Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. TapClicks

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

For advertising agencies and marketing departments looking to aggregate and consolidate marketing, advertising, and website analytics performance data into one centralized platform, TapClicks is a market-leading solution. TapClicks provides customizable modules, charts, and graphs to make visual sense of your data. TapClicks is designed for organizations that are trying to import reporting data across multiple marketing, advertising, and web analytics platforms. It probably does not makes sense to license TapClicks if you are just getting started with your digital marketing and are only utilizing 1 or 2 third-party platforms that TapClicks has an API connection with, it's probably premature for your organization to invest in TapClicks.

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

• Customizable dashboards: these are easy to set-up and manage and tell a powerful story. We appreciate that they can be exported.
• Import Wizard: it's very important that we are able to include custom data points in our reports through the Import Wizard. After a short learning curve, we are not importing data on a weekly basis for a comprehensive report that not only shows marketing trends, but the business results too.
• Groups and Clusters: The ability to manage client groups and clusters has been vital to how we report out to the client.

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.

• The support team sometimes isn't very responsive, and I can go a week without hearing from the TapClicks team on an open issue.
• I would love to have the categories feature enhanced so that I could combine several services, and be able to break out reporting by the flights/adgroups/lineitems within those services.
• I would love for the custom dashboards that are created to be integrated into reporting so that, for example, I could use the Categories dashboard as the title page of an exported report.

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

TapClicks is a must have for our agency clients

Incentivized

Very easy to implement and use.

TapClicks provides an array of on-demand training videos coupled with account management support to help your organization get up and running. That being said, TapClicks integrates with hundreds of marketing, advertising, CRM, and website analytics third-party platforms, so depending on how many integrations you want to activate, it can be a steep learning curve. Overall, we like the usability of the product.

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.

Our organization experienced a very thorough onboarding process that helped us get up and running with TapClicks. It's pretty easy to integrate or "connect" with other platforms. We have developed a long-term relationship with our Account Manager at TapClicks and we really value her support. In today's world, most technology companies change your Account Manager seemingly almost every year, but that has not been the case with TapClicks.

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.

The companies I interviewed are either limited in the number of APIs built with the data source, especially with DFP. Some of them charge us cloud storage fees. TapClicks came in with enthusiasm and so far they have helped us jump start the building of dashboards for our clients.

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

• Greater efficiencies in providing reports to our clients
• Great reporting features to sell when we're trying to close new business as an agency
• Ability to resell and add margin to our investment
• Automated reporting for our clients which saves our team time

Incentivized