Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. OptinMonster

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

OptinMonster is a perfect tool for companies that want to convert website visitors that leave without providing any information. Having more email addresses gives you more prospects to sell your products and services. You can use OptinMonster campaigns to generate leads on blog pages that normally lack a call to action, or use them to capture abandoning visitors on important product or service pages. It is generally a pop-up software, so it can't necessarily replace any plugin or software that handles web forms.

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

• Lots of pre-designed campaigns to choose from that are fully customizable.
• Customizable CSS for each campaign is built in.

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.

• Analytics is probably the area for the biggest improvement. Other than showing how the number of visitors, number of conversions, and conversion rate, there isn't much else to the native analytics. It would be nice to see campaign metrics side by side. Otherwise, you have to view one campaign at a time. In the history of conversions graph, it doesn't overlay website traffic or show how the conversion rate has changed over time.
• The only other area that may use improvement is their capable integrations. There are a few that are not provided, such as Kartra and Salesforce.

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

Very easy to implement and use.

It is very well designed from both a UI and UX perspective. I've never been lost in the tool and building your rule sets is very easy—you'll have no problem hitting your target.

Incentivized

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.

They are very responsive and helpful and courteous. They solve issues quickly. Aside from their tech support staff, they have a great knowledge base and OptinMonster University which has plenty of content about how to use OptinMonster to its full potential and learn digital marketing strategies and tactics. A complete package for sure.

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.

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.

We used to be Justuno customers but their editor kept overwriting a small bit of HTML that we needed written in a certain way to work with a plugin on our site. I contacted their support team who tried their best to help, but their tool just couldn't make it work. When I asked OptinMonster support if my code could be used as-is they confidently said yes. We haven't looked back!

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.

• 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

• For several clients that we have implemented OptinMonster for, we have had a significant increase in leads, which keeps our clients happy and we retain the business.
• Campaigns are quick to set up, so it saves us significant time versus having to go to a web developer to build pop-ups or web forms. We can add something that goes "on top" of the website and turn it on and off with ease or change display rules to adjust how we want to use it.

Incentivized