Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. Ensighten Manage vs. Google Analytics

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

Ensighten manage can be setup to be used by non technical business users. However the product provides a lot of flexibility by the way of custom custom Javascript and HTML tags, and advanced features like events, which needs coding experience as well as understanding of web technologies. Ensighten mobile is also a promising tool, but so far we have not had any luck setting it up, mainly due to challenges with Android setup

Incentivized

Google Analytics is particularly well suited for tracking and analyzing customer behavior on a grocery e-commerce platform. It provides a wealth of information about customer behavior, including what products are most popular, what pages are visited the most, and where customers are coming from. This information can help the platform optimize its website for better customer engagement and conversion rates. However, Google Analytics may not be the best tool for more advanced, granular analysis of customer behavior, such as tracking individual customer journeys or understanding customer motivations. In these cases, it may be more appropriate to use additional tools or solutions that provide deeper insights into customer behavior.

• 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

• Supports typical software development life cycle (SDLC) process by facilitating DEV, QA and PROD deployment stages through spaces.
• Roles and security can be thoroughly defined.
• Very good selection of tagging technologies.
• Site is stable, no availability concerns.
• GUI in general is straightforward.

Incentivized

• Multiple reports to see website use and behavior
• Allows you to customize reports with days, weeks, months, and years
• You can build out a dashboard to easily view stats from multiple websites in one place
• You can share analytics reports via the dashboard, automatically emailed PDFs or in other formats

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.

• While the code templates that are already existent provide an easy interface to leverage existing code sets, custom codes still need to be written a lot of times since the templatized versions apply them to a global scope only and not for individual URLs or regex's for specific use cases for pixel vendors. Also, the library needs to be updated more frequently with new pixel vendors injecting their own variations of codes
• Professional services (both the shared and dedicated model) definitely needs a lot of improvement since this is something that we have been immensely challenged with as a client of Ensighten in general. General response times and availability of support hours both from an account management standpoint and professional services/support standpoint have been quite challenging in the past year or two and there has been no real progress on this front
• Ensighten Manage uses its own best practices to modify certain code sets from say JavaScript to Jquery for instance as it may be more compatible within its platform. This needs to change so that the tool is more nimble, agile and flexible in accepting and executing on different vendor codes

Incentivized

• Data sampling is somewhat inaccurate on the free tier - this is addressed in premium but is expensive.
• Some of the UI is very similar in naming when presenting different data, some in-situ information might be useful.
• Gotchas around filtering and data validation.
• Implementation can be tricky, it can take a lot of time and expertise to get a full, accurate picture of your metrics.

Incentivized

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

For the volume of tracking pixels that we plan to implement it only makes sense for us to continue. At this point, development is benefiting significantly from not being bogged down with writing tracking pixel code and the marketing team(s) enjoy being able to stay connected to their tool deployments. As the portfolio of tracking methods increases, the usage of Ensighten will increase with it.

We will continue to use Google Analytics for several reasons. It is free, which is a huge selling point. It houses all of our ecommerce stores' data, and though it can't account for refunds or fraud orders, gives us and our clients directional, real time information on individual and group store performance.

Incentivized

Very easy to implement and use.

The GUI looks professional and is overall very usable. Menu and buttons are laid out well and easy to view. Wizard-like tag configuration is pleasant. Color scheme is pleasant to view, lacking fatiguing colors. Page load progress indicator is reassuring. Filters on past-visited screens are remembered, very handy. Filter options are flexible.

Incentivized

Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, down to minute levels. That is it's greatest detriment: find the right information when you need it can be a cumbersome task. You are able to create shortcuts, however, so it can mitigate some of this problem. Google is continually refining Analytics, so I do not doubt there will be improvements

Never had any issues

We all know Google is at top when it comes to availability. We have never faced any such instances where I can suggest otherwise. All you need is a Google account, a device and internet connection to use this super powerful tool for reporting and visualising your site data, traffic, events, etc. that too in real time.

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.

This has been a catalyst for improving our site's traffic handling capabilities. We were able to identify exit% from our sites through it and we used recommendations to handle and implement the same in our sites. We have been increasing the usage of Google Analytics in our sites and never had any performance related issues if we used Analytics

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.

The Ensighten Manage support team has been helpful and dedicated to assisting us solve problems that come up with tag deployments even when the issues are completely unrelated to the core Manage product itself. They seem to have the right mix of tag-specific subject matter experts and general support resources.

Incentivized

The Google reps respond very quickly. However, sometimes they can overly call you to set up an apportionment. I'm very proficient and sometimes when I talk to reps, they give beginner tutorials and insights that are a waste of time. I wish Google would understand my level of expertise and assign me to a rep (long-term) that doesn't have to walk me through the basics.

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.

love the product and training they provide for businesses of all sizes. The following list of links will help you get started with Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented by Google Analytics.

1. How to Use Google Analytics for Beginners – Mahalo’s how-to guide for beginners.
2. A beginner’s guide to Google Analytics – A free eBook walking you through Google Analytics from setup to understanding what data is being presented.
3. Getting to Know Your Google Analytics Dashboard – The title says it all! This is a brief post with one goal: to introduce you to the Google Analytics dashboard.
4. Google Analytics for Beginners: How to Make the Most of Your Traffic Reports– This guide doesn’t cover setup, but it does a great job of helping you to better understand the data being presented.
5. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 1: Setup – A video presentation that walks you through Google Analytics setup.
6. Google Analytics Video Tutorial 2: Essential Stats – A video presentation that introduces you to some of the most important data being presented in Google Analytics.

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

Ensighten is a great tool, and as good as any in the industry with strong workflow capabilities, an admin API and a friendly interface. It does have some limitations and is not entirely "marketer friendly" as they claim. Also, note we've experienced some performance/load time issues with the Ensighten data layer, which we are addressing with them.

Incentivized

I think my biggest take away from the Google Analytics implementation was that there needs to be a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it before you start. Originally the analytics were added to track visitors, but as we became more savvy with the product, we began adding more and more functionality, and defining guidelines as we went along. While not detrimental to our success, this lack of an overarching goal resulted in some minor setbacks in implementation and the collection of some messy data that is unusable.

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.

We've used Ensighten Tag Management since 2013 - before this, we used Adobe's out of the box dynamic tagging solution. Since Ensighten is a purpose-built tool, it provides a great deal more flexibility than that of Adobe. Rule-drived spaces and conditions were not available in Adobe's tag container. Ensighten's visual tagger is unique in its ability to place MBOXes on the page for A/B testing. Finally, mobile tagging is simply not possible without going through the release process, which Ensighten has freed us from

Incentivized

I have not used Adobe Analytics as much, but I know they offer something called customer journey analytics, which we are evaluating now. I have used Semrush, and I find them much better than Google Analytics. I feel a fairly nontechnical person could learn Semrush in about a month. They also offer features like competitive analysis (on content, keywords, traffic, etc.), which is very useful. If you have to choose one among Semrush and Google Analytics, I would say go for Semrush.

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.

Google Analytics is currently handling the reporting and tracking of near about 80 sites in our project. And I am not talking about the sites from different projects. They may have way more accounts than that. Never ever felt a performance issue from Google's end while generating or customising reports or tracking custom events or creating custom dimensions

• 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

• Increased complexity when debugging so bug are taking longer to fix when they are related to Ensighten
• Our sites are loading about 10 seconds faster and have opened our eyes as to how much javascript we are rendering onto our sites which is no longer needed.

Incentivized

• It has helped us gain understanding of what is going on on our website.
• It has helped us determine areas that need fixing (i.e. pages with extremely high bounce rates may need to be redone).
• It has helped us understand our biggest avenues for bringing traffic to the website and business in general.
• It has helped guide our website redesign.

Incentivized