Monetate

Formerly Kibo Personalization, powered by Monetate & Certona

I think it's great for AB testing, when you may not have other systems that can use this. In my experience, the Support team are very helpful.

Monetate is great if you already have an understanding of HTML and CSS. In that case, it can be very useful and customizable on a brand-by-brand base. However, it is a bit tricky for those who do not have previous HTML and CSS experience to pick up.

It is very easy to set up AB tests based on the overall population and can use improvements in setting up personalized and dynamic segmentation. Audience segmentation is relatively painless. They provide a robust way to granularly target visitors by device type, location, weather, demographics, etc.

It's great for straightforward swapping and moving of elements and has a nice set of pre-built experiences that make it ready right out of the box. There is also very little setup involved.

We haven't found it that effective for converting for revenue in our market but we are not in a traditional e-commerce business. A normal retail site would see bigger benefits that we do.

It seems to be more appropriate for brands who want to expand and improve their business, seeking the best experience for their customers, improve the product recommendations, it's very appropriate for those who wants to grow the business, for those who needs a very good support and starting on the growth methodology.

Monetate is a great solution to enhance customer experience on site through personalization and customer segmentation, we've been able to feed our audience data into the platforms for various inclusion & exclusion lists

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.

When hot fixes are needed for website appearance and user experience, and the time and resources needed from internal developer teams is not optimal, Monetate services come to the rescue. The various product recommendations options are in constant use and provide tangible results in traffic and revenue. Lastly, messaging on pages, banners and headers and especially A/B testing, bring even more value to this service. We couldn't succeed without it.

We use Monetate primarily for testing and setting up 100% experiences. We run multiple A/B tests and dynamic tests each month to great success and new learnings. Additionally, if we need to change site content for specific visitors for a short period of time, we use Monetate's 100% experiences to take over a section of site content. We use this the most often when targeting visitors who come to the site from a specific campaign UTM. We do not use Monetate to track sitewide behavior and analytics, even during a testing window. For example, when running a test on the Hamburger menu, we do not have a straightforward way to Monetate to see how those visitors behave during the rest of their time on site. Essentially, it can be tricky to see the detailed full-funnel effect of a test variant. For that information, we often turn to a third-party analytics platform like Google Analytics.

Monetate is a great way of targeting the customers you want to complete a specific conversion.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Monetate is a great tool when you need to run a promotion and analyze it's performance. It is also very good (although a bit time consuming) in building lists of related products or displaying information that is location-specific.

Monetate is good for quick changes on the site and simple tests. Complex tests requiring extensive web development can be difficult to execute by business users.

I've used different testing systems, and Monetate is simple-to-use. I've been able to train interns who'd previously had little experience, too.
More complicated tests require web dev. I'd like to be able to "safely" shift and style elements in a WYSIWYG interface, but the interface provides most of what I want.

I would recommend Monetate to a business that wants to get set up with testing and personalisation quickly, with the knowledge that they can get the support they need to learn the tool but don't need to be web developers to use it.

I would also say that in the case of wanting to set up very specific experiments, Monetate is very useful as the targeting can be quite complex and there is the ability to integrate with other applications as well as set up custom targets.

If your business is online and you have pages your visitors will interact with, Monetate can be a huge asset. You can test virtually anything! But if you don't have much capital to use, Monetate will be an expensive investment that you won't see ROI on for at least a few months. If your site is simple and more informational (i.e., no offer pages, informational-only site, etc.), Monetate will still work for you but it'll be really hard to determine ROI and make your money back.

Monetate is great if you're looking to create content that's targeted to specific people or places. We have done this before on occasion and have targeted different images based on customer history with us. We have also used this many times in testing between new and returning customers. Monetate is also great for creating quick website experience changes and seeing how they affect users.

Monetate is great to utilize to discover/address different customer behaviors on site. However, it can be difficult to utilize if you don't have the resources and are not well versed in coding.