Conductor vs. Optimizely Content Marketing Platform

Conductor has proven to be an effective tool for tracking our organic search visibility, researching trends and content topics, and beginning our optimization journey in the new AI-driven world of search. The platform is exceptional for collaboration and is easy to use. Having deeper integration of search-related AI data and tools, organic shopping, schema tracking, and suggestions would further improve an already excellent product offering.

Incentivized

I think it's really well suited for organizations that have either big marketing teams that are scattered across different regions and different time zones because it helps everyone be aligned in terms of what is happening at any given time. That to me is one of the best things it can offer. The second thing is the management of the processes. You are not constantly reinventing the wheel when you work in marketing, you tend to have a process for doing certain jobs. For example, if you need to do an email or if you need to do a webinar, you will know what steps you need to take in order to deliver that. If you have lots of stakeholders that need to review things and need to approve things before they can go live, the CMP is the best tool for this because it keeps track of everything that is happening. You can assign steps to your legal team or your regulatory team and they have to go into the platform, be able to review whatever it is that you need them to review or approve. It keeps track of when that happened. There's no guesswork. You eliminate having to send things by email, by teams, by smoke signals. It's all in one place and if you ever needed to go back into things, everything gets saved there as well. All your working files up to your final files are all saved within the platform. You can manage your versions, you can reuse things in the future. There's so many possibilities for it. It depends on what you're trying to do, but at bedtime, if I do anything, no matter what you're trying to do, you'll find the right application within the platform to be able to make your job alive easier.

Incentivized

• Keyword research (includes related terms, types of terms, high ranking pages, search volume, and more)
• Content guidance and briefs (you can use built in tools to get specific optimization steps and create content briefs within the tool)
• Competitor research (compare how competition is ranking and track organic market share)
• Support (dedicated team support, regular check-ins, built-in requests for deliverables/support items, options for requesting work with partner organizations, excellent training materials, and live chat within the platform)

Incentivized

• Customer Service: They'll contact you with a "we're looking at your issue" email within the hour, even on weekends and holidays. Beyond solving your issues/problems with the software, they'll also follow up later to make sure you don't have additional associated issues.
• Live Analytics: You're given a snapshot of how your blog content is doing at any point in time, since they've been tracking your posts/content. You can compare this month's traffic to last year's trafffic during this same month. Other data points include: Unique Visitors, Average Attention Time, Pageviews, Engagement Rate, etc...and you'll even get referral traffic source. There's much more that I'm leaving out here.
• CMP User Interface (UI): Love the easy to use interface to upload blog posts, to use for editing and publishing content, and broadcasting social shares. Besides easily identifiable icons, you can create/edit content in the WYSIWYG or use the html view to make sure everything looks exactly how you prefer. Another cool thing is that the CMP auto-embeds live links of social updates (like Youtube, Twitter, Instagram) for more dynamic blog posts.

Incentivized

• I would like to see a feature to manage the backlink disavow list through search console. If Conductor is able to add this, we may be able to drop one of our other tools and save some money in that area.
• Conductor has a lot of features and can be a bit overwhelming. It is a strength and a weakness, as it takes time to learn all that is available.
• Another feature I would like to see is more integration with GA, we leverage creating annotations in GA and it would be great to have those pulled into the Conductor dashboard automatically.

Incentivized

• In my opinion, there are too many notifications, making it difficult to manage and figure out which ones are necessary and which ones are not.
• I feel workflows are over engineered.
• For medium-sized organizations, the tool is overly complicated and requires a significant investment to optimize it.

Incentivized

Conductor enables high-value SEO activity. There are a lot of moving parts in SEO and I'm always open to products that fit our requirements, but Conductor has built a stronger argument for its value after we subscribed than it had when we subscribed -- that's rare.

I check features like the InsightStream every Monday to monitor any major losses or gains in performance. These are easily digested and save me tons of time searching for these insights manually. If there's anything "worth calling home about" I can easily add insights into a workspace and create a report to communicate these results. It's super easy to use Conductor with a team and across departments.

As a Content Operations Manager, I find the customizable task views and calendar views to be most helpful in the Plan Module. This allows me to have visibility into each team's overdue tasks, and determine where my time is best allocated to help in content production. The Library is a easy to access and highly used function as well for sharing assets across teams

Incentivized

Always works when I've needed it

Incentivized

I have not experienced any prolonged outages. From time to time there will be errors but nothing that significantly slows down production

Incentivized

Sometimes reports can take some time to load

Incentivized

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform's performance is generally good. Nothing that has impacted production. Page load speed doesn't typically lag longer than a few seconds. Reports take some time but not any longer than we're used to with other platforms. We have not experienced lag when integrating with other platforms

Incentivized

It's been sort of off and on in the 2 years I've used it. The live chat has been really helpful many times, and they're quick to respond. We had different support contacts but they've all been good. I think they've recently changed the way they provide support that I believe will be more dedicated and hands-on

Incentivized

The NewsCred team is very responsive and helpful with any technical issues.

Incentivized

Our in house SEO manager trained everyone. It was easy to learn and he was well versed with the product. Any questions we had he was able to answer or reach out to support to find the answer

Incentivized

Training was clear and concise. It was intuitive and helped me understand how to navigate the platform. Options to dive in on each action or skip to learn about areas of regular use. Resource links available to when I had additional questions or needed more training in a specific area. Overall, the training allowed me to use the platform without interruption

Incentivized

I definitely recommend their professional services for getting started. It got our account 90% of the way to where we needed to be in order to gain value from it. In fact, I'd suggest that with few exceptions (such as, you have a staff that is already familiar with the platform and doesn't need any help), the quick start services over the first 30-90 days should be a standard part of onboarding with any new client. It definitely got us to the point of gaining ROI from the solution and, in turn, will make it easier to justify renewal and continued investment in it.

Incentivized

We tried Surfer SEO before Conductor. It just felt like it didn't have enough to offer in comparison to Conductor. There was a shortage on everything that you could do in the platform and it felt like the lack of in-depth tools caused us to miss out on making sure our content that we're putting out is the best it could possibly be.

Incentivized

I use mainly Microsoft Dynamics, CRM, customer insights, journeys for marketing, email automation or marketing automation. I use Seismic. We're looking to launch an events platform, which I'm not using yet, but that will be a tool that I will want to integrate with the other systems I'm using. Customer Insights Journeys is probably the biggest other tool that I use that I'm trying to be an SME in.

Incentivized

Many features

Incentivized

Optimizely is generally a reliable platform for A/B testing and digital experience management. It's helpful for it's stability, flexibility, and comprehensive features, which is helpful when managing an enterprise website

Incentivized

• The Live Edit feature in Content King has given me the ability to make changes on the fly without having to wait for developer time to make simple edits.
• I have been able to gain back hours of time that I previously spent on aggregating data across tools when preparing on-the-fly reports for management.
• Every morning my dashboard provides me with a new insight or answers a question I may not have even thought to ask. This has added to my workload, but it's also helped to become better at my job.

Incentivized

• It certainly has helped. I think there is guardrails in how you use CMP, what you are putting in. It needs to be the right way of how you want to work, otherwise you're going to create a mess within CMP. So creating that framework outside and implementing it into the system I think is quite important. Again, that's our way of working, but I think it has helped us.

Incentivized