Evergage, Dynamic Field top Gartner's latest magic quadrant for personalisation engines

Evergage and Dynamic Yield have topped a new report from Gartner on the most innovative and comprehensive personalisation engine technologies in market today.

The analyst firm’s latest Magic Quadrant for standalone Personalisation Engines showed Evergage and Dynamic Yield to be leaders in the field, both in terms of ability to execute as well as visionary approach to the technology category.

Gartner describes personalisation engines as providing the ability to create relevant, individualised interactions between a company and its audiences that enhance the latter’s experiences. Platforms must tap user profile and real-time insights from first- and third-party data sets based on individual and look-a-like behaviour and transactional history as well as business intelligence, and help marketers orchestrate and customise both Web and mobile digital channel interactions through content, campaigns, ad inventory, onsite search, navigation and product recommendations.

Key functionality for Gartner includes testing and optimisation, targeting and triggering, data and analytics utilisation, marketing channel, digital commerce and customer experience support, and measurement and reporting tools.

In the report, Gartner said Evergage offered a flexible standalone solution with data and analytics functionality. The platform uses machine learning (ML) to build unified customer profiles supported by predictive scoring in order to personalise across channels.

According to Gartner, Evergage’s strengths are granular data insights, analytics and measurement and ease of integration and deployment. The report did, however, caution on the steep learning curve for users around key features such as ML and A/B testing, as well as a lack of solid peer community support.

Dynamic Yield was also singled out in Gartner’s leaders quadrant. The platform, which is in the process of being acquired by McDonalds, is expected to remain a standalone offering. Gartner highlighted its speed and ease of deployment, analytics functionality, plus robust testing and scalable personalisation capabilities as key reasons for its leadership position.

Gartner noted Dynamic Yield’s client references showed it with the highest marks for overall experience, with its UI a key feature here. In terms of cons, the report found Dynamic Yield does require developers for complex testing, while gaps in digital commerce personalisation and below-average reporting and measurement are notable drawbacks.

Other vendors to make it into the top quadrant for personalisation engines were Monetate, Certona, Adobe, Emarsys and RichRelevance. Challengers in this tech space, meanwhile, include IgnitionOne and Episerver.

Further down the list in terms of ability to execute and vision were Reflektion, Acquia, Oracle and Boxever. Gartner also ranked Qubit a visionary in the personalisation engine technology sphere for its market understanding, testing and optimisation and strong support features, but said resource requirements, lack of marketing personalisation use cases and low-scoring measurement and reporting functionality limited a user’s ability to execute.

Among those vendors to fall out of this year’s report were IBM, BloomReach and SAS, none of which now sell their personalisation engines as standalone solutions.

Read more: Gartner debuts first personalisation engines vendor rankings

Overall, Gartner said personalisation makes up 14 per cent of marketing spend, with personalisation engine adoption up 28 per cent since 2016.

“As more budget flows towards personalisation tools, the market for standalone personalisation engines continues to grow,” the report authors stated. “At the same time, incumbent solutions are enhancing their technical capabilities, particularly in customer data management, to increase share of wallet and better manage data ingestion and integration. And vendors across the marketing technology landscape, such as marketing automation platforms, multichannel marketing hubs and email optimisation solutions, are doubling down on embedded personalisation capabilities.”

As things continue to mature, Gartner also saw more overlap between personalisation engines and customer data platforms (CDPs).

“Marketers who already have a solution for integrating and managing customer data – whether homegrown or managed via a CDP of multichannel marketing hub – should consider whether adding a personalisation engine will require them to sunset the existing technology,” the report advised. “Marketers planning to select a personalisation engine first and building their data and analytics infrastructure out from there will likely have an easier move first.”  

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