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Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)

Score8.9 out of 10

91 Reviews and Ratings

What is Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)?

Based on the former Coremetrics, IBM Digital Analytics is a discontinued analytics product. IBM acquired Coremetrics in 2010, and re-branded the platform to the IBM Digital Marketing Optimization Solution. Product support was ultimately provided by Acoustic, but the product is not a part of the company's plans going forward.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued).
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IBM Digital Analytics - Good enough for most, but high room for improvement

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Finance and Accounting (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

For our clients, IBM Digital Analytics serves as our primary digital analytics solution. We use the CMS platform to construct the solution, and we've created an environment that enables us to act on any data gathered by IBM Digital Analytics (via Exact Target for example). After the deployment is complete, we audit the tagging permanently and offer advice to our clients. For our clients that are in the finance industry, we often provide dashboards and in-depth analyses using IBM Digital Analytics.

Pros

  • Overall support
  • Good ecosystem
  • Data reliability

Cons

  • Very pricey
  • No new features
  • Old technologies

Most Important Features

  • UI
  • Automated reports
  • Easy to use

Return on Investment

  • Better optimisation
  • Pricier than competition
  • Learning curve and set up curve is steep

Alternatives Considered

Kissmetrics, Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics

Other Software Used

Kissflow, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics

Practical CXA

Incentivized
Chris HallView profile
Managing Partner in Corporate at BAC Partners (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We leverage IBM CXA predominantly in support of clients. We do, however, use it against our own web assets to understand customer journeys. Predominantly, we help clients first create a simulation to identify customer experience issues or opportunities and create a hypothesis. In collaboration with the company, we then establish a proof of concept using real customer transactions to validate our initial findings and confirm areas of opportunity.

Whilst there are many low-cost tools that provide insight into user activity and indeed offer session replay, this is an invalid basis for analysis; the focus is on raw data and not drawing conclusions from user activity. IBM CXA is particularly strong for transactional assets such as an eStore. It can, however, be applied to any situation involving user activity.

A particularly strong aspect of IBM CXA is the core foundation it sits upon - UBX or Universal Behaviour Exchange. Not only is the capture of user behaviour through activity automatically recorded, but other, physical activity can also be channeled into the solution e.g. physical store purchases, call centre interactions, etc.

IBM CXA is, therefore, in a strong position to represent entire customer journeys and not simply digital ones.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • IBM CXA leverages script tagging to inspect specific behaviour patterns. A tagging engine against your web assets is a must-have to simplify script insertion and avoid having to leverage internal IT resources to modify web code.
  • Tag management is perhaps the most challenging aspect of IBM CXA. In our view, this could be abstracted further and therefore simplified.
  • We would like to see connectors with UBX to common platforms such as CRM, marketing automation. The more this is readily available, the quicker the time to value for clients.

Return on Investment

  • The ROI question needs to be focused on clients and not our use internally. We leverage this as a platform for designing customer journeys for our clients.
  • The ROI case is far easier to make for eCommerce operators. Customer journey failings can be easily quantified and seemingly simple issues can generate large ROI outcomes. For web assets without a trading bias, ROI can be established using notional value attribution. For example, a lead for motor insurance that is lost can be costed based on average policy value over a typical lifetime; struggle on a customer self-service portal can be quantified on the cost of handling through a call centre; etc.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Analytics and Lucky Orange

Other Software Used

HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, ARIS Business Process Management (BPM)

Good Product

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently testing a couple projects using ML Algorithms in Watson to improve the customer experience. Watson Customer Experience Analytics excels at journey analytics, automatically identifying the pain points of customer experience. We collaborate with business and technology teams and come up with predictive algorithms to get better business results from our existing analytics program. It provides us actionable omnichannel customer behavioral insights and also guides decision making.

Pros

  • Simple implementation
  • Better results
  • Easy connectivity

Cons

  • More knowledge sharing sessions
  • UI/UX Improvements
  • More tooltips on icons

Return on Investment

  • Positive: Faster solution
  • Positive: Better prediction and service
  • Positive: Secure and private

Alternatives Considered

IBM Cognos

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop, IBM SPSS, IBM Cognos

From Coremetrics to IBM Digital Analytics

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Simplified exporting of reports and specific ranges of data
  • Automated reports are easy enough to set up
  • UI is simple and easy to use

Cons

  • The speed of the UIX can be improved upon greatly, at times it is laggy.
  • The more tabs that are open, the slower the tool becomes.
  • Hard tagging is not full of features when compared to other solutions.

Return on Investment

  • Heavy amount of time for training and setting up
  • Increased optimizations of the conversion funnel
  • Costlier than other similar web analytical solutions

Alternatives Considered

Kissmetrics and Google Analytics

Other Software Used

Kissmetrics, Google Analytics, MetricStream

IBM Digital Analytics: Overall product suite, digital ecosystem and marketing priorities should guide your choice

Incentivized
Stewart PrattView profile
Regional Director, Strategy and Analytics at MarketShare (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Uniform deployments provide for the ability to opt-in to relatively robust benchmarks.
  • Technical support teams allow both clients and agencies access to technical subject matter experts to ensure best-in-class implementations.
  • Cost structure is often quite favorable, if a company has chosen other products within the IBM family.
  • Current and long term integrations with IBM products (including Unica, Tealeaf, etc.) show promise and will continually increase the value of IBM Digital Analytics

Cons

  • Uniformity of deployment comes at a price, namely flexibility.
  • IBM Digital Analytics is a better choice who are focused exclusively on e-commerce, heavily regulated industries, or simply interested in precision marketing and CRM. For those companies which prioritize style, form, and flexibility over precision (aka Art over Science), other solutions may be more effective.
  • Competitors are integrating their systems more rapidly than IBM, which is still very siloed.
  • It can be difficult to find professionals with technical expertise to implement and support IBM Digital Analytics. The user base from which to draw is significantly smaller.
  • IBM technical training can be quite elusive to secure, unless you are already committed to the product and have a service contract in place, unlike competitors where technical training is readily available with registration open to all.

Return on Investment

  • Overall, the positive impact has typically been on improving the reliability of data driven decisions to improve path to conversion.

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