Monetate Reviews

Exit feedback tool.

Clarification on the KPIs tracked on each experience.

Impact of results of experiences ran simultaneously on the same pages.

Social proof options.

A Monetate app would be great, as the mobile site is extremely hard to use.

Matching the business product feed with the Monetate data has proven to be difficult.

Targeting a whole categories PDP is very hard to do with Monetate, unless you have time to find the whole categories of product codes.

Providing more Monetate training.

The analytics is known to be 5% invalid when compared to GA, especially monetary measurements.

Provide more in-depth analysis for tests.

The AI tool should be able to better recognize smaller differences.

documentation could be updated more regularly

Training information and videos are very basic

The overall organization can be improved

Still not 100% across the analytics/reporting component

Would be great if we had a local team, given the differences in time zones

Custom events are not easy to use and don't get copied while duplicating experiences.

When opening different experiences/actions in different tabs, all tabs switch to the same action/experience

Impossible to track custom event on added element (added through Test version) with Inspector before experience is actually live.

Differences between experience types (Majority fit vs standard A/B etc is not very clear in the interface. Inexperienced users sometimes choose the wrong experience type as a consequence.

Bounce rate sounds sometimes incorrect. The experiment has a bigger bounce rate 90% of the time.

Lack metrics such as Exit rates and Median order value.

Customer segmentation functionality would be great in identifying the different types of customers we have

Other ways to organize/gather data to identify different perspectives

In my opinion, the only thing I would change is finding the right blog/help guide to use.

Lightboxes that adjust for desktop vs. mobile experiences.

Easier integration with custom analytics we use internally.

Making the server side easier to obtain

Not made for complex dev

Sometimes UI can be clunky

Sometimes it is hard to find what you are looking for (for example, how to export data)

The way of specifying pages on which promotion should be displayed could be improved

It is hard to organize promotions

The learning curve is a little steep, especially if you're unfamiliar with HTML/CSS. The tool is so powerful but can be overwhelming at first. The intro instructional videos/content is helpful but it doesn't cover everything. We needed to partner with an optimization company to better understand the tool and get started.

Setting up an experiment for the first time isn't simple when you're a marketer who is inexperienced with any sort of web development or even just HTML/CSS. While you can easily select the area you want to create a test with, you don't have a way to easily manipulate that section without the use of HTML/CSS.

The first optimization company Monetate recommended us to was horrible - it really was awful working with them. We had dedicated (paid for!) hours that got wasted after the company wasted our time in each meeting (when we did have one - they often needed to reschedule) and they barely knew what our company even did despite multiple meetings. Those hours, despite the awful experience, were never fulfilled, never reimbursed, never carried over to the new (and far better) company. This left a bad taste in my mouth. While I really like this product and it does everything we need, this awful experience and lack of ownership on their end was highly disappointing. We are moving forward though - and happy with our results.

Monetate-built actions are often locked down so the client user cannot amend to be bespoke for their needs. Therefore any changes wanted require a new Monetate dev ticket. This can be time consuming

Lack of ability to move experiences to another folder if you're on the main experience page - This has bugged me for ages because we do a lot of experience duplication for different campaigns every month and it would be easier if you could duplicate and move folders on the same page.

Mass content upload. I may just be missing this feature somewhere but I've never been able to upload more than one piece of content at once and it's quite frustrating.

More Manchester based events. This one is obviously specific to my location and I understand why London is the hub for events but it would be nice to have more frequent opportunities to liaise with other Monetate users locally.

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.

Faster development job is done when requested.

I know the company has been undergoing a change but staff has changed so often that our personalized staff has changed numerous times.

Some DIV tags cannot be selected in ActionBuilder and there is no explanation in the interface as to why that is.

The dataset upload tool errors out sometimes, but when you click "View Error", nothing happens.

When using JavaScript in ActionBuilder, sometimes it continuously fires even after closing ActionBuilder and reopening it. For example, redirect Javascript entered in ActionBuilder fires as soon as ActionBuilder is opened to edit the action.

Searching through all the experiences or tests you put online is reliant on a very robust naming convention

We would like an easier place for notes for each experience or test to be stored so that these are searchable. This allows things like project briefs to be summarised for the purpose of the wider team

It would be great if Monetate had an improved preview function to allow you to view an experience on the device and screen resolution of your choice. Currently, to fully test your experiences, you'll need a few browser apps which allows you to mimic devices, clear cookies...

A smarter way of building out variations for tests would be useful. Occasionally, a test that has a lot of different variables (but ultimately quite similar) will require you to setup multiple experiences to achieve this

Custom customer segments

Training videos

Suppport chat

In the pre-sales process, they really want to sell you billable hours. These hours do not transfer to the next calendar year and are not refundable. It is a poor system.

Their technical documentation is confusing in spots and could be improved. We followed documentation, with an eyebrow raised in some cases, and then were told to go down a different path which was not listed in the documentation (but made more sense.)

I can't speak to the success or not of the program, but we are currently working with a third party of Monetate (who Monetate put us in touch with, as part of our billable hours.) Its not a con per se, but feels weird.

Doesn't always work with active or JS controlled elements on the site.

We use a lot of support hours to implement experiences.

Continuous improvement in predictive analytics.

I truly have no areas for improvement for Monetate.

I know that it is recommended to give any test at least two weeks before considering any results, but I would like to see real time reporting.

We have had some trouble getting some JavaScript elements to fire correctly. We ended up putting our static content in Monetate, and testing against the dynamic content on our site.