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The State of Monetate
July 28, 2017

The State of Monetate

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Test & Segment
  • Product Recommendations
  • Product Badging

Overall Satisfaction with Monetate

Monetate is being used for E-commerce [website] which could be considered just one department, but on the other hand is all it could be used for (our buyers or photographers certainly couldn't get anything out of it.) The primary problem it addresses for us is easy execution of A/B tests of changes to the website. It provides other tools such as analytics and recommendation carousels, but those are otherwise available as-good or better; its A/B testing is top-notch though.
  • A/B Testing is #1 with a bullet. It can do virtually anything and gives robust data comparing groups, plus you can add new, custom metrics on top. Not to say improvements couldn't be made, though. In particular the way they handle multi-group tests is sub-optimal.
  • Badging is also useful, though more as a convenience than a necessity, as it'd be easy enough to create the effect without them. Their implementation is simple enough that our production team can change them on their own, without any dev support.
  • Some of their provided widgets aren't made with speed in mind, which critical in these increasingly mobile based days. For example, we had a recommendation carousel at the bottom of the homepage with 5 starting images (screen width allowing) that by default populated 8 pages of products--40 images total. It loaded them immediately as part of page load. It should wait until the widget scrolls into view, or the 'more' arrow is tapped.
  • Their staffing seems to be in some upheaval currently. We had one great CSM for a long time, but now in the last year we've had at least 3 different ones (I can't even remember them all), some for as little as a month.
  • Placing a widget on a page at any point other than immediately (such as only after scrolling a certain distance, or inside an opened modal) is extremely difficult currently.
  • Monetate's direct contributions, such as carousels and other inserts, have had little effect compared to other options.
  • However, their A/B testing has allowed use to more accurately know how our own contributions stack up. If you took the loss of conversion rate from every test we thought would be good and turned out not to be as an effective gain on their part we could easily say +15% CR in relative terms. (Most of what we think are good ideas actually are, in which case Monetate is just confirmation and didn't gain us anything vs just going with the change right away.)
  • Their Badging consistently bumps purchase rates on tagged items, but I find it hard to say this is a good ROI for that specific feature alone, as it would be quite cheap and easy to implement it in-house. A nice free add-on as part of a package, though.
There are a few thing that could be improved, like comparing groups in test with more than 2, or being able to break down results by device type/category after the fact (rather than having to make separate tests for mobile and desktop from the start). But overall Monetate has the best overall A/B testing of all products I've encountered.
Monetate can target experiences to any possible metric (allegedly, I haven't used 'age segment' nor could I verify its accuracy if I had), including the ever-important device type for today's responsive web. However, it can only set these targets on experience creation; it would be great if you could break down result data by these segments later. I shouldn't have to make 3 experiences with the exact same 'what' just to give 'who's of mobile, tablet, and desktop just to have that data separate.
We have not used these features enough to give a good opinion on them.
Outside of experience results you only get a checkout funnel, and can't break it down by segment or anything. It barely qualifies as data. Experience results are the same by default, but the fact you can target the experiences to various segments does make them more useful in that regard, though you still can't break results down after the fact. One fairly big plus on experiences (that beings this back up to 5 from what would be outright bad) is adding custom metrics; if you're skilled with js you can turn custom data fields into virtually any info you want. That said, it is a lot more work on the customer side than it needs to be.
It works. The integration wasn't too complex. There isn't much to say about this.
+Its A/B tests are the best I've seen.
+Its insertable product carousels are good if you don't have any other source for such things. However they only display basic groups like a given category or best sellers, which leave them inferior to AI learning recommendations such as Sales Force's Einstein.
+Badging is easy to use if it needs to be handled by someone non-technical. "Just paste the SKUs in this text box" is pretty easy to understand.
-Its general analytics outside of comparing test groups are severely lacking, falling far behind even the basic level of Google Analytics, for example. (Though GA's A/B testing feature is garbage, so having both is a good complement.)