Monetate (formerly Kibo Personalization, powered by Monetate and Certona) is an ecommerce personalization software for consumer-facing brands. Monetate enables brands to create individualized experiences for site visitors, with the goal of improving engagement and business performance. Founded in 2008, Monetate services Adidas, Lufthansa, Office Depot, Reebok, Wolseley, and other companies.
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Optimizely Web Experimentation
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Optimizely Web Experimentation empowers teams to conduct experiments (without having to rely on developer resources) in order to test various user interactions, make website changes backed by data, and personalize customer experiences.
The feature set of Monetate was more robust than Optimizely and analytics were more reliable. Pricing and feature set were pretty close to Maximizer, but the interface in Monetate was more intuitive.
Verified User
Project Manager
Chose Monetate
While Optimizely has a number of useful features, Monetate had a much broader portfolio and greater ease of use. We also found that the Monetate team was very responsive and easy to work with on projects.
We used Optimizely as a self-service tool. Our Monetate engagement is full-service, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. I do prefer Monetate's action builder to the Optimizely tool.
I think that Optimizely is more user-friendly than Adobe and Monetate, for example - Adobe is really suited for people with deep pockets and a distinct technical acumen that may not be suitable for a small business. Montetate is not user-friendly - even for seasoned marketers. …
Maxymiser - The statistical significance engine used by Optimizely helps to reduce the detection of false positives. These were noticed on many occasions within the maxymiser tool.
> Adobe's pretty cool for its recomentation / AI / ML engine > VWO's wysiwyg is pretty solid and the heatmapping is nice > abtasty's consent features are pretty cool to launch patch and AB Test Consent Rate > Monetate & Dynamic Yield's pre-built personalization features help …
We were a former Adobe Test and Target client and felt that the tool was not keeping up with the competition. Optimizely greatly streamlined the process of setting up and running A/B tests, making results easy to understand, and provided superior customer service. I understand T…
This is the only real other real similar product that we looked at. We are part of a larger corporation. Another company in our organization had been using Optimizely and they reported back nothing but great things about their partnership with Optimizely. They also reported …
Monetate, but the tool was a little too far out of our budget. We picked Optimizely because it was cost effective and our ROI was justified based upon a defined baseline to increase conversion and continue the strategy of A/B testing.
Monetate is a fully functional space to generate multiple marketing campaigns for your company on the web, many of the functions found in this program are a contribution to manage your content correctly and give it the space you are looking for, we We recommend it one hundred percent. We feel very comfortable with everything we have been able to achieve thanks to this program.
Optimizely Web Experimentation has a higher sticker price than some of its competitors. While this is true, you're buying an industry leader with tremendous experience in working with clients for years. Initially, with our Conversion Rate Optimization program, we were wow'd and cajoled into trying the hot bleeding edge features that some newer companies might call AI/algorithmic models-- these are otherwise known as Multi-Armed Bandit campaigns, which isn't a new thing. That being said, contracting and fully utilizing Optimizely Web Experimentation's suite of features, professional services, and more may be cost prohibitive for smaller companies. Once a CRO program reaches maturity Optimizely Web Experimentation can scale for larger teams where more advanced can utilize server side tests exclusively for seamless experimentation.
Audience segmentation is relatively painless. They provide a robust way to granularly target visitors by device type, location, weather, demographics, etc.
Our CSM has been very engaged and detailed in supporting our partnership. She provides very prompt responses and clearly works hard to push the Kibo team when possible.
The User Interface to develop new actions is not terrible.
Supports Single Sign On, which is the preferred method of managing users at my organization.
We'd like to be able to use the Monetate resources to help us set up tests that require web dev (to get it out of our backlog), but they also have wait times similar to our internal ones. I realize resources are hard to come by, but this is an area we'd love to be able to utilize more if the turnaround were quicker.
IE is always a problem. I know it's not Monetate-specific though, and many tools struggle with IE.
We have a large percentage of our users who use IE, and I'd like to provide more experiences in IE without and additional hassle.
I had never worked within a company that had a tool like this. It made my life as a designer and a creative manager much easier with it's easy to use interface and limitless possibilities in terms of creative. I would highly recommend taking Monetate for a test drive, you will not be disappointed.
Because it's an incredible and essential tool for my line of work as a conversion optimization specialist. Really couldn't do my job nearly as effectively without it. It's paid for itself many times over and I feel like I'm only beginning to unlock the tools potential.
Part of what I love about Monetate is how intuitive the tool is. Very very easy to use - based on the basics - Who/What/When/Where concept. Anyone can jump right in and start using the tool. And very easy to copy campaigns and tweak to continue to build experiences. We recently added Monetate on mobile and similar experience - easy to jump back and forth between platforms. Also love the analytics dashboard...easily quantifiable and easy to get tidbits that are digestible for others not as familiar with tool.
Usability is mostly great. I like the WYSIWYG functionality and adding in real code is simple as well. It's easy to target specific pages or audiences. I've knocked a couple of points off because of how difficult it is to set up URL redirect experiments, confusion around creating pages, and lack of data that can be further analyzed.
I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's availability as a 10 out of 10. The software is reliable and does not experience any application errors or unplanned outages. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.
I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's performance as a 9 out of 10. Pages load quickly, reports are complete in a reasonable time frame, and the software does not slow down any other software or systems that it integrates with. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.
Monetate support team meets with use weekly, answers emails daily and promptly. They are proactive about getting answers for us when we need it and offering suggestions based on observations they have or learnings they want to share from other partners. Monetate's support is top notch.
They always are quick to respond, and are so friendly and helpful. They always answer the phone right away. And [they are] always willing to not only help you with your problem, but if you need ideas they have suggestions as well.
The tool itself is not very difficult to use so training was not very useful in my opinion. It did not also account for success events more complex than a click (which my company being ecommerce is looking to examine more than a mere click).
Monetate installs easily and sets up personalization with just a few clicks. We never used the recommendation engine but the multivariant testing was great.
In retrospect: - I think I should have stressed more demo's / workshopping with the Optimizely team at the start. I felt too confident during demo stages, and when came time to actually start, I was a bit lost. (The answer is likely I should have had them on-hand for our first install.. they offered but I thought I was OK.) - Really getting an understanding / asking them prior to install of how to make it really work for checkout pages / one that uses dynamic content or user interaction to determine what the UI does. Could have saved some time by addressing this at the beginning, as some things we needed to create on our site for Optimizely to "use" as a trigger for the variation test. - Having a number of planned/hoped-for tests already in-hand before working with Optimizely team. Sharing those thoughts with them would likely have started conversations on additional things we needed to do to make them work (rather than figuring that out during the actual builds). Since I had development time available, I could have added more things to the baseline installation since my developers were already "looking under the hood" of the site.
At the time of selection, it was the best tool to fit our business needs. The day-to-day users were able to create some experiences on their own and did not require much oversight. We also had developer support built into our contract along with internal developer support so most experiences were achievable. We believed it was as good and in some ways better than the other comparable tools on the market.
Overall, the tools we compared against were great, but we went with Optimizely because it has all the features we needed and has the market leadership that gave us trust we would be successful in our experimentation efforts.
This rating for Optimizely Web Experimentation is rooted in the more complicated builds that are not feasible with just Java and CSS. These require the featured experimentation add on, therefore the base level platform I am giving a lower rating. We have had issues with overly complex test builds, because we can only utilize Java and CSS to make the elements
We are really starting to understand our audience and what they prefer on our website. One example is on our product display pages, we learned that our visitors convert about 35% more when content is laid out in one fashion versus another. Another example is our promotional banners perform better when it takes up the width of the page versus the margins pulled in more.
At first, Monetate was a negative ROI - we were paying for a service we weren't getting, and not understanding the full power of the program. With the new optimization firm however, we are now really able to churn out more tests, have a clean and direct test plan, and finally seeing tangible results.
As an aside, Monetate has helped us just save time and money on creating our promotional banners now so we don't have to get with our development team each time we want to put one up. Even without running a test, it has let us add content to our site when we need to (as we already have the experiments set up as we need it to and we can quickly duplicate it) without our developers getting in there to make those short-lived changes.
Customer retention: We've reduced subscription service client churn by 20%+ using optimized unsubscribe flows.
Risk mitigation: Testing into full site redesigns has saved clients millions of dollars.
Feature prioritization: Identifying what painted door changes add value has allowed developers to focus on changes that add hundreds of thousands or even millions to the bottom line.