Empowering Optimization with Ensighten_WAD_v9

EMPOWERING OPTIMIZATION THROUGH

TAG MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS

BRIAN HAWKINS, PARTNER

WEB ANALYTICS DEMYSTIFIED

March 2013

EMPOWERING OPTIMIZATION WITH TAG MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................... 1 Optimization today and its challenges Where optimization is heading

OPTIMIZATION BEST PRACTICES ................................................ 4 Time to market Mitigating the need for IT support Managing costs and site performance Persisting test winners Effective data management Data integration—offline and online

BRAND SPOTLIGHTS .................................................................... 9 Sonystyle.com Symantec.com Ice.com

PARTING THOUGHTS ................................................................. 13 About the author About Web Analytics Demystified About Ensighten

APPENDIX .................................................................................. 14 Adobe Test&Target Adobe Test&Target1:1 Causata GetSmartContent Maxymiser Monetate Optimizely SiteSpect Webtrends Optimize


1

Introduction Back in 2009, Eric Peterson wrote a white paper titled “Ten Tips for Testing Successfully,” in which he predicted: Web Analytics Demystified believes that the upcoming decade will be focused on “online optimization.” Based on our own observations and the Web Analytics Association’s reporting that nearly sixty percent of measurement professionals surveyed are focusing on A/B and multivariate testing, the opportunity is clear. Forrester also reports that most companies actively testing today report performing between five and ten tests per month with some ten percent of companies performing more than fifteen tests per month. This prediction has held true. In fact, the new decade has become the decade of optimization. Companies have realized the value of testing and now actively run tests across all areas of their online properties. They have built out robust campaign roadmaps based on current analytic data and insights from previous optimization initiatives. They have progressed beyond basic A/B and multivariate testing to sophisticated tests targeting specific visitor segments. Forward-‐thinking companies that seek to differentiate through marketing optimization are augmenting their content-‐ and offer-‐targeting with behavioral insights. Focusing on visitor behavior enables marketing teams to run tests at the individual visitor level, develop richer models that predict visitor intent, and markedly increase conversions. Testing has become so valuable that many companies have invested in developing testing practices composed of teams that are fully dedicated to optimization. These teams work closely with analytics, marketing, IT and business teams to expand on their testing efforts and disseminate test insights throughout the organization. And finally, the value of testing is evident in the tremendous growth in testing capabilities,

as a multitude of testing tools have appeared on the market. This paper highlights the critical optimization challenges that organizations face today and will face in the future. Tag management solutions (TMS) such as those of this paper’s sponsor, Ensighten, not only help eliminate those challenges but also enable companies to maximize the return on investment they make in their optimization platforms, and to develop a sustainable competitive advantage over their peers.

OPTIMIZATION TODAY The rapid adoption of optimization solutions and practices has not come without challenges. Companies continue to struggle with workflows, execution, and overall management of tests. They often hesitate to run new tests given (unnecessary) incremental test costs. They don’t know how to capture key business data readily available on their website pages and funnel it to their testing tools—therefore incurring an opportunity cost of running un-‐optimized tests. The most common testing challenge that Web Analytics Demystified sees companies struggling with today is instrumenting the website with the testing vendor’s tags. Whether testing requires a single tag across the site or modular tags placed around specific regions of content, optimization teams continue to struggle with getting IT departments to quickly deploy the tags. As companies expand their testing efforts onsite and across customer touchpoints (such as mobile, email, and display) these challenges only become more prevalent. Deploying testing tags on the site often surfaces a different challenge in selecting the right testing strategy. Companies can not only test specific blocks of content but also experiment with redirecting visitors to new pages, incorporating content on success event pages, and selectively running tests on certain conditions such as a subset of product pages based on SKU versus all product pages. Refining these strategies over time often


2

requires modifications to tag deployments, especially with out-‐of-‐the-‐box testing implementations that do not address specific testing needs. Another common challenge for testing professionals is persisting test winners. To avoid manual page updates, companies often rely on their testing platforms to serve test winners broadly. This approach, however, is not scalable because all tests thereafter have to be coordinated so as to not interfere with the persisting of previous test winners. To expand testing efforts to more areas of the site, optimization teams must adopt a scalable approach to incorporating test winners. Fortunately, the advent of tag management solutions (TMS) offer a whole new framework for testing, dramatically reducing the burden of tagging the site, refining testing strategies, customizing out-‐of-‐the-‐box implementations, and persisting test winners.

WHERE OPTIMIZATION IS GOING: OPTIMIZATION TOMORROW Web Analytics Demystified predicts that companies will continue to invest significant time, budget and resources in driving optimization initiatives because, in a nutshell, testing works. Whereas analytics efforts have many moving parts, and whereas driving change based on “reports” and “insights” can be frustratingly time-‐consuming, testing “done right” has repeatedly been shown to be a clear path to revenue, conversions, and incremental value—all in a way that is measurable with statistical confidence and numerical certainty. Optimization is both evolving and expanding at the same time. Evolving in terms of the sheer sophistication of tool capabilities and expanding in terms of where and how often it is applied. Companies will continue to see value with additional insights into their consumer base and with direct impact to their bottom line by testing their online properties as well as expanding and integrating optimization into mobile, display and email marketing efforts. Companies will continue to invest in their optimization teams

and incorporate them much deeper into their organization. For instance, testing will become part of the development process, as opposed to testing new offerings after they have been developed. Organizations will realize that much can be learned as things are being developed, which could very likely impact the general direction and focus of the end product. Organizations will also realize that there are opportunities to save on resources and time by not building functionality and committing resources to potentially costly development projects until testing has validated that the planned offerings generate a positive response from the planned consumer base. As a result, companies will demand increased productivity from their testing organizations, expecting agile and ongoing testing and optimization. Personalization will become a key optimization theme. The ongoing, iterative process by which optimization teams identify the effective experience for individual website visitors necessitates the ability to capture, manage and put into action detailed visitor information. Companies that harness business data from across website sessions, marketing channels and digital devices; collect and unify it; and act on it in real time will achieve effective personalization and gain sustainable competitive differentiation through better management and analysis of these data. While Big Data as a concept is widely popular, Web Analytics Demystified believes that in the coming months and years, companies will need to develop easier and more efficient ways to leverage all the data collected across the organization (mobile, web, POS, etc.) for optimization purposes. This presents massive opportunities for testing system providers that can easily tap these data sources. Mobile will have a big impact on testing. The dramatic increase in the use of mobile devices by consumers here and abroad means that mobile testing and optimization will be a critical part of an organization’s business operations. We already see companies testing


3

their mobile sites and running tests within mobile applications on both iPhone and Android devices. Responsive design is now a mainstream initiative, and optimizing it through testing will become a standard for rolling out designs. Finally, the execution of testing campaigns through tools such as Adobe Test&Target1:1 and Causata adds a level of sophistication to optimization. These tools, and likely others, will augment current optimization processes with capabilities to target testing ideas on an individual level versus relying on broad segments, and to this end, Web Analytics Demystified believes that true “testing leaders” of the future will leverage tag management systems to test new optimization schemes and algorithms as much as they test changes in content, messages, and flows. While preparing to adopt new optimization initiatives, companies must contend with certain operational challenges. These challenges include:

• Tying together data sets from disparate systems, channels and devices;

• Persisting test winners; • Tagging mobile sites and mobile apps

for testing and success event tracking; • Tagging display ads to coordinate web

tests with display retargeting efforts.


4

Optimization Best Practices Enabled by Tag Management Systems Companies with rich and dynamic websites are often the first to adopt tag management to increase digital marketing efficiency, improve site performance and stability, and benefit from streamlined data collection, use and governance. Tag management systems are designed to address current—as well as future—optimization challenges. In particular, TMS facilitates the use of complex enterprise optimization tools. Following are specific examples of how this paper’s sponsor Ensighten enables more efficient use of optimization tools within their customer base.

1. TIME TO MARKET—SPEED, DATA CAPTURE, BUSINESS USER EMPOWERMENT The most fundamental challenge in optimization today—and one that is very likely to be an issue in the future as well—is placing the testing tool tags on the site to execute a test. This is by far the biggest challenge Web Analytics Demystified encounters with companies that leverage client-‐side testing tools to perform sophisticated optimization, such as in response to browser events and user interactions. It will also be a challenge for optimization teams as they incorporate mobile into their optimization efforts. One advantage of a TMS is its ability to tag page areas for testing using visual tools. These visual tools enable rapid deployment of testing tags in a matter of seconds—as soon as tests are ready to launch—eliminating the dependency on the information technology (IT) department to make tagging changes. Optimization teams can independently test alternative content and incorporate key success event tags in areas previously inaccessible, such as mobile properties.

Figure 1. Deployment of testing platforms using visual tools. Here, Ensighten’s Visual Tagger™ allows customers to quickly select areas to include as part of the test on their site, target the test based on business data collected from the site, and pass such data to the testing tool for optimized targeting.


5

2. MITIGATING THE NEED FOR IT SUPPORT As indicated earlier, optimization offers several testing strategies that, in turn, require varying implementations of website tags. The ability to leverage different testing strategies is especially important when using Adobe’s Test&Target, which requires code to be “wrapped” around the content being tested (this code is commonly referred to as a “marketing box” or “mbox”). The organization’s IT group or front-‐end developers are usually needed to perform the on-‐site code placement, but these groups are typically very busy and not well informed about the practice and goals of site testing. In our practice at Web Analytics Demystified, it is not uncommon to find well-‐meaning testing groups completely sidelined by IT’s inability to deploy required optimization code for myriad reasons. As previously mentioned, the advantage conferred by tag management solutions is that once the TMS is deployed, the process of deploying testing code (such as Adobe Test&Target) can be dramatically simplified and effectively managed from a single point without IT involvement. And while IT may still need to approve the final deployment, the effective use of a TMS puts control over deployment and data gathering back into the hands of expert users in the testing group. Other approaches to Test&Target implementation include conversion mbox placement and mboxes that are used for redirect campaigns. Conversion mboxes typically reside on “order thank you” pages and require passing specific data points to the mbox for reporting. These data points include order ID, purchased product ID(s), and total order amount.

Figure 2. Easily configure a Test&Target mbox using Ensighten Visual Tagger

Key TMS Advantage: Better optimization tool control, with less IT involvement and associated delays.


6

3. MANAGING COSTS AND SITE PERFORMANCE Whether your testing tool leverages a single tag or multiple tags across many areas of your site, these tags come at a cost. Some testing platforms, like Test&Target, charge end users per server call. Pricing models can certainly change, but good use of tag management helps mitigate existing costs by selectively deploying mboxes and testing tags only when needed. What’s more, by removing unnecessary tags to help control costs, site operators are also effectively improving the overall performance of their site (by reducing the amount of code being delivered to the end user). Before sophisticated tag management came along, deploying testing tags globally would provide the greatest testing control, but would come at the cost of overall page performance. But now, thanks to the advent of robust tag management systems, companies can improve site performance by only deploying testing tags for testing content, capturing success events, or setting visitor profiles based on exposure to the site.

4. PERSISTING TEST WINNERS Persisting test winners is not something you would normally think a tag management system would cover, but many do just that. These tools offer an interesting approach to a systemic problem facing optimization teams as they test, collect results and seek to monetize those results by making the winning content available to users as the default experience. Normally, when a test concludes and results are gathered, the company has two choices: leverage the testing tool to persist the winner, or wait for IT to hard-‐code the changes to the site. Ideally, IT would incorporate the changes quickly, but often the process takes weeks, if not months. Web Analytics Demystified has worked with dozens of companies that had hundreds of campaigns pushing the test winner to take advantage of its impact—all while waiting for IT to persist the winning content. Now, companies can use tag management to push the winners, eliminating the need to keep a testing tool tag in place to do so. Leveraging a TMS in this manner is a relatively easy task. The testing team simply deploys a general, page-‐specific tag that contains the winning offer and places the required HTML and resources that modify the experience. This code is often similar to the one your testing platform references. Use the same approach to handle dynamic content that requires JavaScript and a reference to any server-‐side scripting you use.

Key TMS Advantage: Lower cost of ownership for your testing solution and better site performance through reduction in unnecessary testing tags deployed on your website.

Key TMS Advantage: A streamlined approach to persisting test winners on your website with no IT delays.


7

5. EFFECTIVE DATA MANAGEMENT Some practitioners argue that the biggest value that a TMS offers for optimization initiatives is the ability to quickly and easily deploy testing tags on the site. At Web Analytics Demystified, we have to respectfully disagree. While getting tags to the site with ease is an incredibly powerful benefit of a TMS, mapping those testing tags to internal and external data sources enables organizations to dramatically increase the range of their tests and develop more granular visitor segments. Tag management solutions such as Ensighten’s enable data syndication—the efficient collection and distribution of data among website tags, which brings further benefits to the testing process. A sophisticated TMS offers new capabilities that not only future-‐proof customers’ optimization investments, but also ready those customers to handle rich and sophisticated tests down the road. Every website—regardless of size and type—contains a rich set of data that can augment the information that the testing tool collects. A TMS provides a quick and easy way to access this data and make it available for optimization. This capability is incredibly powerful as business users can easily create data layers and tie them to testing tools in a matter of seconds. While working with clients, we have found many who were unaware of what data was available to them, or that such data was readily accessible for gathering. A TMS exposes data elements that can come from meta-‐tags, cookies, URL query parameters, browser details, JavaScript variables, JSON objects, and even the page content itself. A sophisticated tag management system makes this rich data readily available to fuel countless test ideas. A tag management system that supports data layers makes it easier for optimization teams to utilize website business data and funnel it to the right vendor tool. Users can expose the data through a TMS to a plethora of vendors, including DMPs, Decision Engines, and

Propensity Modeling for more sophisticated profiling and decision-‐making.

Figure 3. An example of how one can easily create a data layer within Ensighten’s Visual Tagger using any combination of data sources.

Key TMS Advantage: Easily leverage site data to dramatically improve your testing. Simplify the process of funneling data to the tags.


8

6. DATA INTEGRATION—OFFLINE AND ONLINE DATA Some of the richest data for targeting of tests might not be available in the web browser, but rather in other online systems or even offline data stores. This is a common optimization problem no matter what type of website you have. Typically, companies seeking to leverage offline data would have to upload it online and then build complicated server-‐side logic to pull the data and make it available on the web page. Ensighten Data Stream™—a solution that collects, unifies and syndicates cross-‐channel data—streamlines this process. It helps customers realize considerable value by mapping these data elements to their tests. There are countless optimization opportunities when it comes to offline data. Many of the opportunities lie with internal data because it tends to be the richest. But at Web Analytics Demystified we are seeing companies use tag management platforms to collect data from third-‐party providers such as Blue Kai and DemandBase. DemandBase, for example, allows organizations to target content to different types and sizes of businesses. This is incredibly powerful for B2B organizations looking to deliver targeted messaging to their potential prospects. Once data is available on the page, TMS customers have several options to harness it and put it to work. A common approach is to implement a global tag that grabs the data only on the first page load, which then makes it available on all subsequent page loads, independent of session. This means that your testing platform can easily make use of the data on the first page view of a returning visitor—something that was incredibly challenging not too long ago. Few companies today leverage data layer elements in non-‐optimization solutions. Web Analytics Demystified expects that to change in the coming months. Optimization data can offer significant value for other internal and external systems, such as email service providers, display retargeting solutions, internal data collections services, etc.

Ensighten enables efficient syndication of test data to other marketing systems besides optimization tools. For example, Ice.com, an Ensighten customer, informs their email service providers about the tests that their website visitors participate in, and the test variant each visitor sees. This enables Ice.com to coordinate and target emails to only those visitors that participated in a test and to tailor the email content based on the content they saw on the site as part of that test. Similarly, Ice.com communicates into Test&Target the email content that visitors receive, enabling them to target tests to visitors arriving on the site via a particular email creative. This enables Ice.com (and other Ensighten customers) to roll out tests coordinated across channels and website sessions. TMS users can also leverage data syndication to share test information with third-‐party vendors of modeling engines and analytics, such as SiteCatalyst, Insight, Google Analytics, Woopra, Webtrends Streams, Mixpanel, Causata, Webtrends, Coremetrics, and more. Any platform that can take such data can provide either better experience for consumers, or better view of consumer behavior and intent.

Take display ad retargeting as an example. Imagine a situation in which the display retargeter knew not only that you bought a laptop or you booked a flight but that you did so after seeing a particular piece of website content. That display retargeter could then use this test information to better inform its models, and could even make use of that test information as part of the display ad itself as visitors encounter the ad after becoming members of the test.

Key TMS Advantage: Utilize online and offline data sources to increase testing sophistication. Coordinate testing across multiple digital channels.


9

Brand Spotlights Many companies are experiencing tremendous success by deploying their optimization platform using a tag management system such as Ensighten Manage. The following are just a few examples that highlight the value and explain the reasoning of leveraging a TMS to drive optimization initiatives.

SONY ELECTRONICS Brandon Bunker, senior manager of analytics at Sony Electronics, has been in the analytics and optimization business for many years. Before coming to Sony, he was responsible for driving optimization for site search, creative, and navigation at Nike. At Sony, he now manages web analytics, tag management, direct marketing analytics, and testing. Sony, as an early adopter, has been using a TMS for over two years. They originally brought in Ensighten Manage to help with managing their tags and to increase site performance. But they also needed the ability to have different servicing levels for tag delivery, and their TMS vendor of choice made this possible. The servicing level capability allows Sony to add and execute tags at different stages of rendering the page in the browser. They have implemented global tag deployments that are of high priority and get served at the page head, before any content is processed. This is incredibly important when delivering testing code to avoid replacing control content with test content right in front of users—also known as “flicker.” It is highly problematic when a site visitor sees control content with a 20 percent discount offer, which is suddenly replaced with test content offering a 10 percent discount offer on the same item. The next level of tag delivery service is of medium priority—primarily used for first-‐party analytics. This is considered a best practice because placing such tags at the bottom of the page runs the risk of having them not fire when users abandon the site (or close their browser altogether) while the

browser is still processing the page. The final level of service is of low priority, encompassing all third-‐party pixel tracking (e.g. ad or affiliate conversion tracking) for the site. Brandon and his team are an innovative group and Ensighten’s servicing capability has allowed them to implement cutting-‐edge cross-‐marketing at Sony, empowering advanced targeting and segmenting for their testing efforts.


10

With respect to the data layer, Brandon suggests that “if you don’t have a rich data set, you are underutilizing the testing platform.” “We have a rich data layer that comprises data from SiteCatalyst, email platforms, CRM’s, ATG chat, and many other systems. This gives us much better and more robust targeting. We went from having twenty valuable data layer variables to dozens of them.” For example, Sony uses the data layer to collect product prices and order IDs from the page and distribute this data to its third-‐party vendors. Some data elements appear in different formats across the site. Ensighten enables Sony to standardize the data into a single format and syndicate the data to vendors consistently. Sony was using Adobe’s Test&Target long before they brought in a TMS. Deploying tests was a long and arduous process, requiring many cycles to coordinate and get tags in place. While they still saw value in going through these cycles, TMS has enabled them to deploy the tags needed for testing in a much more timely manner. “We are now deploying our mboxes in one or two minutes tops,” says Brandon. This has not only allowed them to get tests out more quickly but also get more tests executed. Additionally, Ensighten integrates the data layer into mboxes for advanced profiling, segmentation, targeting and personalization. Ensighten Manage also populates the SiteCatalyst tags with data layer elements to power business decisions on customer experiences that otherwise would not be possible. The other big boost that tag management gave Brandon and the optimization team at Sony was the ability to control when and where their Test&Target mboxes would fire. The cost savings that Sony realized by leveraging this capability was significant. Sony has now run dozens of Test&Target tests via their tag management system. “We have a handful of tests that actually print money for us,” says Brandon. “Ensighten has allowed Sony to execute more tests and discover those winners more easily and in a much more timely manner.”

SYMANTEC James Niehaus is no stranger to optimization and marketing platforms. Having worked at E-‐Loan, Salesforce.com, and now at Symantec as the director of optimization & web analytics, he has not only helped innovative companies establish sound testing programs but also evaluate and implement the latest and greatest marketing tools. James brought Ensighten Manage into Symantec in early 2011. Tagging was a significant challenge at Symantec. A simple change of a tag would require dozens of hours of work, days of delay and heavy amounts of email communication. After a few meetings with Ensighten, it was clear to Symantec that their offering would both solve Symantec’s current tagging woes and enable them to execute innovative initiatives with their optimization platform. Symantec had been using Test&Target for years and has one of the most sophisticated implementations of Adobe Test&Target to date, completely delivered by Ensighten. Symantec originally used their tag management platform for third party marketing pixels and for the customer survey tool OpinionLab. During that time, Symantec


11

focused on incorporating its data layer into their tag management platform. Once that migration took place, Symantec incorporated Test&Target into their tag management platform. Because Ensighten enabled managing both the data layer and Test&Target from the same console, the most sophisticated Test&Target implementation to date reached new, previously unimaginable heights of testing productivity. Test&Target now has access to the entire data layer, and the data layer has complete access to Test&Target. Symantec is currently managing over a hundred tests a month, most of which make use of this data. Symantec also has a sophisticated testing strategy in place, focusing tests on key site events and site engagement. Ensighten maintains and manages custom scoring models based on site content and because it uses a shared data layer, James and his team leverage this information for targeting of tests with Test&Target. “While Symantec is realizing a ton of value in managing mbox usage and deploying mboxes in a much more timely manner, the biggest value Ensighten has brought to our optimization efforts is the ability to quickly explore new and innovative technologies with little risk and little effort,” says James. “Symantec can now quickly and efficiently test third-‐party code and take it to market in short order.” ICE.COM Ice.com, a leading online jewelry store, uses both Adobe Test&Target and a tag management platform for their optimization efforts. Ice.com incorporated testing around the same time that they brought in Ensighten. They originally implemented tag management technology to help organize all site pixels and optimize their performance. Their TMS vendor of choice has not only helped ease the tagging process but also improved their site’s overall performance. Evan Frank is the director of CRM and oversees testing at Ice.com. Test&Target was

originally deployed using Ensighten Manage to simplify the test execution process. Evan was able to get testing in place immediately because of Ensighten’s streamlined workflow. Given Ice.com’s use of Test&Target through Ensighten, the online retailer is free to deploy any type of test. The developers at Ice.com are the primary users of Ensighten, but that is changing fast as business teams leverage the solution more and more. By using Ensighten Visual Tagger to manage and optimize tags, business users can more easily get involved in testing. Ice.com’s use of Ensighten has allowed them to roll out key tests even during the holiday period when website code freezes are in place, and when limited resources are available to execute tests. By using Ensighten, some of these tests have led to significant, triple-‐digit conversion rate increases. Evan has now run dozens of tests with Ensighten Manage and Test&Target. He has also increased the complexity and sophistication of tests beyond general A/B or multivariate tests by mapping marketing tools together. With their TMS, Evan was able to easily map Test&Target with Ice.com’s


12

email server provider (ESP). This allowed him to have Test&Target communicate test-‐data points with the ESP, and let the ESP communicate visitor information with Test&Target—a bidirectional data syndication and cross-‐channel optimization. This has allowed Ice.com to confirm that personalization is effective both from a customer experience perspective and for their bottom line. Evan credits Ensighten with giving Ice.com tremendous implementation flexibility and cost control over Test&Target charges that are based on server calls. “Using Ensighten, one can easily and selectively deploy Test&Target mboxes as needed and turn them off so no server calls are even made,” says Evan. Evan also credits the incredible support he received from Ensighten’s client consulting group, who are experts in advanced optimization techniques. “Ensighten’s consulting team not only helped me see the potential of Test&Target via Ensighten but also helped me understand the capabilities of Test&Target. They were of tremendous help supporting the roll out of some of the key tests that have really moved the needle for Ice.com.” Ice.com has seen considerable value with testing in a short amount of time and will be incorporating testing into their mobile platform soon, via their tag management system.


13

Parting Thoughts Whether a company is new to testing or has leveraged testing tools in the past, integrating a testing platform with a TMS enables the ability to scale optimization efforts and to mitigate any unnecessary server calls. For companies with mature testing programs that are ready to advance their targeting and personalization efforts, migrating the testing platform into a tag management solution makes business sense. The TMS will allow the marketing and analytics teams to quickly and easily map internal as well external data points to the testing platform, thus enabling even richer targeting and segmentation capabilities. Additionally, we predict that the optimization market is going to get even bigger. New tools will come into play and current tools will become more sophisticated. Companies should be able to quickly and easily study these tools to identify those best suited for their current and future needs. Managing the testing platform through a TMS will enable easy integration.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Brian Hawkins, Partner at Web Analytics Demystified, has worked in the optimization space since 2006, when he started at Offermatica, which is now Adobe Test&Target. While working in a variety of roles at Offermatica, Omniture, and Adobe in both a technical and strategic consultative capacity, he has helped scores of companies get value out of their testing platforms.

ABOUT WEB ANALYTICS DEMYSTIFIED Web Analytics Demystified, founded in 2007 by internationally known author and former Jupiter Research analyst, Eric T. Peterson, provides objective strategic guidance to companies striving to realize the full potential of their investment in web analytics and optimization. By bridging the gap between measurement/optimization technology and business strategy, Web Analytics Demystified has provided guidance to hundreds of companies around the world, including many

of the best known retailers, financial services institutions and media properties on the Internet.

For more information about Brian Hawkins and Web Analytics Demystified, please visit www.webanalyticsdemystified.com, email [email protected], or call (415) 735-‐4295.

ABOUT ENSIGHTEN Ensighten is a developer of breakthrough tag management technology that solves the rapidly growing problems and complexities of vendor and analytics tagging. Established in 2009, Ensighten’s patent-‐pending technology can be implemented within days, enabling superior data clarity and tracking of online behavior, extending the functionality of vendor tools, reducing vendor switching costs, improving site performance, and virtually eliminating the requirements for IT, agency and vendor resources to handle tagging-‐related tasks. Ensighten enables IT departments to empower marketers and web analytics specialists to independently manage, update and remove tags, in any technology environment through the intuitive Ensighten Manage interface. As leaders in the web analytics industry for over a decade, Ensighten’s founders bring unmatched depth of experience to address the most challenging enterprise requirements.


14

Appendix Detailed examples of how a TMS empowers various testing platforms.

ADOBE TEST&TARGET TMS customers can implement Test&Target either through the TMS console or through its visual tools. Such tools offer business users the greatest amount of flexibility for implementation options as well as for mapping both internal and external data sets to Test&Target for targeting and segmenting.

ADOBE TEST&TARGET1:1 Adobe Test&Target1:1 is not typically considered a testing platform, even though it does help quantify the value of targeting of content. Test&Target1:1 is an extension of Test&Target that incorporated the former Touch Clarity technology. Users of Test&Target1:1 leverage the platform to automatically deliver content to the individual visitor versus segments of visitors based on real time propensity models. Test&Target1:1 also allows users to discover segments that they might not have known about or were not incorporating in targeting or segmentation efforts. Because the Test&Target1:1 platform leverages the same mbox tag, it can leverage the visual tools or simply reside in the regular tag deployments in the TMS. While this is incredibly valuable for implementation, the bigger benefit for TMS and Test&Target1:1 users is the mapping of data layer elements to the mbox. Test&Target1:1 can process many types of data and easily consume it for its models via the mbox. Its models use the data to determine what content is most appropriate for each website visitor. Test&Target1:1 will also inform business users as to what data points have a positive or negative propensity for particular pieces of content which mean end users can see what test content positively or negatively relates to a visitor profile attribute.

CAUSATA Causata, similarly to Test&Target1:1, is not so much a testing platform but more of a propensity score and individual experience delivery platform. Causata can be both an on-‐premise and a hosted solution that incorporates both online and offline data. Based on all the data that is captured in real time or uploaded in batch, it is able to construct an incredibly sophisticated visitor identity graph where you can uncover linking identifiers and insights from the data. Causata also provides a very rich and sharp reporting interface. Because Causata both collects data in real time and allows for creating unique experiences at the individual level, tag management platforms can be leveraged to easily accomplish both capabilities. The Causata data collection tag can be simply deployed using a global tag within the TMS. Delivering unique visitor experiences based on propensity score models is done through a page specific tag deployment, depending on where a score or targeted content is to be delivered.

GETSMARTCONTENT GetSmartContent is an easy to use, single-‐tag testing platform. It has interesting capabilities, such as integrations with Eloqua and ExactTarget. This platform’s implementation is as straightforward as it gets. You simply save the JavaScript tag in the header of the site. To get up and running with GetSmartContent via tag management platform, you implement a global or a page-‐specific tag deployment with the GetSmartContent code. It is as easy as copying and pasting a tag similar to the Google Analytics standard implementation.


15

MAXYMISER Maxymiser is also not new to testing and is making much more of a presence in the United States after years of success over in Europe. This tool offers some nice targeting capabilities and the ability to augment the visitor profile ID it manages is incredibly powerful. The Maxymiser profile ID is also one that lasts much longer than most testing tool profiles, allowing tests to maintain membership for longer periods of time. Maxymiser also offers recommendations, segmentation, and prediction capabilities. This tool is a single tag solution that can easily be deployed through a tag management platform global or page-‐specific tag. Copy, Paste, Save then Publish and you are ready to go.

MONETATE Like Webtrends Optimize, GetSmartContent, and Optimizely, Monetate is a single tag deployment platform that references a JavaScript file. Monetate has been making great strides in the optimization space and there are many organizations using their technology today. This tool also offers website owners the ability to badge products with icons and add predictive search to internal search fields. Both of these capabilities can deliver quantifiable value to organizations that have put them in place. To get Monetate in place, you save the JavaScript file in a global or page-‐specific tag. Typically organizations would save this in a global header but with tag management platforms you can selectively deploy it globally across the site or just for specific pages.

OPTIMIZELY Optimizely is not new to the testing space but is getting a lot of attention lately given its adoption by companies both large and small. Its interface allows users to easily create alternative content for tests, which almost makes launching tests too easy. Optimizely also has some great API functionality.

Like most of these platforms, this technology is client-‐side and can easily be deployed using a global or page-‐specific tag deployment. Just copy and paste, save and publish, and you are up and running.

SITESPECT Like Causata, SiteSpect offers a testing platform that integrates at the network layer either by an on-‐premise solution or a cloud-‐based solution. This unique approach allows customers to integrate dynamic content into their testing efforts in a very efficient manner. SiteSpect also offers rich targeting and reporting for things such as interaction effects for it multivariate solution. SiteSpect doesn’t require any client-‐side tags because of how it integrates at the network layer but does have some interesting and valuable links with tag management platforms. SiteSpect can easily communicate test data elements to TMS, making use of this information in a variety of ways including passing it onto analytic tools or added to tag management platform data layers. It can also pass along specific behaviors or data elements that might not be accessible via JavaScript. Because SiteSpect operates at the HTTP layer, it can grab that information and pass it over to the TMS. TMS can redirect visitors to SiteSpect test pages. For example, if you wanted only a certain percentage of traffic or a particular set of visitors to participate in the test, then you could deploy a page-‐specific tag within the TMS that would redirect those visitors to the page where SiteSpect manages the test.


16

WEBTRENDS OPTIMIZE Similarly to Test&Target, TMS customers deploy Webtrends Optimize through the TMS console or its visual tool. Business users can define a data object and incorporate it into the test, thereby increasing the value and accuracy of tests. Specifically, simply specify the Test Alias name and the location of the Webtrends Optimize wt_capi.js file, and away you go—all with even greater customization to manage advanced use cases. It is incredibly easy and, once done, you can set up your test through the Webtrends Optimize interface. Also worth noting is the ability to target when you would like to have the Webtrends code injected. You can select exactly which pages should get the code so as to limit placing unnecessary code on pages you are not testing. And finally, you can enrich your Webtrends Optimize code by augmenting it with different parameters. This allows you to run sophisticated targeting tests based on the parameter value pairs.

Figure 4. Example of how one could deploy Webtrends Optimize via Ensighten’s Visual Tagger.

Empowering Optimization with Ensighten_WAD_v9

Documents

Transcript of Empowering Optimization with Ensighten_WAD_v9