Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued) vs. Lead Forensics

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

It is a costly solution but well worth the money because of the details and information. We used others in the past but switched because it links with WIX. Sometimes I feel as if it is not capturing all our web traffic simply because it doesn't even track when our business is using it. It is good for some leads but I think there can be more it is missing.

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

• It gives you valid leads that have been on your website looking for your products
• The information is always accurate and detailed about their visit
• It notifies you when the customer is looking for help or products, so you know when to reach out to them

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.

• I wish the process could be a little more automated somehow. Right now it is more manual, at least in our process, to aggregate the accounts and segment accordingly.
• It seems more geared towards sales, rather than marketing. We are struggling a little to use this at scale, but it could be where we are in maturity of using the product.

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.

The tool takes a bit to learn and you go through an onboarding to get a better understanding. Once you go through that, the tool is very user friendly and a piece of cake to use - anyone can go through it, no IT skills need to run and manage their platform.

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.

While we have not had a lot of issues, the Lead Forensics team has been helpful in addressing them. The software is fairly intuitive, and issues rarely arise. This could also be from a lack of use on our part, but we have not had a great deal of interaction with the customer support team.

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.

Lead Forensics is the best as far as I can tell, but choices that are a fraction of the cost come pretty close. Some places like ThomasNet even throw this functionality in for free now. I guess it's a question of if you view this type of intelligence as a luxury or essential.

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

• In the end, we canceled our subscription, however, we had a couple solid leads from our use. We reached out to those clients. We didn't generate actual business, but at least we're on their radar.
• In general, we have a better understanding of the marketing capabilities Lead Forensics can offer us. They provided us all of the tools we'd need to be able to recommend it to our clients.
• We were able to see the effects of our marketing and learn from their successes of different tactics.

Incentivized