Adobe Summit: Testing & Targeting Simplified with Adobe Target

Daniel Hopkins, a Senior Consultant of Digital Strategy and Optimization regaled us with stories about how we could use Adobe Target.
Have you ever wondered why optimizing your web site is sub-optimal?    Why is it so hard?
Quote: Simplicity is the ultimate representation (Leonardo DaVinci

Uncomplicate the Process

Optimization: To make the best or most effective use of a situation, opportunity, or resource.
There are lots of pieces to the puzzle.  It’s things like culture, training, governance, personalization, testing methodololy, biases, communications, segmentation, etc.  No less important are the tactical components like implementation, test setup, content creation, success metrics, QA, test planning, testing cadence, reporting, and testing tool.
Daniel chooses to focus on the testing tool to uncomplicate the process.

Demo of Adobe Target

Target comes with Target Standard, Advanced, Mobile app optimization, automated behavior targeting .etc.  The interface comes with four tabs

1. Activities: also called campaigns.  You put your tests here.
2. Audiences: groups of visitors that share a common characteristic.  You can segment by a variety of attributes or actions on a site.
3. Content: place to store content for the offers you build in Target Standard.
4. Setup: You find the one line implementation. Put one small scriptlet on the page and you are good to go.
   1. Includes users, preferences, implementation, and scene7 setting.

Something For Everyone

People from Daniel’s consulting career
Sarah: background in marketing with ideas for big changes.  Her need was to run a simple test as a starting point.
In the activities tab, he created an activity or test.  The UI only has four tabs in the wizard: details, diagram, audience.  Audience comes with a wide range of choices like from Bing, from Google, everyone, etc.

• Starts with the control screen or the default
• Add an experience B test by making small changes
• The scriptlet lets you make html changes. He made a change called stay with us instead of find a hotel
• He added a third experience to change an image.  He changed a beautiful image of a hotel in India to a more mundane image of a couple of snowboarders.
  • The image asset can come from the shared asset library
• Hit the save button and see your flow in the test screen.
  • Here you can define %’s on when to show the different tests
  • Define the goal of the test: His goal was to increase reservations.  To do so, he needed a default view for reporting.  He chose conversion
    • If someone gets to a page with “Thank You” on it he knows that someone was successful and it can be counted as a conversion
• This took about five minutes

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James is sharp but is way too busy and wears many hats.  he needs testing to be easy. He needs to easily test requested site changes.

• Added another test called “Jame’s test
• Chose the audience of everyone
• Added an experience from Thrifty.com
• First test change was to manipulate text in and an inclusion/exclusion test
• decided to get rid of the “Welcome to Thrifty Car Rental.
  • Can hide, which doesn’t change the formatting or spacing
  • Can remove which causes things to shift
• Added another experience by rearranging a text box in the car rental form.  He clicked and then dragged the car type to the top of the form.
• Also decided to move a logo to the footer as yet another experience
• The test now has four experiences including the default.
• This took about 5 minutes as well.
• Same as before, he chose the metric to test and the default report. This metric was about clicked link as the measurable event that counts as a success. In overlay mode, Adobe Target highlights all the links that you can choose.

Bridget – Manages the testing program at a large organization.  She needs to effectively manage many tests at once.

• Went to Sarah’s original test.
• added a rule to the audience where state was not a match to Utah. Don’t need to show a ski picture if they are already there.
  • Could just as easily have added a positive rather than a negative match
• Went to the metrics.   You can put in the estimated value of one conversion
• Looked at Collisions to see if there was any possibility of test overlap. Bridget can manage it all from there.
  • Can drill down into the reporting.   Look at a specific audience for example.

Anthony – He’s a one man show. He’ll run his tests from idea to final test. He needs to more efficient in coding his new experiences

• Created a new test called Anthony’s test directed to all visitors
• Used Verizon wireless as the sample page
• Chose a button and edited the css class.  He changed the red button to a black button
  • Also changed the font weight of a piece of text near the top
• Created a new experience. Moved the image (left to right swap)
• Added a couple more experiences
• You can preview all the changes before launching the experience

All that makes it uncomplicated

Simple……. but not simplistic

As you can see, the UI is simple.  It does not mean it’s simplistic

• Global non-profit made on small change to their site and gained 12,000 registrations
• Pest control put the registration form to the right and they got a 20% lift in form completion
• Well known clothing retailer earned $1.7M by moving the add to cart button above the fold.  That was a 17% lift in RPV

Quote: The value of the test is not based on the complexity of the test but rather, on changing visitor behavior

Next Steps

1. Attend a lab session and use the tool tomorrow at 2:00 PM.
2. Give Adobe standard a try
3. Next month, Adobe analytics will combine with Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics. Huge release coming