ability to combine physical (analog) and digital transactions to create the complete picture of a customer journey, is a stand out benefit.
• The solution does not have to involve the purchase of software. IBM CXA can be sold as a service bundled with analytics as a service. This not only lowers the cost of ownership, it gets around one of the principal issues. Strong staff with design and analytical capability to drive the solution and deliver tangible benefits.
• The seamless integration of Watson AI services to help with the heavy lifiting. Watson reinforces the analytical focus this solution has and can learn to recognise situations specific to a company.

Incentivized

• The user-interface isn't as friendly or appealing as Google's - very bland overall.
• The way they present their Page Traffic report is a big turn-off. It's basically just a grid of numbers and arrows which is hard to interpret at a high level.

Incentivized

• The user interface is in Flash, which can be very frustrating and slow at times. Apparently, this is to be transitioned in a future release.
• Can only segment the last 93 days of data. Any historical segmentation beyond the 93 days must be run in Explore (which is credit based, and has its own limitations with the number of credits per month, based on the initial contract with IBM).
• Reports can only display 93 days of data at a given time for custom date ranges. There are pre-programmed date ranges setup with IBM during implementation (last week, last month, last quarter etc.), but are not flexible enough to answer more specific questions.
• Certain reports cannot have segments applied, making answering some simple questions a bit more tricky. For example, I can create a segment around mobile devices and apply it to the marketing channels report, but I can't create a marketing channel segment and apply it to the mobile reports.
• Built in API calls allows for nice report design and automation.

IBM Digital Analytics is a great solution for our clients and I believe they offer the best solution for the retail space. We have access to IBM support via email or live chat and they can answer many of the reporting questions that come up. IBM is receptive to our feedback of the product so I am confident they will continue making improvements

Very usable overall, quick to find information and conduct analysis for example of how a price of content is performing on Bing search. User interface is a bit clunky at times but easy enough once you get used to it.

Incentivized

Very easy to implement and use.

Never had any issues

As reports are templated, the system is pretty quick. Sometimes you have to wait a bit for a report to render. Or you might have to re-load the page. But there is no real issue here and the system is on par with other similar systems.

Overall, the level of support is very good and I would say it is a strong asset of the solution. However, you can sometimes feel that there is a difference of level among the support team.

Online training is really great. One of the best assets that they have. Lots of great videos, pop quizzes at the end of each module. Fantastic. Other tools have similar features, but not as good.

See previous comment: reading and understanding the encyclopedic implementation guide is a must.

I think that Bing does a good job of being a competitive product in a space that has very basic and insanely complex products. While Bing isn't pretty, it gets the job done and also gets you the right tools in a simple and straight forward backend UI. The ability to place Bing ads, track SEO and see how your site is performing, all from one backend interface is awesome!

Incentivized

Much of the work we did in IBM Digital Analytics could have been answered through Google Analytics, a much simpler, agile and FREE solution set. Not mention, given the vast number of Google Analytics USERS, free and actionable support is simply a click away ... this compared to IBM Digital Analytics fractured and often absent support service.

This solution can support large amount of data and transaction. The way that user management features are built, it shows it is meant for large organizations.

• Not really an ROI product but the ability to do more tasks than google is something that can be used as added value for clients
• Having another search engine to do reporting on helps increase hours and client spend
• some issues flagged in bing but not seen in google can be fixed once shown in BWT

Incentivized

• We spend too much time trying to work around bugs on the new UI.
• We spend too much time trying to figure out how to make certain segments work because support and the knowledge center are lackluster.
• Our sales rep is very unresponsive and leaves us searching for a lot of answers on our own, including what other products we may benefit from that IBM offers.

Incentivized