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ion Platform
What is ion Platform?
Ion, by Rock Content empowers organizations to engage, target, and convert higher quality leads using a code-free, data-driven solution.
From interactive infographics to landing pages, assessments, quizzes and more, ion interactive helps its customers build and leverage their interactive brand as an opportunity to quickly drive enticing and relevant online experiences and build revenue.
PRIMARY USE CASES: Demand Generation, Sales Enablement, Account-Based Marketing, Brand Awareness.
Who Uses ion Platform?
Ion, by Rock Content, is a content experience platform that empowers marketers and designers to engage, target, and convert higher quality leads using a code-free, data-driven solution.
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Reviews of ion Platform
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Great no-code platform for marketers
Comments: Overall, the ion platform has been very helpful for our organization. I highly recommend it for marketers who don't want to wait around for their agency or IT department to help them get an online experience quickly out the door. For developing Interactive content, there is no better platform.
Pros:
Love that we can build websites, pages, and applications without the need to get help from I.T. Templates are awesome for saving time and replicating similar user experiences Support is outstanding, and customer success is proactive and always reaching out to lend a hand There is a huge library of templates you can pull from to quickly get a high quality experience built quickly
Cons:
I'd like a better Print to PDF function. Deeper out of the box integrations with other Marketing Automation platforms would be nice
After a learning curve, a very powerful tool.
Comments: A year ago, I had no experience whatsoever with ion Interactive (or any of it's competitors, for that matter). Today, I use the program/service almost daily to roll out website and landing pages for my clients. It took a while to get a hang of the program and it's capabilities, and I'm still discovering features all the time, but now it feels like second nature. I personally do not use any of the tracking or reporting functions, but I know they are widely used in my organization. For my clients, we use ion Interactive for nearly every site and landing page. The only time we do not need to use ion Interactive is when we are creating a page that for some reason does not need any specific tracking. For example, an internal website for our organization itself could just be created and hosted on our own servers. I cannot speak for my entire organization, but my team uses ion interactive to build websites for our clients. ion interactive makes it easy to update and change content, and track performance once the site is launched. In some ways, we use it as a sort of content management system for our clients' sites, microsites, and landing pages.
Pros:
From design to development to deployment, ion interactive is fast and for the most part simple to use. Once trained in the program, many features become second nature to use. Regular updates keep the platform fresh and ensure users like me that the company is constantly moving forward.
Cons:
Sometimes, features that I use daily may disappear without notice. Whether they're gone forever or simply moved around to somewhere else is usually unclear. The "Creative Studio" really needs an "Undo" button. One incorrect click-and-drag can mess up a whole page sometimes. The platform itself could use a User Experience refresh. Some icons don't necessarily make sense for their function.
Rock Content Response
8 years ago
Great to see that you've adopted ion interactive in house and taking to the tools. I've shared your notes about platform notices and features being removed with our team. For future notice you can review our feature release notes to get more insight into feature changes. Here's a link - http://support.liveball.com/hc/en-us/categories/200106499-Feature-Releases
ION is good, but could be a lot better
Comments: I use ION everyday at work to build many (sometimes 100s of pages a week) and there's a lot to like about ION, but there's also a lot that could be better. My biggest gripe is that ION can be very tedious and cumbersome.
Pros:
Interface when building pages is nice and clean, the page testing features are very helpful, a lot of the built-in functionality makes building pages easy.
Cons:
Can be slow and even crash completely often, Can't connect to a database or create dynamic pages that will be used by multiple clients - so each page has to tediously be setup by hand, the grid for dragging and dropping can be a bit buggy at times and there's no way to undo mistakes, setting up multiple traffic sources is very slow and tedious, on the dashboard you can't just click on the name of a recent project, you have to click the small magnifying glass icon, the interface for adding and managing images is ugly and frustrating, writing custom code in the scripts section isn't very easy and you can't save to preview changes quickly, no way to search through campaigns by name or keyword or anything, can't reorder actions within a rule, the interface for adding actions is very slow, if you accidentally click outside of the Edit Rules menu all your edits are lost, when editing styles you have to reopen the menus every time
Rock Content Response
8 years ago
We truly appreciate this review and your feedback on using ion on regular basis. We've shared your feedback back around scalability and ease of use and will absolutely use this information for future updates.
Great Experience, Bit Pricey
Comments: We have been using Ion LiveBall for well over 2 years, maybe even longer. All in all it is a great tool that automates many processes that used to take countless dev and admin hours. We are an ad agency, I am the creative director for digital. So we use Ion for our clients - it covers everything from simple lead gen pages to land and jump pages with links/ecommerce carts to microsites... We do it all within Ion. Being able to setup creatives and traffic sources where there can be a 1:1 or 1:100 relationship, where you have full control over the A/B/+ split is priceless. In the past, with standalone PHP pages, you would need a link/tracking/analytics platform to do the link splits and then track conversions per split. With Ion, you can do it all! Ion is such a great tool. If you are in the market for a landing page creation, optimization, management or reporting tool, stop looking - you have found it. It is called Ion LiveBall (I wonder if they even call it LiveBall anymore... The only downside is the pricing. But once you use it once, and sell it to a cleint or two, the cost can easily be passed on to clients and you can even start making money on the MSF from clients...
Pros:
Ease of use, features, tracking, reporting (somewhat), administration, A/B testing, MVT, etc.
Cons:
Price! I think it is a bit over priced, You need to invest first, but you can figure out ways to make that investment back and then some. My other big con is reporting. I think the reporting from the dashboard is limited. Especially for MVT testing. I would like to see it as Combo 1: Stats, Combo 2: Stats, etc. Not really like that.
Rock Content Response
8 years ago
Lol. Thanks for this great review! The name has actually changed to ion but we know there a lot of Liveball fans out there. Also we appreciate the feedback on reporting and pricing. Thank you
Best Enterprise Site Solution On The Market
Comments: I have been using ION Interactive for nearly 2 years now and could not attribute the success I have seen without them. As a marketing and sales manager for the largest news and information company with over 90 newspaper publications, I find the ease of use, integration, support, and robust ability of the platform critical in my day to day operation. ION Interactive has provided intelligent, and accurate support anytime I have a need. They have also led several webinars that I find not only interesting, but leave with several takeaways that I can implement into my marketing plan. One of the greatest things I appreciate about ION's support is when I need a new functionality, it comes in an updated release. Their team truly watches market trends and update their platform to meet the needs any enterprise business might have. I consider myself an advanced user with web development experience and find that this platform makes it quite easy to train employees who have no web development skills. This platform is superb for all levels of web knowledge, from the drag and drop beginner, to the javascript/CSS/HTML expert.
Pros:
Ease of use for all levels of knowledge. Support that has your goals in mind. Great no matter the size of your business.
Cons:
I would have to say integration to ALL the top email platforms should be standard instead of needing a custom integration package done. My company uses Exact Target, which requires an API integration. There are others that could benefit from this being standard for all major APIs like Exact Target, Mail Chimp, etc...
Rock Content Response
8 years ago
Thanks for this awesome review! We'll be sure to share your feedback around more out-of-the-box integration options with our team for future updates.
