Item: Piano Composer
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a digital and print news publisher. We use Piano Composer for our subscription flows. For example, to create and manage dynamic paywalls, dynamic subscriptions and landing pages. We also use Piano Composer's segmentation capabilities and range of algorithms to improve our targeting. This helps us to create the best experience we can for users, while also ensuring we optimise our revenue from advertising and subscriptions so we can continue to provide high quality journalism.

Pros and Cons

Very easy to use interface
Powerful algorithms to improve targeting
Great engagement with clients about improvements and future roadmaps

Acquires companies often and integration of these sometimes cause bugs and outages
Can be slow to load sometimes
Any custom work you need done by their developers takes far too long

Return on Investment

Increased digital subscriptions substantially
Enables quick and easy testing, which saves lots of time
Is quite expensive as a tool overall, so you need to balance the benefits to the number of users you have

Alternatives Considered

Optimizely Web Experimentation

Optimizely is a great platform for A/B testing with multiple variants and across a range of devices, browsers etc. What makes Piano Composer different is that you can add tests within your flows - specifying exactly where and why you want things to happen, whilst still building the rest of your experiences around this. The other huge benefit to Piano Composer is that it contains their Customer Segmentation engine and processing this data with their proprietary algorithms, so it is taking everything it knows about your users and including this in the segmentation process, which I think it much more powerful.

Key Insights

Do you think Piano Composer delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Piano Composer's feature set?

Yes

Did Piano Composer live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Piano Composer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Piano Composer again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Piano Composer is well suited to news publishers in particular currently, but in theory this tool could be used by any organisation that relies on a paywall or advertising to generate revenue. Their increasingly powerful segmentation tool would also be very useful to many companies, as you can target particular users very easily or rely on their algorithms to do it for you and learn to optimise over time. I also think that if you have a sales pipeline/funnel that you want to nurture users through, Piano Composer can help you to do that.

Piano Composer is a great all-rounder for segmenting users and driving desired behaviour

Overall Satisfaction with Piano Composer