Today’s post comes to us from Kimen Field, Product Manager working with Adobe Test&Target and Adobe Recommendations. One of the themes you’ll see as you upgrade to new SiteCatalyst 15 platform is that it opens the door for some fantastic integrations both within the Online Marketing Suite and elsewhere. Kimen took some time to describe one of these, a great new feature that allows you to create targeted campaigns based on your segmented data in SiteCatalyst 15. Take it away, Kimen!
With the launch of SiteCatalyst 15, Test&Target 2.8 and Discover 2.96, you can now easily think about the same segments of users across your analytics and optimization efforts. We know it’s important to clearly understand what your visitors are doing (and not doing) before you can try to nudge them in the right direction. We also know that it’s important to speak the same language across your organization so the analysts can talk to the marketing teams and vice versa.
To move toward this goal, we’ve introduced seven pre-defined “suite segments” that are shared across SiteCatalyst, Discover, and Test&Target. We chose these segments because they are valid (and important!) for all of our users—across vertical and market size. We’ve also seen these types of segments predict different behavior across a variety of actions: registration flows, purchases, and general site browsing, for example. In the screenshots below, you can see how the same set of segments is available in SiteCatalyst (left) and Test&Target (right):
The real value for you is just getting started! Apply these segments to your SiteCatalyst and Discover reports and start to understand the differences between these groups. Visitors coming from Facebook are most likely reacting to a post or a piece of news about your site and will behave in a very different way than a returning purchaser—someone who knows your site and your messaging well and is probably back to see what else he might like. If you aggregate all of these different segments, all you see is the average, and that “average” person might not exist.
Once you notice differences in your analyses, then you can start to exploit these differences in your optimization activities. Maybe new visitors are clicking around a lot before they make decisions, whereas returning visitors browse your site in a more focused way. You could run a test to see if offering more information on the landing pages helps these new visitors find their way, and execute that test using the suite segment in Test&Target. Once you find the results, it’s easy to talk about them with all the people in your organization using the different Adobe Online Marketing Suite tools. You can speak the same language!
As you get comfortable using segmentation and targeting in your analytics and optimization activities, you can push harder and start to define your own segments. It’s easy to define a wide range of segment types based on your own company’s needs. You might want to look at people who only buy expensive items, or only ever read articles or watch videos in a certain category. This is where you can really drill down to different groups and start to affect their behavior online.
The ones you define yourself aren’t available across products automatically, but it’s easy to build similar rules in SiteCatalyst/Discover and Test&Target to continue to look at your customer base as a set of segments rather than one average mass. Get going!
Kimen didn’t know this when she wrote the post, but I’m going to give you her Twitter handle—@kimenf—so you can contact her directly with any questions you may have about suite-level segments and how to use them to take your targeting to the next level. You can also leave comments here and we’ll answer them as quickly as we can!
15 for 15: Suite-level Segments
Today’s post comes to us from Kimen Field, Product Manager working with Adobe Test&Target and Adobe Recommendations. One of the themes you’ll see as you upgrade to new SiteCatalyst 15 platform is that it opens the door for some fantastic integrations both within the Online Marketing Suite and elsewhere. Kimen took some time to describe one of these, a great new feature that allows you to create targeted campaigns based on your segmented data in SiteCatalyst 15. Take it away, Kimen!
With the launch of SiteCatalyst 15, Test&Target 2.8 and Discover 2.96, you can now easily think about the same segments of users across your analytics and optimization efforts. We know it’s important to clearly understand what your visitors are doing (and not doing) before you can try to nudge them in the right direction. We also know that it’s important to speak the same language across your organization so the analysts can talk to the marketing teams and vice versa.
To move toward this goal, we’ve introduced seven pre-defined “suite segments” that are shared across SiteCatalyst, Discover, and Test&Target. We chose these segments because they are valid (and important!) for all of our users—across vertical and market size. We’ve also seen these types of segments predict different behavior across a variety of actions: registration flows, purchases, and general site browsing, for example. In the screenshots below, you can see how the same set of segments is available in SiteCatalyst (left) and Test&Target (right):
The real value for you is just getting started! Apply these segments to your SiteCatalyst and Discover reports and start to understand the differences between these groups. Visitors coming from Facebook are most likely reacting to a post or a piece of news about your site and will behave in a very different way than a returning purchaser—someone who knows your site and your messaging well and is probably back to see what else he might like. If you aggregate all of these different segments, all you see is the average, and that “average” person might not exist.
Once you notice differences in your analyses, then you can start to exploit these differences in your optimization activities. Maybe new visitors are clicking around a lot before they make decisions, whereas returning visitors browse your site in a more focused way. You could run a test to see if offering more information on the landing pages helps these new visitors find their way, and execute that test using the suite segment in Test&Target. Once you find the results, it’s easy to talk about them with all the people in your organization using the different Adobe Online Marketing Suite tools. You can speak the same language!
As you get comfortable using segmentation and targeting in your analytics and optimization activities, you can push harder and start to define your own segments. It’s easy to define a wide range of segment types based on your own company’s needs. You might want to look at people who only buy expensive items, or only ever read articles or watch videos in a certain category. This is where you can really drill down to different groups and start to affect their behavior online.
The ones you define yourself aren’t available across products automatically, but it’s easy to build similar rules in SiteCatalyst/Discover and Test&Target to continue to look at your customer base as a set of segments rather than one average mass. Get going!
Kimen didn’t know this when she wrote the post, but I’m going to give you her Twitter handle—@kimenf—so you can contact her directly with any questions you may have about suite-level segments and how to use them to take your targeting to the next level. You can also leave comments here and we’ll answer them as quickly as we can!