Contentsquare vs. Coremetrics / IBM Digital Analytics (discontinued)

It is well suited to businesses with a full time web analyst that will be using the tools to create actionable reports that drive action in the company. It is less appropriate where companies are just looking for some new tools and it will be forgotten soon after implementation. If a website is critical to your business and you have dedicated resources or consultants to help you understand the data, then it is invaluable. I love it.

• As mentioned earlier, transactional heavy web assets such as eStores are particularly strong candidates.
• IBM CXA along with other, similar tools, is not set-and-forget. The solution must be well managed in order to deliver value. Purchase of the solution is one thing; driving analytic results is another. If a company's staff are not strong analytical thinkers, CXA will not help. IBM CXA is not just a technology platform - it is a basis to design strong customer touchpoints and interactions. You need to be customer journey design literate to get the best from this.

Incentivized

• The qualitative aspects of user experience are very well captured by ClickTale. We can get solid actionable insights through the various dashboards which track mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, etc.
• The visual conversion funnels give a very good high level view of landing page performance and how they work together.
• The video recordings are especially helpful. The user behavior captured is especially helpful in making decisions about user interface - form fields, call to actions, etc.

• Marketing attribution models - capable to deliver an holistic view of the marketing channels performance
• Multisite capabilities : allows to have a Cie view as well as individual site's view
• Unique customer view and Live Profile: we are able to go to the visitor level and therefore use the behavioural data for marketing actions
• Reliability of the data: we have full confidence in the data collected and the rules are clear for us
• Support: available support 24h/7.

• Looking at isolated recordings without creating a segment, we still have to use the old interface
• User interface has been massively improved but there are a few nags here and there that still need to be addressed
• Mobile and desktop should be shown side by side and not separately

Incentivized

• The new UI is slow, buggy, incomplete, is not intuitive, and has limited support or explanation.
• The demo videos for the new UI showcase features that are not even available in the new UI and support said those features may never be available so they are not sure either why they are shown in the demo videos.
• Tag management is extremely manual leaving a lot of room for human error.
• Support across the board for the legacy UI and new UI are not very helpful. They typically do not take the time to understand the root of your problem and commonly default to the response "that feature is not available". For example, you cannot currently delete reports in the new UI even though there is a delete button available. Support says the feature is not available, so if you want anything deleted you have to submit a list to support and they will delete it for you. This is extremely frustrating when you are creating "test" reports in the new UI and then you have no option to delete them when done.

Incentivized

For small companies with limited user testing budgets, ClickTale serves as a useful user testing tool. When I cannot get the funds for in depth user testing, I always know that I have a baseline of information I can rely on

It is still a best in class analytics platform, but working with IBM contracting has proven to be quite a hassle at times... There are proven pros and cons to each of the major systems and vendors (most I already listed). I always recommend to establish the business questions you are trying to answer, determine which platform answers them best and decide whether it is worth the dollar investment

I had some issues interacting with viewing recordings of a specific page by many users but my impression was that this was going to be fixed.

Very easy to implement and use.

Never had any issues

As reports are templated, the system is pretty quick. Sometimes you have to wait a bit for a report to render. Or you might have to re-load the page. But there is no real issue here and the system is on par with other similar systems.

Overall, the level of support is very good and I would say it is a strong asset of the solution. However, you can sometimes feel that there is a difference of level among the support team.

Online training is really great. One of the best assets that they have. Lots of great videos, pop quizzes at the end of each module. Fantastic. Other tools have similar features, but not as good.

See previous comment: reading and understanding the encyclopedic implementation guide is a must.

ContentSquare [(Clicktale)] is going deeper on UX understanding than traditional web analytics tools. You can truly understand how a page is used (where users click or even miss click, on which part of the page they are spending most of their time, if some links are clicked but bad positioned on the page...), and that's a thing you can't really measure trough a traditional web analytics tool.

Incentivized

IBM Analytics is a great tool for measuring and analyzing web traffic along with consumer behavior to a degree. When compared to other solutions and tools available in the market today, I'd suggest checking out Kissmetrics or even Google Analytics over this tool. Ultimately, it will come down to the end user and if they are comfortable in the environment of the backend and workflows of IBM Digital Analytics.

Incentivized

This solution can support large amount of data and transaction. The way that user management features are built, it shows it is meant for large organizations.

• I learned how effective some of our image carousels were. How only 10% of a page visitors were being exposed to only the first slide. People were scrolling down or leaving the page without ever being exposed to 90% of the content. Once I provided this input to stakeholders it was an easy sell to redesign this aspect of the page.
• I used the mouse-move heat map to analyze user interaction with the footer. Showing stakeholders the before and after redesign heat maps did wonders for improving my credibility as an usability analyst.
• We used Clicktale to help analyze our 404 error page effectiveness. Our redesign gave us a 14% lower bounce rate on our redesigned 404 error page. Stakeholders appreciated a quantitative measure to gauge the success of that project.

• Using IBM Digital Analytics has allowed us to optimize marketing spend for our clients and provide us the insight to reduce the spend on vendors that are not performing well or not bringing in qualified traffic.
• Using IBM Digital Analytics data to power on-site product recommendations has increased the percentage of total sales from recommendation zones to around 10% compared to around 1% with manually merchandised zones.
• Using IBM's TruePath Funnels to analyze the checkout process for various clients has allowed us to see where visitors are dropping out of the checkout process and make improvements to increase conversion rate.