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Event serialisation with derived metrics

derived metrics, analytics, adobe, sitecat, event, serialisation

Have you got conversion values that are over 100%? In other words, have you got more people starting a form than you have visits? Or more people finishing a form than starting it? Or more people getting to step 2 of a form than actually starting it? This is a pretty common problem and stems from the way your event metrics have been set up.

Are you taking your site for granted?

A pair of glasses making letters on eye test chart in focus.

Are you happy with how your website is performing, or would you like it to drive more conversions? Incorporating a structured approach to your testing is one of the ways you can improve your conversion rate.

eVars, props and events 101

different graphs on a chalboard

Here’s the first of our articles to help you get your head around the building blocks required for Adobe Reports & Analytics (formerly SiteCatalyst).

Are we there yet? Get more by scoring prospects.

With all of this data flying around, we can do some pretty nifty things with visitor scoring, if we think beyond just a flat score. Think about scoring them on multiple levels to separate the “nearly’s” from the “maybe’s”.

Back to basics – SAINT classifications.

Painting of three catholic Saints

SAINT can be used for more than just campaigns, but there are a lot of people using it for limited purposes. Tim gets back to basics and revisits the tool that can and should be used for so much more.

If you’re ignoring internal search, slap yourself silly

While Jerome is busy posting about the in’s and out’s of implementing Search&Promote, I thought I’d wade in with a post on why businesses should consider their search as a missed opportunity.

I’ve previously posted on what I think is a hidden gold mine of information called internal search. It’s an area of the site that many companies, quite frankly, ignore.

“Not too sure how to do anything with it, we assume it’s working just fine serving up results to random queries, so we’ll leave it alone and focus on our core purpose, driving people into our conversion funnel.”

Or something along those lines.

If that’s you, go stand in front of a mirror and slap yourself a few times! Wake up and smell the coffee…there’s much more to search than that!

What are our members doing?

This topic was requested by one of my readers – thanks for the inspiration Dan.

And it comes back to segmentation. And the value derived from measuring your customers/members behaviors across your digital channels, and the impact they could be having on your conversion rates if you don’t segment.

Hello 15!

Well, it’s August and true to their word, Adobe upgraded us to SiteCatalyst v15 on the 1st, and so I thought I’d share a few of the golden nuggets within v15.

I was thinking about how to order them…do I go by not bad to flamin’ eck, that’s awesome? Or start with the big bang and then let it continue to smoulder throughout?

The problem is there are too many new and great features that you can’t really put them in any type of order. They appeal to you on different levels, from functionality, to UI, to analysis, to reporting, to combination segmentation and sub reporting.

5 simple steps to make it count.

I’m still generally stunned that companies find thinking about measurement so difficult, and tend to either leave it to the last minute, or have nothing in place to effectively determine the success of something, and as a consequence have no method to improve on the ROI.

As marketers in a digital age, we’re far more fortunate than our offline counterparts in that we have, at our disposal, a multitude of tools, that allow us to measure success and further optimize the user experience.

Visitor Scoring – the engaged visitor segment

So I promised that I would finally put fingertip to keyboard and talk a little bit more about using Visitor Scoring…to finish up the series that I started a while ago.

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that we implemented a series of metrics for engagement measurement, culminating in a per-visitor score.

I wanted to share with you some of the insights and benefits of doing all of this, particularly in Discover.

1 million rows and SAINT still wants more

While this might be a quickie, it’s a biggy. A big one in terms of the amount of data just uploaded through SAINT. In fact, we’ve just uploaded around 1 million rows of data, with 6 columns per row.

And it didn’t even blink! Gotta love that!

So why do we have a million rows of data?

Customer segmentation of course.

The icing on the Visitor scoring cake

This is the third (but not final) post in the series on Visitor Engagement. One of the problems with the Visitor Scoring method that I previously described, is that, at the end of the day, you’re still somewhat limited to viewing scores at the “average” level, by segment.

That presents a number of challenges because the average is precisely that…and the underlying scores vary dramatically within each segment.

But there is a way to see what each and every visitor score is, or even within the different segments…and it’s called the Unique Visitor ID. You can see at the visitor level, how many times they’ve returned, how many “things” they’ve done, such as searches, product views, revenue etc.

This is really the icing on the proverbial cake.

Elusive engagement – Part II – Visitor scoring

This is a follow on post to my previous one about measuring that elusive engagement. This post focuses on the aspect of applying a score to visitor interactions, as they interact with your content and applications.

Visitor scoring is fairly simple – especially in SiteCatalyst, and by leveraging the data in Discover through segmentation, (and ultimately in SiteCatalyst 15), it’ll give you even more insight into visitor engagement.

Visitor scoring measures and assigns a relative value to individual customers and prospects based on their actions and behaviors over time. You can determine intent and engagement – even before visitors convert.

Once you’ve identified your most valuable visitors, you can dissect their actions to determine the campaigns, keywords, referring sites and offline touch points that engage them – and invest more on these efforts.

Engagement, that elusive measure

Figuring out who your engaged visitors are, can be quite the challenge. The problem is, there is no straightforward answer, and there certainly isn’t a single metric to define it.

Engagement is an estimate of the depth of visitor interaction against a set of clearly defined goals – Eric T. Peterson (Web Analytics Demystified)

As the previous statement suggests, the reality of it is that engagement comes from a number of different criteria.

Elusive engagement

Now, there’s a hot topic. Measuring engagement. One of the most widely debated topics in web analytics.

What is engagement and how do we measure it?

Engagement, unfortunately, is not derived from a single measure. It’s not time on site. It’s not how many pages they viewed. It’s not bounce rates and it’s not about conversions.

Engagement is about a lot of things. What is an engaged visitor and how do you measure engagement?

Test&Target silly season has arrived.

It’s campaign time again. Normally we behaviorally target content to users based on their application stage.
We know from previous tests that this provides more relevance to the user when they visit our site – instead of just seeing a standard campaign message each time. And relevance is proven to lift conversions.

Moving beyond business-based segmentation

One of the most powerful ways to enable an audience connection is through behavioural segmentation.

Many companies today segment from a business standpoint. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good strategy and aligns your measurement and optimisation strategy with your business segmentation model.

Customer / non-customer segments. Product A owners / product B owners. Mosaic-based segments. Geographic segments. Lead / Non-lead segments. These are all typically business-based segments, and you should definitely be segmenting using this methodology if your overall business does.

But I think there’s a higher level of segmentation – behavioural segmentation. Read on to see how we easily achieved this.

Understanding user behaviour on forms a.k.a. form abandonment

We’ve all got forms on our websites. And chances are, you have multi-page forms. But, do you know how they’re performing? Do you know where people are abandoning your forms? If you knew that, what could you do? There’s lots of ways to track forms but they vary depending upon what you need to accomplish. Multi-page forms, which are very common these days, are slightly more complex from a measurement standpoint, but you definitely want to get some insights into these types of forms. In this post, I look at various ways to review form abandonment, from SiteCatalyst Fallout Reports, to using Discover Fallout Reports, to the Form Analysis plugin.

Enabling Customer Segmentation

So, following a recent “back to basics” post, a reader requested that I write something describing how custom traffic props are actually useful. How about customer segmentation achieved through traffic props?

Custom traffic props are used for counting traffic-based activity, to gain insights into user behaviour across our sites. By default, custom traffic props only come enabled with the metric Page Views, which, by itself is, admittedly, not a lot of good. But, with a couple of minor customisations, you can get valuable insights from the props very quickly.

This post is actually about customer segmentation – in our case measuring student activity versus staff activity versus “anonymous” activity. In your case, it’ll probably be customers vs. non-customers. But, you don’t have to stop at the customer vs. non-customer segments either. There’s plenty of other customer segments that you can apply throughout the brand funnel, as they move from being just a browser to a high value loyal customer.

Read on to find out more about enabling customer segmentation.

Back to basics – props, eVars and events

wooden building blocks

One of the fundamental things you need to understand about Omniture SiteCatalyst is the difference between an s.prop and an eVar, and just what events are and when to set them. They are at the heart of the product and provide the ability to customise it to suit your business needs.

If you don’t understand the difference, you’re going to be in a world of pain, and left dazed and confused.

This is, understandably, the most confusing thing to new SiteCatalyst users, and they take a bit of getting used to, especially when you start to combine them all together, but once you understand them, you’ll be on your way to generating custom ones that can really provide insight. Hopefully this post will help out in some small way.

How to create a good measurement strategy

Many companies struggle with an effective digital measurement strategy, often due to the lack of resources or the lack of understanding how it can provide an effective return on the investment.

And it is an investment. Generally you’ll incur people and training costs and you’ll incur licensing costs for the various platforms. These are all ongoing costs.

But you can demonstrate an ROI that will far outweigh the costs incurred, if you spend the time and effort in putting a solid strategy together. Read on to see the 6 key elements to a successful measurement strategy.

Measuring engagement over time

I recently read a great blog post about Cohort Analysis – measuring engagement over time, from 52 weeks of UX, and it got me thinking how to achieve this within Omniture SiteCatalyst.

As it turns out, with a bit of custom code, it’s pretty easy to do, and what an opportunity it opens up.

Cohort Analysis allows you to look at a group of people who start something at a specific time and monitor them over time to see whether their engagement increases or decreases. Then you can also compare them with people who start the same thing at a different point in time.

Read on to find out what this all means, why you need it, and what you can do with it…

Segmentation is the key to success.

It often strikes me as strange that people still look at numbers in the aggregate. Knowing that you get a certain amount of page views, or a certain amount of visitors and so forth, doesn’t really tell you anything.

In order to get some insights of value, things that you can really act on, you need to segment your traffic and conversions.

But so few people really do it, and even fewer do it really well. Read on to find out why segmentation should form the basis of your analytics strategy…

Page success events and eVars

So, still want to know certain things like what pages were viewed from visitors conducting a search, or which campaigns are driving most page views – and you don’t have Discover. Well, there’s two parts to this post and a bunch of answers…so read on.

Driving content relevance with Test&Target

In many cases homepages are either relatively static, or promotional driven. The problem is that homepages are often still the starting point of a users journey on the site and not every user should see the same content.

Enter Omniture Test and Target. A very powerful application that can dynamically change content based on previous user behaviors. Content relevance yields greater conversion, so it makes a lot of sense to include it in your overall online strategy.

People who liked this…part 2

In my previous post on People who liked this, also liked…, I put forward an idea how to generate “related” products of interest, based on what users were looking at, which could then be automated and re-published back to a site, based on Omniture data.

Having implemented this, we’ve made an interesting observation, which changes one our user assumptions, and I thought it was worthy of a quick posting.

Automate your tag clouds with Omniture

One of the nice things about Omniture is the ability to export information out to other systems. We use this feature to generate tag clouds on our site, based on the most popular courses viewed over the last 30 days, segmented for different audiences.

Searching for gold

Search is a veritable gold mine that is frequently ignored.

I’m not talking about Search Engines and Keywords, I’m talking about your internal search. Providing you track internal keyword searches, you can gain a wealth of understanding.

Internal search is generally used as a quick wayfinding method, highlighting areas of content that are well used, but are not readily available. And more often than not, it’s seasonal as well.

Martech Talks: The Four Stages Of Attribution Excellence

This webinar was recorded in October 2023.

Note that the information contained in this presentation should not be taken as legal advice. Digital Balance and its partners recommend that you undertake your own legal investigation.

Martech Talks: Privacy and Data Governance

This webinar was recorded in August 2023.

Note that the information contained in this presentation should not be taken as legal advice. Digital Balance and its partners recommend that you undertake your own legal investigation.

Martech Talks: Privacy Changes and Data Security

This webinar was recorded in July 2023.

 

Note that the information contained in this presentation should not be taken as legal advice. Digital Balance and its partners recommend that you undertake your own legal investigation.