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Suite Talk 15 for 15: Potpourri of Remaining Awesomeness

Targeted Surveys — Suite Talk

Personalization · By Justin Grover On June 17, 2011 · Leave a Comment

For my first post in the Suite Talk series I am going to show you how to tar­get sur­veys using T&T. Sur­veys are use­ful tools for get­ting inside people’s heads. They give insight into what peo­ple are think­ing, what they intend and the way they feel. Most sur­veys are try­ing to assess very spe­cific things about spe­cific groups of peo­ple. Tar­get­ing sur­veys helps you zero in on only the peo­ple you want to reach, which in turn reduces the com­plex­ity and can increase the response rate. Adobe Test&Target and Adobe Sur­vey can be used together to tar­get your sur­veys to the audi­ences that you are most inter­ested in.

Tar­get­ing Surveys

To setup a tar­geted sur­vey there are a few prerequisites:

  • Test&Target
  • Sur­vey
  • Some­thing you want to find out
  • Site­Cat­a­lyst

There are 4 steps to set­ting up a tar­geted survey:

  1. Cre­ate the survey
  2. Set up the tar­get­ing parameters
  3. Cre­ate the offer
  4. Build the tar­get­ing campaign

For this exam­ple I will use the fol­low­ing busi­ness ques­tion. Do peo­ple who look at lots or prod­ucts on my site have prob­lems find­ing what they are look­ing for or are they just com­par­ing all the options?

Step #1: Cre­ate the Survey

Cre­ate a sur­vey that will help answer the busi­ness ques­tion. There is just one ques­tion, “How dif­fi­cult is it to find what you are look­ing for on our site?”, in this exam­ple to keep it simple.For a tar­geted sur­vey there are a cou­ple of set­tings that are important.

  • Set the sur­vey launch to Man­ual so the sur­vey is only launched by Test&Target.
  • Set the dis­play options to “always serve” as tar­get­ing is han­dled in Test&Target.
  • Don’t limit the respon­dents, if you want to use this as an ongo­ing benchmark.
  • It usu­ally isn’t nec­es­sary to have any fil­ter­ing ques­tion like “how many prod­ucts have you seen in this visit?” because the sur­vey is already tar­geted to the audi­ence you are inter­ested in.

Step #2: Setup the Tar­get­ing Parameter

Many times T&T will already have the tar­get­ing para­me­ters avail­able to you (e.g Browser, Geo, etc.). How­ever, in this case I want to tar­get peo­ple who have seen more than 12 prod­ucts on my site. To do this setup a sim­ple pro­file script to keep a count of the num­ber of prod­uct pages a cus­tomer has viewed.

This code will be dif­fer­ent for each site as imple­men­ta­tion will vary between sites.This logic will look for a prod­uct page mBox and then incre­ment the value each time that mBox is viewed.

Step #3: Cre­ate the offer

The HTML for the T&T offer is pretty simple.

There are few things to note with this.

  • Line 1: cre­ates a div for the sur­vey to be served into, this is optional but can add a lot to the expe­ri­ence (see the Sur­vey User Guide).
  • Line 3: Checks to make sure the s object is avail­able and that Sur­vey is installed, this will help avoid javascript errors on the page if the s_code is unavailable.
  • Line 5: Launches the sur­vey, the first argu­ment is the sur­vey id and the sec­ond argu­ment is the name of the div that the sur­vey should be launched into (again see the Sur­vey User Guide).

Step #4: Setup the Tar­get­ing Campaign

The final step is to setup the tar­get­ing cam­paign. This cam­paign is very sim­ple it will have one recipe and be tar­geted at the cam­paign level. The tar­get­ing will be user.productViews is greater than 12.

Next, setup one recipe with the offer cre­ated in the pre­vi­ous step.

Finally give the cam­paign a name, set the con­ver­sion to “**dis­play mboxes**”, test it and push it live. This is what the final result looks like.

Run the sur­vey long enough to get enough responses to feel com­fort­able with the answers. Then make deci­sions based on the data from the sur­vey in com­bi­na­tion with ana­lyt­ics data. The sim­plest way to do this would be to cre­ate a seg­ment in Site­Cat­a­lyst of those who found the site very easy and another seg­ment of those who found it very hard.  Then com­pare their activ­ity on the site, specif­i­cally which sec­tions of the site they vis­ited, whether they used search, or just browsed for prod­ucts, and even where they entered the site. That infor­ma­tion will help decide which fea­tures res­onate with cus­tomers and which ones didn’t. It will also help gen­er­ate addi­tional ideas for testing.

Other Use Cases

This tech­nique can be used in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions. Say you have a seg­ment in T&T that com­monly under per­forms, you could tar­get that seg­ment with a sur­vey to see if you can find out why that seg­ment might be under­per­form­ing. Even if you get a hun­dred responses to the ques­tion “how could we improve our site?” might give you enough direc­tion to start test­ing against that group. Another use case could be that you or your ana­lyst find some­thing inter­est­ing like, peo­ple from the west coast don’t con­sume nearly as much con­tent on you site as peo­ple from the east, for which you can’t explain. This would be a great way to get some qual­i­ta­tive data to add color and dimen­sion to your analysis.

Are there other use cases that use tar­geted sur­veys that you can think of?

Tagged with: Survey • test&target 
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