Improve conversion and AOV

Certona Experience Manager is a powerful End-User Tool that allows me to update strategies, and A/B test regularly and get reporting to optimize the experience and drive conversion.

Occasionally CEM glitches, gets hung up puts me in blacklist mode a bit too often, would like to be able to copy individual strategies to separate containers, to same container for modification. Tagging logic , REc Demand logic was difficult to confirm with other analytics software like Omniture.

They make it very easy to see where they are driving revenue and engagement, which I appreciate. Their testing and reporting is thorough and easy to follow. The account management and customer success teams are helpful and friendly. They always have a list of new ideas to test so that your strategies don't get stale, rather than just setting something up and then forgetting about it.

Personalization engine and algorithm are strong Team supports frequent testing to ensure that your strategies are working optimally Account managers are thorough and easy to work with There is great continuity among account staff - you don't get bounced from one rep to another Team makes lots of suggestions for improvements and how to best optimize your use of the software

Some pieces are not as easily customizable as I would like On some things, support queue can be very long Building some reports in the portal can be tedious or difficult to get to

I did enjoy working with the Certona team and loved the recommendations, but it was a set it and forget it plan as we couldn't track the results and/or make any additional changes as we wouldn't know if it would hurt the bottom line or help us.

I loved the ability to customize the software to meet the Company's needs on all of our devices: website, iPad app, CRM, and analtyics package. We had the ability to download the information to work on an off-line mode as well.

While the recommendations were good, we lacked the ability to track our results - we were unable to measure ROI, run A/B tests, as well as make upgrades, such as content recomendations. This was our developer's 'fault' due to incredibly high costs, but in a nutshell without results - we're unable to make decisions.

Easy to understand and get actions, experiences, targeting set up for production.Their testing features really help fine tune and trying out new ideas to see if they work.

It would be nice if the users could implement some of the custom attributes from datasets into the actions themselves instead of having to rely on Monetate.

Customer support is quick with responses and always gives an easy to understand resolution. I appreciate that.

For a Digital Merchant with no technical background the tool is very easy to use. I have a nerd-like affection for kicking off new A/B tests and appreciate the Real-time insights data which quickly allows me to check and make sure sessions/events are firing as I expect. The Recommendations Beta reporting is valuable for Monthly reports to show ROI. Recommendations have a been a valuable feature to upsell customers on coordinating products. My favorite thing about Monetate is it's ability to update my website without the need for IT support - on occasion we might publish a bad link that cannot get updated until the next day. Using my "magic Monetate wand", I can correct errors on the fly and save the company lost revenue.

There is a way to organize experiences by folders but we didn't attempt to start using them until many years later. There should be a way to assign experiences to folders when you create them, not after the fact - this would save precious time. We basically don't use that feature because most everything remains Unfiled.These are minor bugs and should probably be reported to Support. 1) If you're looking for old content the Search feature within that library doesn't reset your filters. 2) When adding secondary metrics search feature does not always match on expected keywords.

We have used Monetate not only as an AB testing tool, but to provide hot-fixes on our website which we can deploy outside of our monthly dev release cycle. It is an easy to use tool and offers us the opportunity to test out ideas, setup product recommendations and soon have social proofing.

Ability for the teams to try out ideas, have multiple variants of tests and to create personalised experiences based on user age / gender / previous purchases and lead source. We work with a testing partner who run all tests in monetate and provide comprehensive analytics to back up the results.

I can honestly say, there is nothing I don't like about Monetate!

The features to customize messaging and personalize a user's experience are endless. They are fun to use, and you can learn some neat things from them about your audience, how to message to them, and what they tend to respond to (just not neat enough in my opinion). The support is absolutely fantastic. If you're a very large organization, I can see the tool providing value though.

The features, such as weather triggered ads, messaging to certain customer segments, and the ability to alter appearance of a website based upon the location of the user's IP, are all awesome in theory. However, in order to truly take advantage of the tool, you need to be a very large organization in my opinion to see ROI. You need statistically significant samples to make potentially major changes in strategy. This would be ideal for retail, such as a clothing company or maybe even a travel company. Your website will need to see a ton of traffic. Then, once a change is implemented how long will this perhaps slight upgrade break even or contribute significantly from an economic standpoint? I bring this up due to the high price tag of the platform. Not a good choice unless a form of company as noted above. Platform is also not easy to use, a large learning curve comes with it.

Manually setting up recommendations is impossible given our staffing. The support from the Certona team has been exceptional in the last several months.

The software with the assistance of our Certona team has done a great job making product recommendations across our 3 unique sites. Using Certona has allowed us to spend less time and effort on manually setting up recommendations in addition to providing better results than a manual or simple algorithm could provide.

It took several months to achieve optimum results given the complexity of our data.

when I stated to use Monetate it was very overwhelming, but there is documentation on how to use this product as well as training on their site if you need it. Also our contact over in Monetate helps us a lot. She recommended us training modules and it help us a lot with using Monetate.

When I started to use the Monetate product it was a little over whelming. there are some parts where I would like for it to become more user friendly. For example when creating an experience you have to go all the way to the right instead of clicking on experience and going through the steps you manually have to go though datasets -> product recommendation ->experiences. Another example is when you click on preview instead of going to the exact experience it will go to your homepage and you will need to manually navigate through my site to find my experience.

Certona has allowed us to create a more personalized experience for the customer on our website and within emails. They generate additional demand by subtly suggesting products to shoppers based on past and like behaviors.

We have loved working directly with our client success team. They are constantly working to optimize our strategies via very thorough testing.

The platform has always been a bit clunky to work with, but their teams are always available to help work through any questions we have.

They are one of the worst vendors I’ve ever had to work with. Their product managers and technical specialists don’t know how to implement their own product. They change the solution multiple times and caused several delays in the project timeline. They don’t take ownership and seems like they don’t even know how to solve for basic use cases.

Nothing at all, for being “best in class”

Terrible API integration, unable to support cross-selling and up selling with an API implementation.

Ab Testing feature And Recommendation strategy is my favourite features in monetate. It is very easy to use and directly we can able to track the conversion rate for that particular feature released.

Performance needs to be improved, It takes lot of time to render the webpage. Reset Password I can able to observed if we tap enter on URL. It will resume with existing password.

Helps A/B testingHelps feature customizationHelps to get product recommendationsAnalytics gives good insights to conclude the feature

Response time is highAlgorithms are limitedLittle complex to understand in the first goResponse is inconsistent

Overall our experience is positive and enjoy the benefit of this product across our site.

The majority of the software is very customized. We use the software for running recommendations across the website which has worked well to increase customer experience and shoppability.

There has been frequent technical issues where implementations have been delayed and need time to spend investigating issues. Overall some of these technical issues have slowed us down.

The machine learning features and the performance.

New targeting & segment definition & edition. Make the integration more outside from the client site.Add functionality to the analytic tool

After several tests we're convinced that Certona recommendations perform better compared to hand-picked products. Once you did implement the code and know the software it's quite easy to use.

The product recommendations: we did several tests and the recommendations perform better compared to hand-picked products. The use of strategies to setup recommendations: it's not a complete black box, but you can actually tweak the settings.

No lay-out flexibility: Each recommendation 'container' has just 1 lay-out (template). It would be nice if you can switch lay-outs using the parameters in the URL. Example usecase: we can't use product image1 in the first recommendation and product image2 in the second recommendation. This cannot be solved using 2 containers, because they aren't attuned to each other.

Ease of use, good documentation, actions that are component based in nature, useful API's, good customer support and friendly staff.

React.js integration with existing website. Monetate sits on top so there seems to be more and more issues a rising as the website is converted to React. This is something I have brought up many times in recent meetings.

The level of service we receive from Certona is remarkable. They bring so many insights to the tables, and are always full of ideas to improve our placement strategies. Because they serve so many clients, they always have their finger on the pulse of what is working right now in the eCom world.

Ability to quickly test new strategies and optimize our placements across the site and emails.

We rely very heavily on the Certona service team to make weekly updates...I would love to see an improved UI that would make self updates easier.

The team at Certona are excellent - very attentive and always willing to help or proactively come up with a workaround. The product itself works very well for the needs of our site, something which can only be built on as we roll out their visual search.

The back end operating systems are quite dated and confusing

From an email standpoint, I appreciated the flexibility of how you can utilize the recommendation containers within the email.

From an email standpoint, I do wish there was an easier way to A/B split test different strategies within the email. On the website you can do this easily but not so much with Email.

The best thing about the company is the Customer Support and contact persons we work with. The second best is the openness of the company to search for non-trivial solutions for the emerging business requirements

Configuration UI could be more responsive

Overall, experience has been pretty good ROI - however, I wish turnaround times would be quicker and during holidays it can take up to a month or longer for technical issues to be resolved.

The algorithm has been tested across many companies and people, and seems to work well for basic product recommendations in the normal placements across the site.

The UX is not the best - CEM is a little archaic and the reports are very basic excel outputs and not organized in the best way.

We want to offer better and more meaningful recommendations to our customers.

It's feature rich and can do just about anything you want from a product recommendation engine.

The UI of the dashboard is a bit confusing and cumbersome to navigate. Takes some time to learn how to get the most out of it.

Good but can be better

AB testing and recommendations strategies

Inconsistent recommendation strategies and inconsistent response from API

Easy, flexible, powerful dynamic personalization engine. Is responsive, accurate and has made creating targeted marketing campaigns so easy!

Very easy to set up, very easy to use. The integration was simple and straightforward. And the insight and power that you gain is incredible. The targeting is so easy and has the ability to execute very complex experiences. Very easily to bring in 3rd party data to personalize.

With a lot of experiences in action, it can be tough to manage and isolate experiences. Reporting is complex, but gives us the insight we need.