Dynamic Yield is presented as an AI-powered Experience Optimization platform that delivers individualized experiences at every customer touchpoint: web, apps, email, kiosks, IoT, and call centers. The platform’s data management capabilities provide for a unified view of the customer, to allow the rapid and scalable creation of highly targeted digital interactions. Marketers, product managers, and engineers use Dynamic Yield for: Launching new personalization…
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Firebase
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Google offers the Firebase suite of application development tools, available free or at cost for higher degree of usages, priced flexibly accorded to features needed. The suite includes A/B testing and Crashlytics, Cloud Messaging (FCM) and in-app messaging, cloud storage and NoSQL storage (Cloud Firestore and Firestore Realtime Database), and other features supporting developers with flexible mobile application development.
Much more optimization possibilities. Deeper and automatic analysis of tests, product recommendations, email widgets and much more. VWO is the chimpanzee and Dynamic Yield the human.
Dynamic Yield is great for just about any sized organization, though to get the best bang for your buck, I recommend having a front-end web developer well-versed in JavaScript. Additionally, a front-end web designer would be advisable as well as their templates have great functions but some have lackluster UI's that can't be tweaked without developer assistance. Were it not for the above + the occassional slowness on the console/admin-side of the platform, I'd give it a 10. If you have a front-end dev/designer, then it's closer to a 9.5. Ideal utilization scenarios could include: Personalization, CRO/UX/UI testing, and audience or user-level tailored digital experience.
Firebase should be your first choice if your platform is mobile first. Firebase's mobile platform support for client-side applications is second to none, and I cannot think of a comparable cross-platform toolkit. Firebase also integrates well with your server-side solution, meaning that you can plug Firebase into your existing app architecture with minimal effort.
Firebase lags behind on the desktop, however. Although macOS support is rapidly catching up, full Windows support is a glaring omission for most Firebase features. This means that if your platform targets Windows, you will need to implement the client functionality manually using Firebase's web APIs and wrappers, or look for another solution.
Provide fantastic support, both in relation to strategy/best practice and troubleshooting.
An easy to use interface, as a user who is relatively new to Dynamic Yield I find that it is an intuitive platform to use.
The ability to segment and drill down on data allows for really specific insights which, whilst not necessarily being leveraged on a testing basis, can be super valuable from a greater marketing perspective.
Analytics wise, retention is extremely important to our app, therefore we take advantage of the cohort analysis to see the impact of our middle funnel (retargeting, push, email) efforts affect the percent of users that come back into the app. Firebase allows us to easily segment these this data and look at a running average based on certain dates.
When it comes to any mobile app, a deep linking strategy is essential to any apps success. With Firebase's Dynamic Links, we are able to share dynamic links (recognize user device) that are able to redirect to in-app content. These deep links allow users to share other deep-linked content with friends, that also have link preview assets.
Firebase allows users to effectively track events, funnels, and MAUs. With this simple event tracking feature, users can put organize these events into funnels of their main user flows (e.g., checkout flows, onboarding flows, etc.), and subsequently be able to understand where the drop-off is in the funnel and then prioritize areas of the funnel to fix. Also, MAU is important to be able to tell if you are bringing in new users and what's the active volume for each platform (Android, iOS).
The impact (either positive or negative) of potentially overlapping campaigns, especially the UX personalization or custom code campaigns, may not be easily identifiable.
It would make more sense for the new deep-learning and machine learning (ML) driven strategies be made part of the standard offering, as opposed to positioning them as add-on subscription, given that many other completing services are baking in ML as part of their platform evolution.
The documentation on the API and custom code implementation can be fleshed out further.
Attribution and specifically multi-touch attribution could be more robust such as Branch or Appsflyer but understand this isn't Firebases bread and butter.
More parameters. Firebase allows you to track tons of events (believe it's up to 50 or so) but the parameters of the events it only allows you to track 5 which is so messily and unbelievable. So you're able to get good high-level data but if you want to get granular with the events and actions are taken on your app to get real data insight you either have to go with a paid data analytics platform or bring on someone that's an expert in SQL to go through Big Query.
City-specific data instead of just country-specific data would have been a huge plus as well.
implementation took a long time but also, DY has really proven that they are transforming and adapting their platform to be more user friendly and the right technology choice for their brand or company
Setting up strategies, audiences, and experiences is simple and fast. It is incredibly easy to modify the appearance of your site and optimize every aspect with the Dynamic Yield Personalizations. However, while the data visualization on an experience level is easy to modify and analyze, exporting the data in meaningful ways is time consuming.
Firebase functions are more difficult to use, there are no concepts of triggers or cascading deletes without the use of Firebase functions. Firebase functions can run forever if not written correctly and cause billing nightmares. While this hasn't happened to us specifically it is a thing that happens more than one realizes.
Overall, the support is very good. If you are a partner (my case), they assign you a customer success manager, that helps a lot. Also, there is a technical person to provide support to the partners, again a great help.
My only "complain" is that with some complex issues, the support may delay in providing you with a solution. Sometimes that can cause some tension with your client.
Our analytics folks handled the majority of the communication when it came to customer service, but as far as I was aware, the support we got was pretty good. When we had an issue, we were able to reach out and get support in a timely fashion. Firebase was easy to reach and reasonably available to assist when needed.
Oracle Maxymiser is very clunky and hard to code with. Previewing changes was a challenge and development for fixes were slow
Optimizely - Great for coding. Fast and efficient. Everything worked great. They were limited at personalization triggers though and their costs were expensive.
Monetate - Evaluated but their UI was hard to use.
Before using Firebase, we exclusively used self hosted database services. Using Firebase has allowed us to reduce reliance on single points of failure and systems that are difficult to scale. Additionally, Firebase is much easier to set up and use than any sort of self hosted database. This simplicity has allowed us to try features that we might not have based on the amount of work they required in the past.
Most tests have had a positive impact on either revenue or conversion rate - quite often in double digits.
Dynamic Yield has also helped us to stop some particular initiatives through direct interaction with the customer base via questionnaires or by a test proving negative quicker than rolling out a permanent feature.
Makes building real-time interfaces easy to do at scale with no backend involvement.
Very low pricing for small companies and green-fields projects.
Lack of support for more complicated queries needs to be managed by users and often forces strange architecture choices for data to enable it to be easily accessed.
