Efficient platform to build your marketing campaign

I worked with montage while being a web content management specialist at a large retail company. We used it to add promotional banners and product labels reflecting promos, and we also performed A?B testing of our banners. I liked working with the tools especially when being results of the campaign and figuring out what approach to promotion was more effective.

Pros

Monetate allows to efficiently add and track marketing elements to your site's pages thus to see how effective your campaign is. You can create and add custom content to the pages with promo details, specify audience, perform A/B testing, and see how the campaign performs all in the same place.

Cons

Creating proper queries to specify the exact pages where the promos should appear may be a bit challenging.

Powerful, Flexible Personalization tool

Improve conversion and AOV

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Certona Recommendations

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Solid tool for personalization and engagement, with some minor flaws

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Time saving recommendation tool

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

Pros

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.

Cons

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