Bombora vs. Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)

Bombora is the perfect tool for anyone looking to understand their B2B customer and their buyer's journey better. Companies produce tons of content - and pay lots of money creating and then amplifying it too. But is it really what the customer is interested in? Now you don't have to guess, you can know thanks to company surge data.

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

• Intent topics, as well as the clusters tied to them, have enabled our PMMs to be more granular with specific workloads that are based on industry.
• The "Account Intent" option within the "Insights" tab allowed us to look specifically into historical data tied to current activities that we were experiencing with that account.

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

• Downloading intent data and trying to use it outside of their environment is tricky because the data is essentially one large worksheet. We want to overlay the data with our own data but joining it all together is tricky. Our data comes from D&B so the names provided by D&B don't always match what we get from Bombora so account matching is not very clean.
• Customer service is a bit hit or miss. I worked with an account rep to try and resolve it but she couldn't. However, she did open a ticket with the Bombora help desk to try and get me answers. I waited more than a week and got no answer. I followed up and the reply was the original owner of the ticket is out and the new ticket owner was wondering if I had rerun the report to see if the problem went away.
• Despite having a self-service type set up for the dashboards and reports, trying to understand what exactly needs to be filled in isn't always easy. The data doesn't match up with what we download so trying to compare the dashboards/reports to the extract is next to impossible?! It shouldn't be this way.

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

I give Bombora an 8 as they do intent well for now. Not a 10 because again its a one trick pony where there are other platforms like ZoomInfo that offer intent as well plus so much more. From an end user perspective, I'd like Bombora to build out first party intent data capabilities to combine into the scoring.

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.

Our CSM team is always available for us to meet with via an outreach click to book an invite and we have standing meetings. They met with us on day 1 of implementation and had us up and running that evening. They even go to the lengths of matching industry tenured folks with us to help us move faster.

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.

There is a room for improvement in a layman's perspective as it was difficult for our to understand things during training and had to rearrange sessions.

Incentivized

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.

Liked the implementation, however there is a still room for improvement for the support needed in overall implementation

Incentivized

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

Bombora doesn't give you a token for the number of accounts that are populated. You can search and request as many as you'd like. With other platforms, they provide you a token, and if you use all your tokens for the month, then you have to wait til next month.

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.

Need improvement in places such as visualisation & UX

Incentivized

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.

• Bombora played a big role in us proving the effectiveness of ABM for our organization and had a huge impact on us gaining approval for a full ABM platform.
• Bombora helped us identify key target accounts that brought great net new business to our company.

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