Adobe Target vs. Chartbeat

We recommend this application because it allows us to segment and track the traffic of our domain under an analysis of their behavior, ranging from counting the number of clicks they make on a single element to the most complete action within our page in real time.

Incentivized

It is well suited to keeping me toward a specified goal, and gives me concrete numbers and gives me an idea of what we need to do to meet our goals. It's less appropriate if you want something more than pageviews, and doesn't really do a lot for video views.

Incentivized

• Because the software is established there is lots of online help available and most of the bugs have been worked out
• Adobe has a vast supply of resources if your pockets are deep enough.
• The dashboard is easy to follow and is getting more user-friendly. You no longer have to be an HTML wizard to implement changes.

Incentivized

• Provides easy at-a-glance look at what people are reading right now
• Heads-up Display allows you to make sure the homepage is showing the content people want to read
• Headline testing tool provides fascinating insight into what makes people read a story and improves headline-writing ability

• There should be some more clarity around what makes a test significant. While this can be decided by the client themselves, some direction from the tool would be helpful.
• Also, if there was an easier way to organize campaigns and search for them it would be helpful. Right now there is just a long list of campaigns and you have to rely on search to find a specific campaign. What if you don't know the name of the test?

• Source of traffic needs improvement. Search and social make sense, but "internal" and "links" is a grey area. It would be helpful to define those with an organization and provide an information icon so users can easily remember what each of those buckets is tracking.
• More ways to customize the real-time board. For example, with video content, that's great that I can see a user has started a video, but what is the completion rate, was that only on O&O or can that track Facebook, too?
• Would like to see demo (age) information included as a way to slice the data so I can see what's working with my older and younger demo.

Incentivized

Once you get started with your testing program, you realize that it is necessary to continue. You must keep optimizing in order to remain a vital competitor in today's marketing world. Even if you're not using Test & Target or any other user experience testing software, you ought to be performing comparison tests on your own, simply by routing your audience to different experiences and quantifying the aggregate of the results.

I gave Chartbeat a 5 for a renewal rating, because, while it delivers clear and understandable content, Google Analytics also provides many of the same features for free. For a small to medium website, I believe it would be more cost effective to use Google Analytics. A website with a high amount of traffic, however, could merit spending the money on Chartbeat to maximize their potential.

The recent UI update is a complete mess. It is difficult to navigate and find features that previously existed. The reactiveness of the page depending on window size is also ridiculous and it is absurd that depending on how large your window is, entire columns of functions will disappear with no indication that they are missing. The usability of the tool has fallen off a cliff.

Incentivized

Chartbeat is really pretty straightforward. The only things that may cause confusion are the string of sidebar features and tools at the left of the screen. I mostly use the big leader board in real-time and the historical feature (looking at the monthly or weekly performance of my team's content) and then generate reports automatically from there.

Incentivized

i don't think we use the full functionalities of the tool, but to use the full functions, it's almost impossible (Too hard)

The bottleneck is never the software program

On several occasions, we have had the need to ask for help from the Adobe Target support team, and I must say that they have provided us with an excellent experience, as they take care of solving the problems quickly and with high precision

Incentivized

I have had limited experience of support for Chartbeat but whenever I have needed help it has been there. Recently there was an issue of seeing different forms of data in real time - app and otherwise effectively, and the issue was being clearly dealt with and communicated back to us.

Incentivized

The instructor that came to train us was awesome and this training was very useful. I would recommend it for anyone who is going to be using this software. I only mark it lower because it is an added expense to an already expensive product, and a lot of the training covered the "Target" portion of the software (which again, we didn't use)

The training was very easy to understand, however it would have been more useful to my development team than me. It was also primarily over-the-phone, which is never as easy to follow as in-person. We ended up scheduling and paying for an in-person training session to supplement the online/phone training because it wasn't helpful enough.

Implement using a global mBox on the page so you can change any and everything over the traditional method. Traditional method is good if you do not have technical web dev resources, do not know Javascript/jQuery, or you have money to blow on mBox calls. Global deployment reduces mBox calls and allows you to touch many parts of the page easily. A lot more customizable

For us, the decision was very straightforward. We chose to invest in the Adobe stack and utilize tools that are developed to integrate together and complement each other. Ex: Adobe Target 'A4T' integration within Adobe Analytics. Optimizely appears to be a great tool, but for us aligning with the Adobe suite, ensuring that future product enhancements and tools would work well together was a very important key factor in our decision

Incentivized

Google Analytics has gradually become much more difficult to use, and much slower in its realtime reporting. It was the changes that came in with Google Analytics 4 that gave us the final push to work with Chartbeat - a product some of us were already familiar with from previous jobs. Things are just much harder to find in GA, and when time is always tight you can't afford to spend a long time looking for particular data - it should be quick and easy to locate

Incentivized

• This is something we've been working to improve on, as far as how we're calculating and tracking this, but Target has had a substantial ROI on our business.
• I will say specific to our efforts, we could have probably done similar work if not the same work using a different testing tool (Optimizely for example), but Target has been good for us.

Incentivized

• It has helped us save time in report generation and performance analysis.
• By helping us evaluate our contributors, we're able to get our money's worth.
• Seeing our numbers on the Big Board fosters healthy competition among brands, motivating us to distribute our stories better.

Incentivized