Adobe Target VS Optimizely, Which is the best suitable A/B testing tool in all aspect ?

Adobe Target OR Optimizely? which is the best tool for A/B testing? 

Business is all about understanding and analyzing customer needs and creating value for them, the more value you provide, the more are chances of being successful in your online business.

Measuring and analyzing the value your marketing, experience and advertising campaigns create is one of the biggest challenges. We can now generate actionable data through the use of A/B testing, instead of using old methods like storing and analyzing it manually.

In helping to lead the market, there are many testing tools are available for your online business growth like Optimizely, Adobe Target, VMO, unbounce, etc.

Optimizely and Adobe Target are one of the most leading and trending testing tools available in today's date, which provides different types of testing capabilities like A/B test, Experience test (XT), etc.

Now deciding which testing tool is suitable for your business is a kind of difficult thing, as you need to know the capabilities of different tools and pick the best one for you.

Following are some important insights about Adobe Target and Optimizely, which will clear your thoughts and make you go ahead and kick start with testing to improve customer experience and value.

Adobe Target VS Optimizely

Pros and Cons of Adobe Target

Pros :

• Advance Targeting capabilities: Test and Target allows you to write your own JavaScript/Rhino code in situations when the out-of-the-box features aren't enough.
• Integration with SiteCatalyst - test data is pushed into SiteCatalyst for comprehensive reporting.
• Rapid test creation - this can be achieved via "local" HTML offers, redirects or referencing AEM/CQ5 components.
• The interface is pretty easy to use.
• Easier mobile app editing composer.
• Provides integration with Adobe Analytics for reporting purposes.
• It allows you to show different content to a different group of customers.
• AB testing - Adobe Target now allows you to split audience/customers automatically using advanced machine learning algorithms. which is known as auto allocate.
• Apart from A/B Test and Target provides, Experience testing, Multivariate testing, Automated Personalization(Available in premium version), Recommendations(Available in premium version).
• Can connect with different platforms in Adobe experience cloud (Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics) to deliver a great experience to your customers and analyze the effect of test cases in depth.

Cons :

• Documentation - the current documentation is fine for the basics but when it comes to advance stuff it lacks in providing enough information.
• It relies on mbox and depending on how they are implemented, you may need to rely on your IT team to implement additional mboxes for certain tests.
• To set up test offers, most of the time you will need to have knowledge of HTML and CSS. And depending on how the mboxes are implemented, you could be heavily relying on Javascript / jQuery to manipulate the elements on your site for test offers.

Value return on investment in using Adobe Target (According to customers who used this tool)

• Testing (Setting up test) becomes an easy and quick job to do, sometimes in minutes, as compared to development technology
• More testing results in learning customer needs and achieving good revenue out of it.
• More accurate data.
• Adobe Target allows you to edit content in a do-it-in-your-way style.
• Test and Target may help you make decisions about whether to put manpower behind certain website strategies? as you can test them temporarily and run A/B tests to prove effectiveness.
• Test and Target allow you an easy way to serve different content to different groups.
• Test and Target allow us to know more about your users by measuring analytics of how users interact with the dynamic page elements served by Adobe Target.
• Helps in growing your business with effective test cases.

Adobe Target Support

As compared to earlier days, adobe support has improved a lot. Quick mail and call support with a fast resolution.

Community Forum is always available to solve your doubts.

Pros and Cons of Optimizely

Pros :

• Quick and easy test setup if you've got the HTML/CSS changes ready to go.
• Plug and play.
• A/B testing - this is the core functionality that Optimizely has always been great with and only got better as they add more functionality.
• Transparent results allow results to be shared across all departments.
• The user interface is very straightforward and Optimizely's free online documentation is an excellent resource.
• Optimizely has a really powerful WYSIWYG editor. Not every marketing department is blessed with a talented developer. So this puts the power in the business user's hand, without getting bogged down in coding.
• Optimizely has spent a lot of time understanding the intricacies of multivariate testing and statistical analysis and made it dead simple to see the results in their product. Even if your focus isn't around data, you can plainly see how your experiments are performing and focus on what you are best at. If you want to learn more, they've provided a lot of resources to help you understand concepts like statistical significance.
• There is a great user community that helps answer questions. Chances are, someone has run into the same issue you're experiencing.

Cons :

• Showcase their user's implementations.
• Stores unnecessary data.
• Optimizely doesn't seem as buttoned-up on the sales side as they are on the product and support side. Granted those other groups set a very high bar.
• Optimizely doesn't have a useful engagement metric out of the box. You have to integrate your analytics platform with it which for you might be a challenge.
• If you want to set up multiple 'projects' in Optimizely, each project requires its own code snippet for your site(s). This precludes us from creating multiple projects, and thus it's a little unwieldy in the interface. Also, if you have so many sites and campaigns, your code snippet is much larger than you would like. This again is a symptom of your own organization, where you are having many, many sites.
• Sometimes it's not obvious how long an experiment will need to run based on a product's existing traffic. Having an estimate integrated directly into the experiment would be very helpful.

Value return on investment in using optimizely (according to customers who used this tool)

• It helps in our quest for better conversion in several different areas across a website, like lead generation and revenue to name a few.
• This tool allows making creative decisions using data. This has always been a struggle and this tool helps solve this issue.
• One of the negative aspects is that this tool allows us to think about so many testing possibilities that now have to compete for prioritizing test cases.
• A tremendous amount of useful data to better understand our clients.
• Some of our tests yielded huge improvements, affecting our recurring revenue. We couldn't have known that without Optimizely.

Optimizely Support

Questions are generally answered promptly and accurately.

Adobe Target VS Optimizely overall rating summary

Performance :

• Adobe Target: 8.0
• Optimizely:6.0

Usability :

• Adobe Target: 1.3
• Optimizely: 7.8

Reliability and Availability : 

• Adobe Target: 6.3
• Optimizely: 8.8

Support :

• Adobe Target: 7.3
• Optimizely: 5.2

Implementation :

• Adobe Target: 7.5
• Optimizely: 8.0

Likelihood to renew :

• Adobe Target: 6.3
• Optimizely: 9.0

In-person training :

• Adobe Target: 8.1
• optimizely: 7.9

Online Training :

• Adobe Target: 6.1
• Optimizely: 3.4