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Summit Topic #1: Visitor Scoring in SiteCatalyst
Whew! Omniture Summit 2010 has come and gone, but hopefully you’re still deriving real value from some of the thoughts, tactics, and strategies that were discussed, both formally and informally, at the conference. As promised, I will be blogging about each of the three advanced SiteCatalyst solutions that my team and I covered in our breakout session. (It’s also worth noting that, while we discussed SiteCatalyst specifically in my session, these ideas become even more powerful when coupled with an advanced segmentation tool, such as Discover or ASI, or when used in the context of Test & Target.) Let’s get started with the first topic from our session.
Visitor Scoring—an overview
You probably have a number key activities on your site that constitute a highly engaged visitor. These are things that you want users to do, because they either constitute direct success (i.e., conversion), indicate the building of loyalty (e.g., social elements such as “Write a Review”), or suggest that the user is truly interacting with your site (e.g., internal searches, viewing photos, etc.). Visitor scoring in SiteCatalyst allows you to assign numerical “scores” to each of these key activities, and then aggregate these scores as visitors move through these different site elements.
The idea is that you can begin to see how varying visitor (and visit) scores affect conversion and customer loyalty. For example, you may notice that users with a score of 30 or higher spend twice as much money on each order when compared to users with score less than 30. You can also drill down to see which site elements are preferred by highly engaged visitors so that you can focus your efforts on those areas. Additionally, the solution allows you to see which visitor acquisition channels generate the highest levels of interaction with key site elements, and which campaigns are the stickiest in terms of leading users to these aspects of your site.
To do this, you will need three things:
- A scoring system that assigns values to each of your top 5-10 key engagement points.
- One “counter eVar,” which will be explained below.
- One custom event, set to “numeric” as its type.
The Scoring System
This is the most complex aspect of the Visitor Scoring solution because you will need to lay out a relative points system for the 5-10 top site elements that you want users to engage. Some users may have access to advanced systems for scientifically assigning relative value to different site activities, but in the absence of such a system here is how we recommend doing this:
- Identify the top several key “things” that you want users to do on your site (including, but not necessarily limited to, conversion). As described above, these should be activities that show engagement; the idea is to gauge how active a visitor’s experience is.
- Isolate either the activity that you consider most valuable or the activity that you consider least valuable on your list.
- Assign that value an arbitrary score, such as “5.” (This can be anything, and can be adjusted later.)
- Assign other scores relative to that first score. For example, if we believe that “internal search” is our important, but is our least “valuable” activity of those on our list, we might give it a value of 4. Let’s say that subscribing to a newsletter is significantly more valuable; we might give it a value of 8. Reading a review may be even less valuable in our minds than performing a search; we’ll give it a value of 3.
This chart shows an example of how this system might be laid out:
This will be entirely unique to your business and, at the beginning, may involve a bit of educated estimation. Fortunately, as you work more closely with these reports, you’ll be able to see where scores are being inflated (or deflated) by user activities that have been overvalued or undervalued, and you can adjust your scoring appropriately.
The Counter eVar
A staple of almost any SiteCatalyst implementation is the “eVar” variable, which allows you to set a value (e.g., an internal search keyword) and persist it for a customizable period of time so that you can tie subsequent success metrics back to the values. (In the convenient “internal search keyword” example, an eVar allows you to view the amount of revenue, number of leads, etc. that occurred after the given keyword was searched.) These eVar variables accept text strings by default, but also have a nifty option for accepting numbers. Adam Greco defined counter eVars in outstanding detail in a previous blog post, which contains information on enabling counter eVars as well as a number of use cases.
In the case of Visitor Scoring, we’re going to take advantage of eVars’ persistence by setting the number of points for the key activities that were defined in the previous step into the eVar each time the activity occurs. For example, based on the chart above, we would set a value of “+3″ into the counter eVar immediately after the user rates a product, “+5″ every time the user e-mails an item to a friend, and so forth. Implementation-wise, using eVar1 as an example, it looks like this:
// after an internal search
s.eVar1="+4"
// after writing a review
s.eVar1="+5"
(Not that this has anything to do with Visitor Scoring, but it’s worth mentioning here—because we forgot to do it in one of our two chances to present this topic—that you CAN pass negative numbers into counter eVars to subtract from the overall visitor value.)
As the user moves through an experience on your site, interacting with the various key elements that you have defined, he/she will accrue points. If the user converts, you’ll be able to see their “score” at the time of conversion. If they don’t convert, you’ll be able to see that, too.
Pretty confusing, right? We can see that scores of 16-17 appears to be the “sweet spot,” but it’s hard to really understand what we’re looking at here. Fortunately, you can use SAINT to “group” visitor scores, and note that SAINT is flexible and allows you to rearrange/reallocate scores into different buckets depending on your changing needs and observations. After doing this, the report is much more digestible and actionable:
Now we’ve got something we can use. This makes it much easier to see how different engagement levels affect conversion. Again, how you divide up the different scores into groups is completely up to you, and you’ll probably want to adjust it as you dig into these reports. Also, note that you can do some really powerful things here with segmentation; using Discover, ASI, or Data Warehouse, you can focus in on the user experience both for users in the “Very High” group and in the “Low” group to see what they’re doing, and optimize your site around those findings.
The Numeric Event
The final piece of our Visitor Scoring system involves a numeric (a.k.a. “incrementor”) event, which you can enable using the Admin Console. (Mr. Greco documented numeric events as well in a previous post.) This might be my favorite part of the solution.
In addition to setting a counter eVar whenever a user does something that we’re scoring, this method also sets the value in an event so that you can view the score as a metric in various reports. This does involve using the s.products string, but don’t worry; we’re not going to mess with any actual product data. The implementation would look something like this (expanding on the examples given above and using event2 as our numeric event):
// after an internal search
s.eVar1="+4"
s.events="event2"
s.products=";;;;event2=4"
// after writing a review
s.eVar1="+5"
s.events="event2"
s.products=";;;;event2=5"
(Make sure to note that “event2″ exists both in s.events and in s.products in this case, and that there are exactly four semi-colons in s.products before event2 gets set.)
The great thing about this is that it allows you to see how various data dimensions affect engagement with key site elements. You’ll probably want to set up a calculated metric to divide this “score” metric by visits, because the raw score may be higher for different data dimensions simply due to varying levels of traffic; for example, when viewing this metric in the Campaigns report, a campaign that has 10,000 click-throughs will likely have a higher visitor score than a campaign that has 10 click-throughs simply because the overall traffic level is higher. When we view various marketing channels through the lens of this calculated metric, we immediately get a great report:
Social media sites, natural search, and partners are the clear winners in terms of bringing interested, engaged visitors to our site. Looks like we know where to focus our efforts—especially if we already know (from our experience with our counter eVar) how much more conversion a high-score visitor is likely to generate on our site. This gets even better when we focus on individual items within our top channels, breaking down this report by referring domain:
Not only do we know that social media brings eager visitors to our site, but we even know exactly which social media efforts/campaigns were most powerful (in this case, Fark.com, Delicious, LinkedIn, and Facebook).
Conclusion—and two bonus tips!
We didn’t mention this during the Advanced SiteCatalyst session at Summit, so be glad you read down this far. A really useful twist on this solution if you have two available eVars for use with visitor scoring is to configure one of them to expire at the end of the visit and another to a much longer expiration (such as “never”). The first eVar then gives a uniform view of individual visits, and how varying levels of interaction with key site elements affects conversion within the individual visit only. The second eVar would provide a view of “lifetime engagement” across multiple visits since the user last cleared his/her cookies. You can slice and dice both data sets to get some powerful views into how user behaviors may change over time.
Along these same lines, it’s possible that different teams or individuals may want to assign different scores to certain site activities. Don’t fight about it! Don’t let this scoring system destroy the harmony in your marketing department. Instead, similar to the tip just mentioned, if you’ve got an extra eVar, you can actually assign different scores to the same key site activities. Here’s a quick example using s.eVar1 and s.eVar2:
// this one is for the first team
s.eVar1="+5"
// this one is for the second team
s.eVar2="+30"
So there you have it. One tactic down, two to go. Next time, we’ll cover perhaps the most popular of the topics that we covered—the brand-new getPercentPageViewed plug-in. If you have any questions about Visitor Scoring, either based on this blog post or on the content we shared at Omniture Summit, please let me know by leaving a comment here. You can also contact me via Twitter (@OmnitureCare).
Three things you should know while tagging Facebook Fan Pages:
1. Do not mess with your onsite metrics:
Offsite visits or page views should not be mixed with your onsite page views or onsite sessions. Let’s say your site gets 2,000 sessions for the day and if there are 500 visits to your Facebook fan page on the same day, do not count the number of sessions as 2,500. Instead clearly differentiate the offsite traffic with onsite traffic and correlate the influences as needed. Coremetrics has an impression tag for this very reason – we do not create sessions, we do not mix traffic.
Here’s a simple impression tag that will fire an impression tag when a Facebook page that contains this img tag is loaded.
<img height=”1” border=”1” width=”1” alt=”” src=”http://data.cmcore.com/imp?tid=17&vn1=4.1.1&vn2=e4.0&ec=ISO-8859-1&ci=9999999&cm_mmc=Facebook-_-FanPage-_-Wall-_-SpringPromotions”>
If you are a Coremetrics customer click here and search for ‘facebook’ under the “download” section to download the Facebook Solution Brief from our support site.
2. Correlate offsite behavior with onsite behavior:
We introduced Impression Attribution as a generic application framework which can measure offsite behavior without any sessions. We didn’t stop right there; we also added the capability to measure the click-through and view-through influence. Now you will ask, “What is view-through influence?” Let me use an example to explain.
On January 5th 2010, John Doe visited the Facebook fan page of a premier retailer, mynotsofavoriteshoes.com.
On January 7th 2010, John Doe visited a Myspace page where an ad from mynotsofavoriteshoes.com was served.
On January 10th 2010, John Doe decides to go to mynotsofavoriteshoes.com by directly visiting the site.
On January 12th 2010, John Doe is searching for socks and sees a natural search landing page from mynotsofavoriteshoes.com and clicks through and browses through many products, and purchases socks.
With our unique Impression Attribution technology, we can measure all impression influences on John Doe for the past 90 days before he visited the site or purchased. You can see the influences based on the first impression on John Doe, last impression, or all impressions with equal or custom weight. Impression Attribution applies to different types of conversions including whitepaper downloads, video views, article views, enrollment/registration, purchases, etc.
Here are two reports showing the Offsite Behavior correlated with Onsite Metrics. The first report is reported with simple impression tags without passing Facebook user details, and the second one is with Facebook user details, where you can apply demographic categorization
3. Collect and semantically categorize the social networking noise to information:
Plan on capturing as much information as possible for analysis. For instance, if you capture tweets, Facebook wall entries, etc., pass those in a marketing attribute like cm_mmca3 and see the patterns of sentences and apply semantic filters to cut through the clutter. Remember, there can be 1000s of messages on Facebook or Twitter; it is not useful to just collect. You need to be able to categorize, report, and observe the trends to gain better insight about how your customers are being influenced in the social media world.
Here’s a report with Semantic Categorization of Social Media. The semantic categorization is done using wild card expressions to scan through the sentences (MMC attributes as an example). For instance, if I see ‘crap’, ‘bad’, etc., mixed with your brand terms and doesn’t contain ‘not’, this can be loosely categorized as negative comments.
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Thank you for reading my thoughts on this subject. Would love to hear from you if you are tracking Facebook as a effective Marketing channel or planning to do so in the near future.
Welcome to the Idea Exchange!
We love ideas. Always have. I spend most of my waking hours talking to Omniture users on Twitter, the Yahoo! Forum, blogs, etc., and many of these conversations center on ideas—how best to use our products, how to solve perplexing problems, and how to improve the Omniture Suite.
Because we love ideas—and because we especially love to use ideas—we recently launched the Idea Exchange, where any Omniture Suite user can log in and tell us exactly what ideas they have for any of our products. Then other users can “promote” the ideas that they feel would help them do their jobs most effectively, giving us a great sense of which features are most critical for our users.
(Speaking of critical ideas, enjoy this clip and just know that our building will not be demolished as we’re reviewing the ideas that you send us.)
In all seriousness, it’s a mutually beneficial situation. You have a quick and effective way of letting us know how we can improve your online business optimization efforts, and we have plenty of ideas and feedback that we can implement to make that happen. Our job then becomes to monitor your ideas, interact with you to understand the underlying business questions and your suggestions, and figure out how to get them to you. Various members of our organization spend a lot of time out there; one of the neatest things about last week’s Omniture Summit was hearing Brett Error (Vice President and General Manager, Products and Technology) speak with intimate knowledge about many of the ideas that have been submitted already. So, yeah. We’re listening intently.
You want more eVars? Submit an idea and watch others promote it. (Actually, that one has already been submitted, so you’d be best served by promoting the existing entry.)
Need rule-based SAINT classifications? Describe how you want it to work and follow the implementation process.
Want an entirely new product that does something cool? Yep, you guessed it; Idea Exchange FTW.
You can also use the Idea Exchange to get to know other users in the Omniture community. Everyone has a profile and can add information about himself or herself, upload an avatar, post contact info on several major instant messenger platforms, and more. It’s a great place to get to know how others are using Omniture tools, and it’s also a great place just to get to know others. You can even interface directly with various Omniture folks including developers, Product Managers, and more. You’ll definitely see me around. I’m one of the folks who makes sure things are running smoothly out there.
To begin using the Idea Exchange, just log in to the Omniture Suite as you normally would. Then go to Help > Idea Exchange. You will be prompted to choose a username. Once you have chosen a username, it will be paired up with your SiteCatalyst login info, and you can access the Idea Exchange thereafter either via the Help menu, or directly by logging in to ideas.omniture.com.
So have at it! We need your best ideas, and we need them now. And if you have any questions, please let me know. You can follow me on Twitter at @OmnitureCare, or just send me a message on the Idea Exchange. See you there!
Google Analytics API Case Study: Dolby Laboratories automates analytics reporting with Shufflepoint
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We continue to be impressed by the new solutions developers are bringing to market by leveraging the Google Analytics Platform. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it’s innovative and useful we’ll highlight it to our readers on this blog.
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics API Team
How Do YOU Use Facebook?
As you may have seen, we announced our Facebook ROI measurement capabilities yesterday. Our approach is tailored to marketers who really want to understand the impact of their Facebook engagement, whether it’s a campaign, a tab, a specific promotion, or all of the above.
For our purposes, and the purposes of our customers, we see the core value of Facebook as a place to share the brand, get consumers to engage, and persuade those consumers to have a more positive inclination toward the brand and the company it represents. Ultimately, the CFO, CEO and CMO will be looking to see how much the Facebook investment is contributing to the top line.
Of course, we realize that some brands may be using Facebook as a customer lab, or for other purposes. So it sparked a conversation internally about how different brands are currently using and evaluating Facebook, and a curiosity about what YOU would say if you were in the room with us.
So we’re asking you — how do YOU use Facebook for your brand?
Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Dynamic Ad Targeting & Optimization Using Omniture Test&Target
This morning, Omniture announced new solutions in Display Advertising to help advertisers increase their return on ad spend. The press release may be found here: Omniture Announces Display Advertising Solutions for Increased Return on Ad Spend
Today, I’d like to add color to a particularly exciting part of the release titled “Dynamic Ad Targeting & Optimization Using Omniture Test&Target“. This capability marks significant progress towards our ability to increase ad relevancy by providing a capability that matches a visitor that belongs to an advertiser segment (identified using Site Catalyst, Discover or Test&Target) with a dynamic ad (via Test&Target). The ad is dynamically assembled and may contain messaging relevant to the segment.
During the limited release phase for the solution, we have seen a significant increase in ad click through rates (CTR). Given that ad impressions may only be shown to visitors that fall in segments that have proven ROI for return conversions, advertisers reduce impression waste and increase conversion rates, increasing their return on ad spend. This is extremely exciting.
As the Product Manager for the solution, I wanted to outline two major capabilities as we push to bring this solution into the hands of some of the largest advertisers in the world.
Display Testing for Acqusition Campaigns: For Advertisers that are interested in optimizing their acquisition campaigns, Test&Target provides AB and Multivariate testing for elements within the ad. Agencies can purchase media through their current processes. Ad creative would be produced using a Test&Target ad template and would be trafficked across the media plan. Typically, the ad would be served by the agency ad server.
Display Targeting for Remarketing Campaigns: For Advertisers that are interested in optimizing their remarketing campaigns, Test&Target provides the capability to target visitor segments to ads. The creative may be generated dynamically for the relevant segment. For example if you had a visitor segment that was in market for travel between any origin and destination city, they could be shown a dynamic ad containing the origin and destination city. As prior, the ad creative would be produced using a Test&Target ad template and would be trafficked across the media plan and the ad would be served by the agency ad server.
Last but certainly not least, the vision is not limited to increasing the CTR on the ad. The solution includes connecting the messaging in the ad to the messaging on the landing page (via a unified Test&Target Experience) and through the funnel, i.e. the “long ad” to enable our advertisers to increase their conversion rates through reinforced messaging. Advertisers can view reports from “click to close” that allows advertisers to evaluate their ad spend against the metric they really care about, i.e. against conversions or revenue.
For those attending Omniture Summit 2010 , you can learn more at the keynote this morning. I would also suggest you attend a couple of breakout sessions. The first is Optimizing Display Advertising Campaigns The second session is How Data and Analytics Are Shifting the Display Advertising Landscape. Hope to see you there!
I’ll be using this blog to keep you posted on our developments in this space. I’d also love to hear about your thoughts so feel free to comment here or email me directly at schaudha at adobe.com.
New Facebook ROI measurement capabilities
Today, we announced ROI measurement capabilities for Facebook. We’re very excited about how Seton Hall University and other Coremetrics clients deploy Coremetrics Impression Attribution on their Facebook fan pages, ads and applications. The solution helps clients attribute credit to the role Facebook plays in influencing subsequent website visits, behaviors and conversions.
This attribution happens whether visitors directly click from Facebook to the website (click-through traffic) or indirectly via a different channel (view-through traffic), such as paid or natural search.
Coremetrics Impression Attribution attributes credit to Facebook for both generating clicks and for increasing brand awareness and customer loyalty. And clients can apply this attribution to business-impacting metrics, such as sales, orders, conversion events, page views, and so on – not only to impressions and clicks.
I hope you’d agree that this is pretty awesome!
The ease at which clients can leverage Impression Attribution is amazing too. Simply add the Facebook Static FBML application to your fan page, add in the Coremetrics impression tag with the information you wish to report on, and voila! Let the Facebook attribution begin.
Advertisers with several Facebook assets can deploy several impression tags and get granular data about how each asset influences subsequent website behaviors and conversions.
More informing data can be captured and reported on by dynamically constructing the impression tag on custom Facebook tabs and applications. Advertisers can pull Facebook profile and activity data using the Facebook API and pass that data as tag attributes. Marketers can then group, filter, segment and report on these data attributes to understand what roles content preferences and user demographics play in influencing website conversions.
I hope to share more of how our clients leverage Facebook ROI reporting in future blog posts. In the meantime, please share your thoughts about these capabilities in the comments section.
Mobile Video, App Targeting, and Flash 10.1, Oh My!
At the mobile event of the year, Omniture and Adobe announced several advancements in mobile publishing and content optimization including measurement and analytics for mobile video, testing & targeting capabilities for mobile applications, and beta for Flash Player 10.1 (general availability expected in the first half of 2010). These announcements mark significant progress toward rich, measurable mobile experiences.
The press releases may be found here:
Omniture Announces Mobile Video Measurement Capability
Omniture Extends Real-Time Personalization and Optimization to iPhone Applications
Adobe Unveils AIR on Mobile Devices; Readies Flash Player 10.1 for Launch
Here’s a peek at a ESPN flash video running on a mobile device:
Omniture Summit 2010:
If you’re attending Omniture Summit 2010, be sure to come to the session I’ll be doing on mobile apps. I’ll be covering the announcements above, Dan Mason from ESPN Mobile will be sharing practical advice on optimizing mobile applications, and we’ll be providing a ton of resources for measuring, analyzing and optimizing mobile app experiences to drive value for your business. The session is part of the analytics track and starts tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. (3/3/2010).
No-tags Google Analytics Integration: Pion Lite from Atomic Labs
Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team
Sharing Our Favorite Custom Segments
Posted by Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Customer Solutions Engineer
