Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. GoSquared

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

1) Maintaining customer relationships - GS just makes it so easy to respond to our users who use our product more from a tactical point of view 2) Onboarding - I think it's more or less an extension of the first point above but GS does make it easy for us to onboard new clients who are sort of beginners.

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

• Provides real-time statistics and trends which is invaluable to representative to establish solid connections with our customers
• Allows us to see current trends and product engagement. Also allows us to compare unique visitor counts with relevant dates.
• You can go big as you need, and pay as you need with instantly upgradable and affordable plans.
• Customizable dashboard is a great add-on for representatives to remove screen clutter and have clean information
• You can always directly communicate with your customers by integrating another component to your site.

• 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.

• CloudFlare integration is spotty - stats in Cloudflare (tracks also Javascript off visits) and GoSquared stats are often significantly at odds
• Notifications don't seem to work very well
• Dashboard likes to re-set itself even when it was arranged & saved previously
• Weekly/ Monthly/ Yearly absolute numbers

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

Not only does the GoSquared application work well, the GoSquared team is constantly making improvements. When I first started using GoSquared, they only offered daily reporting -- now they offer the weekly and monthly feature per popular request. I like that they are always updating the look and feel of the website and emails they send to maintain a modern look. GoSquared is easy to implement and easy to use!

Very easy to implement and use.

GoSquared makes it easy to get started, providing everything you need to integrate the code into your site and start seeing and analyzing data

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.

The GoSquared team has always gone above and beyond to create the best analytics platform and provide top notch

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.

Google Analytics is massively bloated and can be difficult to configure, navigate and understand. While GoSquared doesn't provide the feature set that Google Analytics does it focuses on providing the best experience for the features it does offer. If you just want to know who is visiting your website and when then GoSquared is a simple way of tracing this information.

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

• GoSquared helps us to react quickly to high volumes of traffic, and allows us to identify very quickly how engaging our content is
• Using browser specs helps us to ensure our websites are compatible with as many of our customers as possible, rather than relying on generic global stats