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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VWO
Score 8.8 out of 10
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VWO is an A/B testing and conversion optimization platform that enables growing businesses to conduct qualitative and quantitative visitor research, build an experimentation roadmap and run continuous experiments on their digital properties. With its 5 capabilities Plan, Track, Test, Analyze, and Target, it brings the entire CRO (conversion rate optimization) process at one place. VWO helps online businesses follow the process- and data-driven conversion…
$49
per month
Pricing
Monetate
VWO
Editions & Modules
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Subscription
$99.00
per month
TESTING
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The classic VWO A/B testing solution
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The all-in-one platform for all your optimization needs
ENTERPRISE
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Customized solution with advanced AB testing and conversion optimization capabilities
Online Marketing Manager, Main Focus Website Optimization
Chose Monetate
We also use the Visual Website Optimizer which cannot cope with the excessive possibility to show and test content on our pages, as well as the additional possibility to target our visitors. We also tried to use the Tool provided by Google Analytics for testing landing pages but …
VWO
Verified User
Manager
Chose VWO
Both products are very similar but Visual Website Optimizer has a much friendlier interface. Also VWO's capabilities matched our needs slightly better. Monetate had post-segmentation which was very appealing and I wish VWO had that feature.
VWO has worse usability and isn't as flexible as the other platforms. Also, the insight that Qubit and Optimizely generates is actually accurate and can be used compared to the reports that VWO provide.
We also use Monetate which for us is a solution that helps us better personalise the experience for our customers. Especially with this tool we are able to test throughout our whole order process, on every page. We use the VWO for budget reasons and because it offers us the …
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.
Our marketing team does a lot of creative testing around messaging and imagery. VWO is well suited for this type of testing and can yield great results if you define your conversion goals correctly. However, when we have tried to do more substantial/advanced changes through VWO (such as re-positioning content or modifying elements in a form), we have had some challenges and not been able to get the desired tests working correctly.
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.
VWO has a strong support team willing to help provide answers to questions during the setup process. During setup, we had some questions regarding implementation across a significant number of sites and they were able to ease dev team concerns and provide detailed best practices to streamline integration.
Some of the initial results of a few of the initial tests raised some questions internally. We setup a call and were able to quickly address the questions and find some opportunities to leverage moving forward.
I discovered a bug within the UI that lead to some questions internally. I was able to report it and the problem was fixed rather quickly and their team followed up with a thank you for reporting it and to report the issue was now resolved.
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.
The user interface within VWO does take a bit of time to get used to, especially as it pertains to switching back and forth between tests. When running multiple experiments on a site at a time, a clear and succinct dashboard for everything in one place would be helpful (as opposed to needing to switch between A/B, multivariate, etc).
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.
It's great value and we think we've ironed out all the major teething troubles. However, if we experience any more bugs or problems that significantly slow us down then we're seriously considering switching to Optimizely, which I haven't personally tested but have heard great things about from my CRO peers
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.
I gave Visual Website Optimizer a rating of 8 because it is overall a great product to use. Setting up and keeping track of various tests is easy and straight forward. The only reason why this product is not rated higher is because the support documents online leave a lot of room for improvement.
VWO doesn't appear to slow down our website at all, though some customers with adblockers like UBlock Origin have been known to not see entire pages if VWO is making changes to the page at a macro level (background, font, etc). This is rare though.
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.
While their online document support is lacking a simple email to their support team will almost always get responded to the next day. It has however taken more than one email to explain the problem to the support team till they understood the problem. The solution I was given also only half fixed the problem the rest I figured out on my own.
Training was good, just limited to the onboarding process. They walked through all of the steps it takes to get started in VWO and each of the modules, along with giving us ideas for starting our first test. I feel like it could be better if there was a guided process within the VWO program to continue to educate you along the way, and a way to turn that off for experienced users.
Monetate installs easily and sets up personalization with just a few clicks. We never used the recommendation engine but the multivariant testing was great.
Overall, the implementation of VWO is straightforward. If you've got a straightforward way of deploying code to all of your test pages, either a good CMS or a TMS, then implementation should be a breeze. There is no tweaking to be done to the code itself, and once deployed it has the flexibility to cope with different VWO modules (tracking, conversion analysis, session analysis) without modification.
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.
I used Google Optimize when it had just launched. It was therefore not yet a competitor to VWO. I haven't used it in roughly half a year time, so a lot has probably changed. I still use Hotjar for certain features that VWO offers, but which I think function better in Hotjar. I for instance prefer the Hotjar heatmaps, because I can elect to ignore certain elements on the webpage, such as a cookie consent pop up. A simple difference which makes me like Hotjar recordings more is that I can view a recording and click next, rather than going back to the overview and selecting the next recording.
The product seems infinitely scalable for our needs (small business) and we've never had any issue with loading VWO-edited elements. I will say, though, that online customers with ad blockers have been known to not see certain VWO elements as their third-party scripts are disabled.
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.
