Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. Piwik PRO

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

Piwik Pro Core is especially perfect for smaller businesses that want to have an alternative to Google's ecosystem. You can do a lot of the great stuff you can do with GA UA and GA4. But it still needs some tweaking. Especially for some bigger companies who have a lot of events, it would be great to have some smaller payment steps, as of right now it can be quite steep for some companies to pay the bill if you go above 500.000 events per month. Nevertheless, I believe this is one of the better options available when data ownership and privacy come to mind.

• 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

• Manage all campaigns and increase large volumes of data.
• It has an excellent activity panel through which you can have complete visibility of each activity you carry out.
• It's great to track all interactions between users and track all conversions.

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.

• Filtering: ip ranges, hostnames, regex. These are a few things that aren't possible like we are used to.
• Tag Manager: not all tags/triggers are possible yet to what we are used to.
• Are more progressive payment model: more little steps to buy a plan.
• Custom dimensions: they weren't available but are now. But they aren't that user friendly yet as I'm used to.

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.

We had to contact the support several times in the beginning and they really took their time to explain the different functions in detail. So in terms of support I can definitely recommend Piwik PRO.

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.

Piwik Pro's support for multiple sites saved me a lot of time. To view reports from numerous client sites, I'll have to access a single dashboard. Its digest reports save time and are simple enough for non-technical executives to understand. It gives us access to information about individual users that Google doesn't allow us to see as a whole. It will allow users to express their desires more clearly. As a result, this one is significantly more useful compared to other tools.

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

• We have obtained a good impact both economically and in data integration.
• It has allowed us to collect and analyze all the data of our clients, and to create groups that allow us to divide potential clients and make personalized messages.
• We use the Enterprise plan because it provides us with the necessary tools and unlimited features.

Incentivized