Monetate

Formerly Kibo Personalization, powered by Monetate & Certona

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 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.

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.

Unfortunately we had a really poor experience with Monetate. Unprofessional, poor communicators and provided no analysis and insight into experiences and tests after I asked multiple times. The platform is quite overwhelming and setting up an experience involves the user going into several different sections on site. Overall, would not recommend them after the experience we had.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 an excellent testing platform to test your ideas onto the site and see how it's working before you actually make a permanent change, and to experiment with various ideas at the same time to see which one works the best.

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.