Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. Linkdex Enterprise SEO Platform

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.

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From my research, Linkdex is the least expensive enterprise SEO platform available. If you have a team of optimization specialists or you are managing SEO efforts for multiple clients, Linkdex is a perfect entry-level enterprise platform. If you are a solo practitioner managing a single site - even if you work at a multiple billion dollar organization - Linkdex may be TOO much for a single individual or a small team to handle, as you surely will not use the platform for its collaboration ability and not dive into certain areas on a frequent enough basis to make the cost justifiable.

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• 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.

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• Share of Search is awesome! It is one of the primary features we use and talks about with our clients and it always makes its way on to our monthly dashboards. Being able to assess your organic coverage in comparison with your competition is extremely focused and drives action.
• Content 360 allows you to not only see areas which have SEO issues and how many keywords the page is ranking for, but it also integrates data from Google Analytics - showing engagement and value metrics. This lets you quickly assess whether you are going to optimizing a page that is trafficked frequently or if you are optimizing a page that no one cares about.
• It is a comprehensive SEO platform. Linkdex incorporates not only base SEO tools like issue tracking, keyword rankings, etc., but its integration with Google Analytics and Search Console provide an even clearer picture - helping you prioritize your optimization work. In addition, it has content strategy tools within the platform to help you plan your next blog post or content update by sharing competitive analysis and showing online authors - so you know where to look and who to reach out to if you are link building.

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• 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 on-boarding was done relatively well, with recurring meeting and even the account rep logging into our account and doing some of the grunt work for us, Linkdex is a bit of a beast to setup and configure to get the full potential out of the platform. So you cannot expect to get immediate value out of it on day one.
• Dashboarding and Report Generation capabilities could be better, as the visualizations are somewhat limited and lack filter abilities where needed. This can cause additional work of exporting data and manipulating it manually. Depending on scenarios, this could be solved using the API; however, for those don't want to go that route, this would create a gap.
• Lack of integrations. It would be ideal to pull in additional data points beyond the out of the box Google Analytics, Search Console, and Twitter options. Facebook, YouTube, and other social media and marketing platforms would help make the data set more robust.

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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 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.

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.

Linkdex is truly an enterprise solution. We have had enterprise clients attempt to use Moz as an enterprise solution and it falls short. Specifically with the ability to add unlimited users to the platform and configure rights. The task management capability is also great to enterprise teams, as you can assign tasks and include comments around hypothesis or context as to why you are implementing an SEO solution. Being able to review when changes were made to a site and then measuring how rankings/traffic/engagement changed because of it, without having to use an SEO tool, Google Analytics, and Excel... it is all in a single platform. If you are a small organization or a single individual, that is the only reason, in my opinion, to choose Moz.

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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.

• 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.

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• We were manually pulling data to provide a rough calculation of Share of Search before Linkdex. This process would take 3-4 hours per client, per month. With Linkdex, we would log in and see Share of Search... it was just there without any work. We were able to provide a better service to our clients by spending more time analyzing the data and less time cultivating it.
• The relatively small investment from a monthly/quarterly tool budget perspective was great for us. At approximately $600 per month, it was so insignificant to the many clients we served that by staying in the same platform versus having to log in to multiple platforms, multiple times to see information across clients, we easily saved $600 in task switching simply from a login/logout perspective on a monthly basis.
• The fact that the account rep would take some tasks off of our plate and go in and configure the system for us was great and saved our consultants time to bill the client doing additional activities, while still moving forward in configuring the platform.

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Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info