Monetate (formerly Kibo Personalization, powered by Monetate and Certona) is an ecommerce personalization software for consumer-facing brands. Monetate enables brands to create individualized experiences for site visitors, with the goal of improving engagement and business performance. Founded in 2008, Monetate services Adidas, Lufthansa, Office Depot, Reebok, Wolseley, and other companies.
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Optimizely Content Management System
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) is purpose-built for marketers, and fully composable for developers. The CMS supports the end-to-end content lifecycle, helping users to deliver on-brand, high-impact digital experiences that 'wow' audiences.
Monetate is a fully functional space to generate multiple marketing campaigns for your company on the web, many of the functions found in this program are a contribution to manage your content correctly and give it the space you are looking for, we We recommend it one hundred percent. We feel very comfortable with everything we have been able to achieve thanks to this program.
If you want to build a website quickly there are plenty of ways to do so with some great examples and plenty of support both from the company and in the forums. if you want to build a more complex structure you can but be ready to spend the time to build exactly what you need as a solid foundation goes a massive way before building out content and making those choices early and sticking with them helps
Audience segmentation is relatively painless. They provide a robust way to granularly target visitors by device type, location, weather, demographics, etc.
Our CSM has been very engaged and detailed in supporting our partnership. She provides very prompt responses and clearly works hard to push the Kibo team when possible.
The User Interface to develop new actions is not terrible.
Supports Single Sign On, which is the preferred method of managing users at my organization.
I think the user interface for content admins is very good and very competitive. And compared to other providers, the technology that CMS in particular has. So the way it integrated the net ecosystem is very well because it follows the MBC pattern. So basically it just allows really simple implementations for what would normally be complex components on any other sort of vendor that's out there.
We'd like to be able to use the Monetate resources to help us set up tests that require web dev (to get it out of our backlog), but they also have wait times similar to our internal ones. I realize resources are hard to come by, but this is an area we'd love to be able to utilize more if the turnaround were quicker.
IE is always a problem. I know it's not Monetate-specific though, and many tools struggle with IE.
We have a large percentage of our users who use IE, and I'd like to provide more experiences in IE without and additional hassle.
Magento did have some nice tools for creating product groups or carousels for promotion. Opti seems to be lacking in that.
A blog - maybe this is available and we don't have it installed, but a searchable blog would be very appreciated.
Structured Data/MicroData - maybe it's our install, but this seems to be missing
Meta data: we have access to limited types and need to make a request from IT, it would be nice to be able to access more to adjust for SEO needs.
When in a folder on the BLOCKS tab, it would be wonderful to hit the MEDIA tab and stay in that same folder.
I have some less technical people that will make folders with spaces - which Opti handles, but it would be great if it wouldn't accept a space or gave an error message not to use them.
I think I know why the extra code is added to urls and image links, but it causes issues when taking things from our testing site to the live site. For example, I need to copy the Navigation from Inspect Element on testing to put it in production. I have learned to work around it, but it's not my favorite.
I had never worked within a company that had a tool like this. It made my life as a designer and a creative manager much easier with it's easy to use interface and limitless possibilities in terms of creative. I would highly recommend taking Monetate for a test drive, you will not be disappointed.
Since I work on the implementation side of things, and do not directly own licensing for Ektron CMS, I have to base this rating off of how I think it will be received or presented to customers looking to start a new site deployment. I try to remain CMS agnostic, though my specialty is with the .NET and Microsoft stack. Because of the experience I have working with Ektron, I tend to be more forgiving with the shortcomings as I am familiar with how to work around them or past them from experience. Being familiar with the community available also helps, as you become familiar with the best approaches to find solutions to your issues. Each product has it's ups and downs and all of them are only going to be as good as the company or development team implementing them can make them. This is EXTREMELY important to remember when choosing a CMS, as it can make or break your expensive investment.
Part of what I love about Monetate is how intuitive the tool is. Very very easy to use - based on the basics - Who/What/When/Where concept. Anyone can jump right in and start using the tool. And very easy to copy campaigns and tweak to continue to build experiences. We recently added Monetate on mobile and similar experience - easy to jump back and forth between platforms. Also love the analytics dashboard...easily quantifiable and easy to get tidbits that are digestible for others not as familiar with tool.
From our editors perspective they find the CMS system easy and to clear to use. Our developers find it very easy to design on and appreciate the level of service support available. It's also always evolving and getting better every year. We find this investment reassuring and encourages us to try keep pace and see how we can continue to push the envelope and continue to improve all aspect of our websites and online touch points.
Monetate support team meets with use weekly, answers emails daily and promptly. They are proactive about getting answers for us when we need it and offering suggestions based on observations they have or learnings they want to share from other partners. Monetate's support is top notch.
I attended multiple trainings/tutorials early in the process. The vendor-supplied content about Optimizely was engaging for users/attendees (I often analyze training content, compliance programs, governance plans), which helps our OCM people by having good "word of mouth" about the product long before a rollout ever happens. I actually when the user-focused portion of the Optimizely Academy twice in 2022 to ensure I had a grasp on operability and to be able to support the training and OCM efforts
Ektron is one of the best solution for .Net platform. Over the years have improved the performance issues that the previous versions had. My only complain is right now you can't do Page builder pages if you choose to have a MVC architecture
Monetate installs easily and sets up personalization with just a few clicks. We never used the recommendation engine but the multivariant testing was great.
At the time of selection, it was the best tool to fit our business needs. The day-to-day users were able to create some experiences on their own and did not require much oversight. We also had developer support built into our contract along with internal developer support so most experiences were achievable. We believed it was as good and in some ways better than the other comparable tools on the market.
Optimizely Content Management System is much more feature rich, and less complex that the other CMS platforms we have used. Optimizely Content Management System is more intuitive in how the content is structured and how easy it is to pull blocks of content to create the layout of a page.
We are really starting to understand our audience and what they prefer on our website. One example is on our product display pages, we learned that our visitors convert about 35% more when content is laid out in one fashion versus another. Another example is our promotional banners perform better when it takes up the width of the page versus the margins pulled in more.
At first, Monetate was a negative ROI - we were paying for a service we weren't getting, and not understanding the full power of the program. With the new optimization firm however, we are now really able to churn out more tests, have a clean and direct test plan, and finally seeing tangible results.
As an aside, Monetate has helped us just save time and money on creating our promotional banners now so we don't have to get with our development team each time we want to put one up. Even without running a test, it has let us add content to our site when we need to (as we already have the experiments set up as we need it to and we can quickly duplicate it) without our developers getting in there to make those short-lived changes.
