Ion Interactive LiveBall - A developers landing page and a/b testing dream!
Updated August 07, 2018
Ion Interactive LiveBall - A developers landing page and a/b testing dream!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with ion interactive
I have used Ion Interactive LiveBall in 3 different companies, all with slightly different implementations. But in the end, LiveBall excels at rapidly creating landing pages with highly dynamic content and flexibility. It is a very unique platform for creating landing pages that honestly I have yet to see another platform that can be used to create content like you can on LiveBall as quickly or easily. So all of the companies that I have worked with used LiveBall to rapidly prototype and deploy landing pages for multiple domains, multiple marketing campaigns, for reporting and analytics of those campaigns, and to keep it all in one spot.
- Ion Interactive allows you to rapidly prototype landing pages for multiple domains and keep your marketing campaigns organized.
- This tool allows for a lot of customization and flexibility. You can create forms for your landing pages. And do you need to connect to an API? Yep it is quick and easy. Do you need to have the submitted forms email to someone in your company? No problem. Do you need to create custom thank you pages for your campaign? It does that too. Do you need your landing page to show different content to different users based on different parameters? Once you get the hang of it, this is a breeze. Do you need to do all of these things together? It does that quickly and easily too.
- Do you want to code sets of templates that can be re-used with just minor tweaks? This platform can take a very basic base template, and allow you to rapidly edit this template (think child themes), to be customized for each campaign and then be re-used whenever necessary.
- The learning curve in Ion Interactive is a bit tough for some people. The support team is great and whether you are a developer or a marketer and wanting to use this platform, they will have several one on one sessions with you to get you in and get you moving. However the learning curve is a bit tough since this does work quite differently than most web platforms.
- If you do not have a developer to create your custom themes and custom frameworks, the graphic user interface is good, but with any non-custom solution, sometimes it can limit things a little bit.
- Rapid prototyping and re-purposing of past campaigns with few tweaks and edits needed.
- Ability to make changes on the fly even for live campaigns.
- The ability to A/B test absolutely everything, and easily find conversion factors that matter and then implement those changes in future iterations of content!
Honestly these are different products. Other web platforms, are built to create a website. However this is meant for rapid content creation of landing pages. A user lands on the page, does a desired action (fills out a form, clicks a button, etc) and then they are done. Also A/B testing is built into ion where other platforms, it is an after thought and usually something that has to be carefully constructed.
Ion, by Rock Content Feature Ratings
Using ion interactive
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Well integrated Consistent Feel confident using | Requires technical support Cumbersome Lots to learn |
- Ion Interactive Liveball is a very different type of system compared to most CMS systems, you essentially create a page, and then tie it to one or multiple URL's, So from that perspective it takes some time to get to know and figure it out, once you do it is amazing being able to make one page and have it running on 12 URL's at the same time, the dynamic properties it can utilize also help to make this very powerful and elegant once you get the hang of it!
- The system has a large number of highly editable templates that can be used, this allows most users to get up and running fairly quickly. Some of the concepts are unique so that is the biggest stumbling block since it does behave differently than most other types of CMS systems.
- In this system many pages utilize forms or different scripts that you can use and re-use on multiple pages. Having these containers that are already created and working exactly as expected allows users to rapidly copy an existing page, make small modifications or updates and re-use components from other pages. When this is done you have new pages created literally within minutes and set to live on new traffic sources (URL's) if you want.
- My biggest gripe with Ion is a bit unusual. When a user starts to get into the deeper complexities of Ion, there can literally be 20+ places you might have to look to find a rogue script, action, or rule that is causing certain behavior. So since this problem can happen in so many places, if people do not stay consistent with how they are building and utilizing things it can become very tedious to find some small piece of code causing an undesired action to occur.
- Ion can be used in very simple, or very complex ways using multiple datalayers, getting data from API services, and more. So sometimes when someone asks for a simple edit, but you have to go and follow a trail of breadcrumbs to find out the information is kept in a datalayer, find the datalayer information and make the edit, people have a hard time accepting that to change a single word it can take 30 minutes or even more. However very few people utilize Liveball in this way so for most implementations it is not that big of a problem.
- They don't truly have a test environment, and it is not really possible to implement one, but you can create an item and send it to a dummy or test URL, so while they don't have a test environment there is a decent work around, but this is a pain point for many people and companies using Ion.