Kibo Personalization, powered by Monetate & Certona

Monetate is well suited to an eCommerce business looking to add recommendations to its website. The algorithms are easy to understand and set up. It's also a great platform for A/B testing, as you can build the tests within Monetate without the need for setting up cookies. The testing analytics are available in real-time, as well as provide projected time to reach significance. For additional insight into the tests, Monetate can be linked with GA accounts, which allows us to dive deeper. We use it as a content insertion tool, which can be challenging as it's difficult to remove the flicker from experiences. We are aware that this use is a bit off-label, and while it's sufficient for our current needs, I don't think we'd recommend this platform for that use. The reason we rated the platform so low is our struggle with the customer service/ support end. It's very difficult for us to receive timely responses from support and we often feel as if our account is being ignored.

This tool was a great help when used as CMS - I.E.: when we need to quickly make content changes and schedule the updates for a certain time/ date. The downside to this is that there is always a flicker - the time to load the new asset is slow to load so that the user will initially see the existing page. The overall page performance will decrease with the number of tests/ Monetate experience running on the page. The overall platform is pretty difficult to use in my experience. Lastly, the accuracy of their analytics dashboard is really hard to trust.

Kibo Personalization is great at allowing non-developers (marketers) to build simple tests without relying on IT resources. Simple things like lightboxes and banners are easily built and repurposed while more technical builds can be done by internal IT or Kibo Personalization technical resources. This allows for more tests to be built without trying to work all through the internal IT release schedule.

Monetate is incredibly effective at A/B testing in a variety of scenarios, from the location and display of content to more advanced changes that can be built in Javascript. Monetate also makes it extremely easy to run successfully tested experiences while the product and content teams work through their backlogs of fully implementing them. I do not have experience using Monetate's product recommendations.

In terms of multivariant testing, it is probably one of the most flexible and powerful tools I've used. It's really easy to quickly tweak and change site elements without the need for any coding knowledge. Should you have coding knowledge the tool is even more powerful. The only criticism would be allowing conditional logic in their recommendations engine, i.e. allowing certain logics to fire over others based on what the user is looking at/has carted.

I think the tool is really good and has great potential. Just we often find irrelevant products being recommended also out of stock.

We struggled with a test where you couldn’t get it to show on first view. Most tests have been great.

It is very helpful for offering extra products to customers that on the whole are relevant to their purchase. It does, however, need to be less likely to offer irrelevant products. It would also be more suitable if for example for lamps, it only offers the correct type of bulb for the lamp or the right batteries for a device.

Out of the gate, we used Monetate to fix things that would have taken weeks to get fixed until a build happened. We also used it to stay agile with customer messaging for COVID. It is well suited to place product recommendations across the site and personalize experiences on site.

KP is perfect for any company looking to get a start in their experimentation program, or looking to increase their maturity in an existing one. It can be used with a variety of organizational structures and management. Even when a company is not blessed with high traffic rates to their website (the testing Achilles heel) then there are alternative methods available that mean value can be gained from KP where perhaps traditional AB testing is not viable. It may not be appropriate for companies looking to automate all aspects of the testing lifecycle, however, these represent a small minority of the entirety of the global eCommerce sector.

A simple A/B test is Monetate's bread and butter. Providing you have a developer with the technical ability to acheive what you want, you can easily manipulate page layouts, insert content , remove content to achieve a test.

Whilst the majority fit works well as a low risk way of showing that a test will work, it does not give you learning or insight as to why something does or does not work.

The product, overall, is a good product but the interface is not user-friendly and takes a lot of time to get used to how to use it. I also had issues w/our customer service team and their responsiveness.

For testing scenarios, including conversion rate optimization, Kibo Personalization (we've used it as Monetate) does very well. The interface is fairly intuitive, and it is a very powerful tool, allowing us to make CSS changes easily without needing to do a whole code deployment with our development team. Product Recommendations was a long and painful project. We were promised it would work well with Magento and could display parent/configurable products instead of children/specific variant products. In my experience, they could never get it to work properly, and after many months of struggles with their team, they came back and told us it wasn't recommended that we use it for parent/configs—complete fail.

If you want a testing platform and you have savvy users with at least some software development (HTML, CSS, JS) coding ability then a client-side Kibo (Monetate) implementation will work for you. Running a few experiences at a time. You may need to pay more for support but the platform does pretty well in relation to other tools. I would advise significant technical oversight of any experience manipulation platform. As long as you have the support internally or through Kibo you can be successful with this tool.

We leverage Kibo's product recommendations extensively for personalization. The most beneficial is recently viewed and customized landing pages. Using Certona product recommendations we build customized landing pages throughout our site.

A tool such as Monetate can impact the businesses most if it is able to leverage multiple sources of first and third party data. I would discuss in the evaluation process the best ways for integrating and leveraging those data sources in a way that is scalable. If your team does not yet have a culture of testing, it is worth discussing what organization is required to leverage the tool.

Very responsive and proactive support team. There never seems to be a bandwidth issue on their end to address our questions or issues.

The product has not evolved much since acquired by KIBO

I really enjoyed working with the Monetate platform. I thought it was easy to figure out and pretty self-service compared to other solutions, had a robust offering with great reporting, and our support team was very helpful. The platform was pricey, but I thought well worth it as long as you are taking advantage of all of the capabilities.

Monetate can speed up things. I speak highly of its versatility and efficiency. It does well in customer preferences tracking and behavior analysis.

The mobile app plays a key role in how it helps the business flourish since majority of users use mobile devices.

Knowledgeable with technical issues and responsive.

Overall, really happy with the onboarding, training and support provided. I would recommend to other brands as once you get the hang of the platform, it is pretty easy to do simple experiences yourself. Otherwise, Monetate and Lean Convert are always happy to execute our ideas whilst still giving recommendations on best practice etc.

Excellent support - this is where Monetate excels. Great onboarding and organisation from the very start. Training provided was also really well done and Monetate accommodated to a time that suits us, even though we are in different timezones. Whilst communication has decreased as we know the platform more and can create experiences ourselves, support is still available and they are quick to reply.

To create an experience, it is pretty intuitive as it is divided in the who, what, where etc. To create various actions, the tool is also quite useful. Overall, the platform is pretty easy to use. To get into more technical builds, a knowledge of javascript / coding would be beneficial.

Monetate is ideal for quick or advanced A/B testing online and uses specific data collection to target the right audience with the right experience. Supporting trade day to day or, building a business case for future projects. This helps with project priorities and making decisions based on data. Linking data to your analytics tool can be challenging so it needs to be kept in mind for the findings you want to get out of the experiences you are running.

Monetate teams are really reactive and support when needed.

We would have expected to be able to build more tests internally but the support is great, so we are less limited.

Best suited for small UI changes on the client side. Beat suited for full page tests on the server side.

Active UK consultants and an offshore support team there to aid any build.

Very simple and user-friendly UI.

Well suited to:
Targeting specific customers within Monetate, such as Google shopping customers or customers previously bought dresses etc. Completing homepage testing for personalized journeys through the AI testing tool.

Less suited to:
The Monetates analytics page is not very helpful, and it would be great to have more results. Testing sequencing within Monetate has also proven difficult.

It is a great system which is very user-friendly and the support is very helpful. I am proud to use Monetate.

The system is very user-friendly and easy to self learn with guidance.

When building tests that would benefit google shopping customers, Monetate is good because it can specifically target this customer base to help optimize their specific journey.

Friendly and informative people who come into the office, who give us a whole day to book in sessions around topics.

It's very easy to use. However, we sometimes have to search for information on key metrics.

Good to put content/changes immediately online. Good at A/B testing metrics analysis.

The team is reactive and eager to provide solutions.

Not too complicated.

Monetate is well suited for running AB tests as well as running campaigns and banners across the site.
It's efficient and easy to use.

We often send questions to the Monetate support team and they are quick to provide feedback to the issue They are helpful and offer solutions to the problems at hand..

Monetate is very user friendly and the UI is easy to navigate and browse through.
I like how it's relatively self explanatory and does not take much effort to understand.