Omniture Test and Target for BusinessBy: Casey Fictum

“Deep web analytics to help you test and target web traffic”

Summary

Omniture is a leading web analytics software that operates under Adobe. The software has been adapted by many organizations large and small to track, analyze and interpret web data in order to optimize for better results. Within Omniture's "Online Marketing Suite" there is a tool called Test & Target - this article is a brief overview of the terms used and the ability that test and target has so you can determine if test and target sounds like a good fit for your business.

Basically, Test and Target is about optimizing your webpages to create the best lead strategy based on user activity. Think of it as an interface and tracking tool that gives you the ability to test out different pieces of content on your page such as images, paragraphs, offers, etc. and evaulate which content works best. Your website may have 4 different creatives for 1 ad – test and target allows you to run all 4 creatives on your site and test which one works the best for specific or non-specific targets. It allows you to test and target for demographics, people, brower types, and more. You can test page vs. page, content vs. content, page+content vs. page+content… you get the picture

The tool works by using JavaScript code within your website – that notifys the Omniture servers when a visitor arrives and what they are seeing. What they see can be a variety of “recipes” layouts of your web page that are determined by you within the Test and Target interface. So if you have a campaign that is targeted at users that visit sports sites – the test and target tool will be able to deliver your “sports related” ad copy to that user based on analysis of their prior web activity – when that user visits the page, the JavaScript Code is activated and informs the Omniture server that that particular user was given that particular ad. Sound confusing? It’s not at a high level – it is all about giving specific users – specific experiences and testing those experiences to improve upon them and understand what works and what doesn’t.

How Data is Collected – High Level

Data is sent from your business’s web server to the end user computer – then to Omniture’s data center as in image package – then the data is input to your Omniture user interface.

The Ominture Test and Target Terms

Report Suite

A report suite is about grouping – it is full and independent reporting on choosen segments. You can group sites within your report suite – you can group pages, it is used to group together certain bits of information based on your own perception of their relations.

Your businesses may want to group different products in different suites to make it easier to analyze the results. For example: an ecommerce site may have different product lines: they may want to separate those product lines to gain more insight on each specific line, instead of the whole picture (all the lines in one place).

Recipe

A recipe refers to the experience or elemental formula you plan to give visitors to your site. Let’s say you have 4 different ads with the same offer. You want to run all 4 ads and test which one works the best. You would set up 1 recipe for all 4 ads that contained the different ads - ad 1 – another for ad 2- and so on. A recipe is simply a combination of page elements and experiences that you feed to the user.

For example:

Recipe 1 choice A

Recipe 1 choice B

ad version 1

body copy 2 Picture 2

ad version 2

body copy 1 Picture 1

mBox

An mBox (marketing box) is they core of test and target’s operations. The mBox is what you place within your web pages to determine what you want tracked and what you want to use as a subject in your recipes. With the examples above, you would consider all those parts of your page mBoxs. Therefore, you could have several mBoxs on 1 page or you could have an entire page for an mBox. It is just a region of your web page or a web page that you can swap in and out of your recipes.

You want to track 4 ads, they all become mBoxs that you can add to your recipes. mBoxs are added to elements of a page by inserting some JavaScript within their code. Once you become a client of Omniture, you will have to download the file that allows mBoxs to communicate with the server. That file is called a mbox.js – it allows your visitors browser to talk with Omniture. Once you download that file to 1 of your servers, you just need to reference that with a syntax in all our mBoxs.

Offer

This is the ACTUAL content displayed inside an mBox. This content can change depending on the user; it can be anything on a website. The offers can be stored on your server or Omniture’s servers for a little extra cost.

Offers could be looked at as ad copy. If you whole website is an advertisement, offers are what makes up that website to influence users to perform certain actions such as clicks, reading, playing, etc.

Conversion

Omniture classifies a conversation as “the action when visitors perform what you want them to” – you set the conversion metrics based on the goals of your campaign

An mBox is placed on this element or page that counts as a conversion for you and this is tracked.

Campaign Types

A/B Test – Compare 2 or more versions of content Landing Page – Content given to a user coming in from a referral site like a search

engine Monitoring – Track website activity over time Optimizing – Trying out different recipes and optimizing them for max potential Multivariate Test – test many variations much quicker than A/B testing Display-Only – A/B with only 1 recipe – meaning 1 vs. another.

Default Content

Every campaign that you run must have what Omniture calls “default content” – it is the content that will show up if you ever pause a campaign or it is not running or if a visitors browser has cookies disabled. (cookies is the tracking component used to determine which recipe the user receives).

The RESULTS

Base Web Analytics Results

Of course Omniture’s Test and Target tool gives you the basics of web analytics, such as visitors, conversions, time on site, time on page, browser type, source, etc. This is all there at your dispense. But read on to see some of the additives the software throws in there.

Results Time

Know that as a general rule of thumb with web analytics, it is good to run a plan at least 2-3 weeks before jumping to any conclusions. When you make changes and want to judge their performace, ensure they have been running at least 2-3 weeks.

Lift

Once all your results accumulate, you can dive into all your campaigns and recipes to analyze what is working and what isn’t. A very cool metric that Omniture gives you is the “lift.” For each recipe you have a “control option” that control option is your most successful recipe in most cases – the lift is the percentage difference in conversions from recipe B, C, D etc. in comparison to the control recipe.

For example: Say that the control recipe is recipe 4. It is set as your control – recipe 2 has a lift of -10.4%. This means that recipe 2 is 10.4% less successful at converting than recipe 4. So if you have a recipe with a lift of -60% and your site has a lot of conversions – you know that you need to do something about the under-performing recipe.

Confidence Level

The Omniture reporting tool also gives you a cool metric referred to as the “confidence level” – it is the pecentage chance that the lift result will stay the same. Meaning, if recipe 2 has a lift of -!0%, and the confidence level is below 20%, Omniture is not too confident that that particular recipe will stay around the -10% lift range – so you can expect different results overtime. However, if the confidence level is above 90%, then Omniture is pretty confident your stats are going to generally stay the same. The longer you run a campaing the higher the confidence levels will get – this is obvious seeing that Omniture just has more historical data to base their interpretations off of.

Push Winner

While you campaign runs there will always be a winning recipe and that recipe is a winner because it gives you the most amount of conversions. There is a feature within your interface that allows you to push that recipe more often in comparison to the others – it is called the “push winner” button. When you elect to push a winner you have the options to determine how much you want to push it. For example: you decide you want to push it 70% of the time to visitors from the United States. This feature is cool because it allows your business to easily act on analytical results.

Omniture for Business

Now that you have a feel for the terms and processes that Omniture’s Test and Target can give you in regards to website optimization, you can test out whether or not Test and Target would be beneficial for your company. It’s obvious that these tools can be helpful and the analytical processes go very deep, allowing you to deliver more targeted messages. The issue all comes down to two areas:

Cost Resources

COST

The first is always a concern in any business decision, but when it comes to web analytics it is a primary concern…why? Because Google Analytics is free. And Google Analytics provides a lot of cool features… and some would argue it has more than enough features to run, analyze and optimize online marketing campaigns. If you already use Google Analytics and get A LOT out of it you may want to look into Omniture for deeper analysis. But if you use Google Analytics for top level analysis like visitors, A/B tests, bounce rates, etc. – then it may not be worth the investment in Omniture which can be expensive depending on the package you need. That being said, Omniture does have some advanced features that may make a huge difference in your campaigns if you have the time to utilize it – and that leads us to the second area – resources.

RESOURCES

Omniture has a lot of tools that do stuff for you. Like the confidence and lift formulas – they give a deeper analysis that other analytics tools would make you do yourself. That being said, they also have a LOT of features, so do you see the tool as a time saver or a time hog? From my experience, the tool saves you a lot of time if you use it at a base level and it is probably the MOST targeted one can get with an analytics testing service – so if you are a web based business and need to constantly figure out best formulas for user experiences, Omniture may be just the tool you need to reach max potential.