Data analysis inadequate for an agency.
February 22, 2013

Data analysis inadequate for an agency.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction

  • It is a good overall social media analytics tool. It has basic data but it doesn't drill down to our specific needs, and it doesn't have the ability to deliver custom reports with hard data.
  • It certainly has some nice features (e.g. search) and is probably an effective tool for corporate social media managers.
  • It doesn't go deep in to data analysis: In order to supply our clients with the kind of data they wanted to see, we were still obliged to export data from the system into Excel and spend valuable time creating appropriate reports to share with clients.
  • We really needed a tool where we could build custom reports and provide our clients with access to those reports by logging into the system. Sprout does not offer this kind of "agency" functionality.
  • We also needed to compare changes in metrics across specific time periods. Sprout does not offer this functionality.
  • Better insights analysis for our online and social media data. Improvement on decision making
We chose not to move forward with this product.
The tool is OK for SBS trying to get a better feel for their social media analytics but it doesn't work very well on the agency side.

Product Usage

4 - Social Media Community Managers
  • Social Media Analytics: Our main business problem was being able to provide our clients with proof-points that the social engagement efforts we were making on their behalf were, in fact, effective. The overriding issue was to provide customized metrics showing engagement through content click-throughs etc.

Evaluation and Selection

I didn't switch, but used Sprout Social as part of the evaluation process when looking for a good social media analytics tool.
We evaluated the following tools:
Sprout Social, Webtrends, Pagelever. We did not, in fact, pick this system but went instead with PageLever.

We felt that Sprout was a good tool, but did not have the agency features we needed. In addition, the people we worked with a PageLever were incredibly helpful in helping us customize the system to meet our use case. The Sprout Social people we talked to were not unhelpful, but had more of a hands-off approach. For example, they sent us canned marketing materials, but didn't spend time with us to personally discuss our use case.

Implementation

Ultimately, we felt that we could probably have done a better job if we had just done it ourselves.
  • Professional services company
We used a small local agency called BaaS.

Training

The product is fairly easy to use and has a good user interface, so it's not difficult to learn.

Support

Customer support tended to be a bit too arm's length. we did not feel that we were ever able to build a strong business releationship where they behaved like a partner rather than a vendor.

Usability

It wasn't that the UI was particularly poor. It was more a matter of not being able to do what I wanted. For example, I really wanted to be able to set up dashboards with different KPIs for different accounts. This was not possible.

Reliability

Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.
Performance was average. Definitely lower than some other products we looked at.

Vendor Relationship

Not very easy. As already stated, they were quite professional, but they didn't really talk to us. Conversations were mostly via email and it fel a little impersonal.
There isn't any room for negotiations