Does anyone use Predictive Content?

I use it out of the box with some CSS customisations for the design, so far in around 3 months I've had a 5% increase on additional form fills. It's a very clunky platform and is a 'one size fits all' product, even Marketo hacks the code on marketo.com to make it work. I have to say from what they Demo it as, it's a million miles to what each company needs to make it work for them. Happy to give you a run down if you need to know more.

It was added to our renewal last year - I suspect there's not a very large % of Marketo customers using it due to very little discussion that takes place on the community.  We incorporated the js code on our website and use it primarily for the analytics it provides.  And yes, it is a bit clunky and could use some refinement. 

As you probably know, PC has migrated/rebranded to Content-AI - and those customers who have PC in their contract are being forced to upgrade their subscription if they want to take advantage of the enhanced analytics that Content-AI provides over what PC included.  We never used the actual dynamic/predictive content in our emails and web pages.

Ironically, there's a webinar tomorrow at 1pm ET "Introducing Content-AI: The future of one-to-one engagement"

I use it. it's come along way, already, in just the last few quarterly updates. But most importantly the Analytics screen that they enabled in December is fantastic. Among other metrics, it has a very easy 2-week trending content section that basically gives me a quick checklist of content I should add to predictive.

Some issues I have with it are mostly on the display side, not the functionality. For instance, all the 'ads' are created as images based on input; therefore they are not very dynamic and can sometimes come across as blurry or just not crisp enough. They provide 7 or 8 layouts to choose from, but really it's just 3 with some variations. If you need something else you have to embed it in the image yourself or rely a bit on your display preferences (whether Rich Media or Email) to get what you want. I've said it before, but it's really sad that my biggest stumbling block with ContentAI is getting the right image layout designed to use with it -- it's just small enough where you want more space, but any bigger and it runs the risk of cannibalizing your other content (for me, in email, it's a secondary CTA)

All that being said, I am on the list of ContentAI & RTP--as a whole--for customer reference calls. I do enjoy it and I do think it will continue to improve and the earlier we are involved the better.

Our setup includes a 2-image section at the bottom of many of our emails (the fact that it rotates content and predicts what people are more apt to click on without me having to design or worry about it is awesome -- I don't worry that people see the same thing every time). We also embedded it on our website as a 'recommended for you' section on our blog and a few key pages throughout our site. It's been great, again, for the flexibility.

The first issue is the how Marketo scrapes the content for Predictive Content, it will only scrape the main domain, if you have sub domains then you need to get Marketo Support to add those sub domains, which in some cases is limited to 4 domains and sub domains. Once the url’s are scraped, on occasion it also scrapes url’s with parameters, so you see multiple instances of url’s (but the analytics does usually only point to the main url, the other will just say 0), from an admin/housekeeping point of view I manually delete these duplicates.

A nice feature is that you have to manually add a url for use in Predictive Content, i.e. Marketo won’t just randomly add content for you.

Once the add an item for use in Predictive Content, you then go into another tab and make you edits, currently I’m using the Rich Media styled feature, my number 1 bug here is that Titles are restricted to 50 character max, but this is not documented anywhere and I’ve only worked this out as you get a random error if you try and approve. The thumbnail is a fixed size, so if it doesn’t fit within your website styling, you have to write CSS to override the styling, as it’s a ‘one size fits all’. The Rich Media styled Predictive Content has only 3 templates to choose from, again if it doesn’t work for you, CSS styling is needed to remove to tweak the styling. I understand customisation is part of our day to day jobs but rather than adding your own styling, you have to hack the code Marketo provides and this has to be done once it’s live as styling is not provided in Predictive Content.

The above comments are what I see and use within my instance and currently only use Rich Media.

I attended the Content-AI webinar this afternoon.  Unfortunately, they ended the call 40 minutes early and skipped right over the questions I had posted in the chat window.  @JD Nelson​ - maybe you can help answer:

• Aside from some enhanced analytics, how does Content-AI compare to the former "Predictive Content" offering?
• From what I understand, "conversions" apply to content that is engaged with when filling out a gated content form.  Are we able to attribute engagement with non-gated content - like a direct click on a PDF link - as a conversion?
• They mentioned how you can tag your content appropriately so that it appears for specific segments (like specific industry content).  Yet, i cannot find anywhere in the interface on where you can include additional tagging beyond the content type - am I missing something?  In other words, where do I tag a piece of content as "Banking"-related?  This is all I see:

Okay -- I stand corrected, Predictive Content and Content AI are NOT the same thing -- they are, but they aren't. It seems like they're basically migrating people from Predictive to ContentAI (it just happened that my renewal was at the same exact time as the switch, so it seemed seamless to me). ContentAI Analytics was added to all existing Predictive customers as a trial through April, and is included in any renewals that then become ContentAI. The only thing I'm not sure about is what happens if your renewal is after April -- it seems like you'll lose the dashboard. From a sales side, I foresee some more options coming from Marketo to keep that from happening...

Sorry that doesn't really clear it all up - but that's all I've been able to uncover. Enjoy!