IBM Digital Analytics - it costs, but it is worth the investment.
May 19, 2014

IBM Digital Analytics - it costs, but it is worth the investment.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review

Modules Used

  • IBM Digital Analytics
  • Explore
  • Export
  • Benshmark
  • Import
  • Monitor
  • DDX

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Digital Analytics

We use Digital Analytics to share and visualize the performance of the website. IBM Digital Analytics allows us to report on the behavior of the visitors at an individual level - what has been clicked and how it helped our customers buy what they came for. Moreover it allows us to compare different strategies and have the data to help make strategic decisions. Marketing is no longer a 'like/dislike' decision, it is an actual analysis on the performance of the different decisions. The data is shared across all departments of the company to help make predictions across a wide variety of services: in the sales department to see what items are wanted, in the finance department to see what payment methods are most favored, and also in the marketing department to see what promotions are performing best.
  • Digital Analtyics works best at analyzing on individual level. Each visitor can be targeted to improve its journey step by step.
  • The ability to include many parameters in the tags helps create reporting that totally reflects company challenges. It helps with analyzing all aspects that we come across.
  • Most of the reports are defaults and can be easily customizable. The fact that the interface allows the customized views to be placed in the interface next to the default views makes it easy to find them.
  • The export functionality helps with exporting raw data to make off line analysis across all departments. This is really helpful when some very specific analysis needs to be made.
  • The API is easily accessible and does not need an implementation language to create reports.
  • IBM Digital Analytics allows for custom values in the tags, but they can only be accessed by creating Explore reports and there is a charge for each new report created. If the values could be accessed freely that would make a huge difference.
  • Segments sometimes take a long time to process, and this slows the analysis quite a bit. Moreover the limit that is imposed is sometimes very restrictive (10 maximum)
  • The interface is not very user friendly.
  • IBM Digital Analytics helps with understanding the key strengths and weakness of websites. For instance it helps with understanding if some visitors belonging to a given category are experiencing problems in their journey.
  • The interesting aspect of IBM Digital Analytics is that the more you use it the more you need it and the more you want to know about the visitors. Most of our clients that are on a free solution end up on IBM Digital Analytics because they realize that the tool does not completely answer all the questions they have.
  • The conversion rate of some of our client's websites really went up because we were able to identify the problems that customers had on their websites.
As a consulting company, we tailor the analytics solution to our clients. Usually they start with a free solution like Google Analytics, but they rapidly end up with a paying solution because it offers a deeper analysis and less restrictions on the data.

For instance Google Analytics will not allow you to nail a visitor and trace his journey from the start of his visit to the end of it. Moreover we are, with IBM Analytics for example able to identify the visitors that came multiple times in their lifetime to buy online. This allows us to study the customer life cycle and link this with the email that we send them to re-engage them after a while.

An other strength that IBM Analytics has compared to Google Analytics is the ability to have 50 attributes per tags and therefore adapt the tracking to the company.

The weak point however is the price of the solution.
Once you start using IBM Digital Analytics, it is hard to move on to a solution that offers less flexibility and less information.
IBM Digital Analytics is very suited for large companies that need a lot of detailed information about the visitor journey and that need support. The price of the solution usually makes the difference compared to other solutions like Google Analytics. The fact that IBM offers support is one of the main strengths. Thus if the analytics solution is a key for the organization, I recommend IBM Digital Analytics as it is supported and if there is a problem, IBM has a SLA and a complete team to take over if there is a problem.