Important questions before you get started with Site!
“Start small, get smart and grow bigger.”
Start with 1 segment, 1 offer. Check the results and build from there.
Get the answers to the following questions:
What do you want to know about your visitors?
First determine what information is of importance to the business and contributes to getting to know a person’s preferences and interests.
- Think of possible audience segmentation and what values need to be collected to create these segments? (A 'reporting segment' is a group of profiles. First time visitors, active buyers, engaged visitors …) E.g. if you do a promo on dresses, you do not need to know the specific dresses the visitor viewed in the past but you need to know if the visitor has a long-term interest in dresses and is looking at one right now to show him a promo.
- Clicks, views and time frames.
- the device used for viewing
- the source of traffic: did the visitor arrive on the website through a search engine, a paid search, an email, etc.?
- the search time used to get to your website
- ..
More information on creating segments can be found here.
In addition to the default Site information, user-defined
tags can be used as well.
Example: Product categories, Number of hits on an overview page or subpage,
different page types, price ranges, number of articles clicked, number
of purchases …
Values for these tags are collected in different ways: a meta-tag, an element in the html (e.g. the page header (h1)) or with JavaScript.
- Think about if you are interested in a long-term behavior (overall) or intent (session). For instance you want to know who has a long-term interest in a product and has now shown the intent to buy one because he visited multiple product detail pages within his session.
- Think about tag levels. One level may not collect all the data you need if you want to track categories and subcategories. For instance, Electro -> Smartphones. Adding more levels results in more different tag values. You can setup 3 levels per tag.
- Make sure your tagvalues offer the right amount of detail. Too little values don’t allow you to do very specific audience segmenting. Too much values don’t bring any value, because the results are too fragmented. E.g. if you have a product catalog of > 10.000 products, you will not tag every individual product. That data will be too fragmented to build a Engage audience.
- When creating tags, think about how long you want a click to be remembered (decrease value). For instance, the number of purchase will not decrease in time. Your first purchase will always be your first purchase. While others, like a visit to the Electro products overview page, most likely isn't valid forever. Perhaps even only for 1 day.
Once you have defined what information must be collected, tag the different pages on your website.
More information on setting up tags can be found here.
What do you want to offer?
Tracking a visitor has a purpose: to offer him the right content based on his profile.
In general, an offer serves a purpose: stimulate a second purchase, complete a loyalty card request, sign up for a newsletter, etc.
When you know what to offer and what goal should be reached it is easy to setup the audience, the content and the goal of your offer.
But does an offer always needs a goal? No. It is possible to change the website content for a certain audience, without actually expecting a return. Simply don't set a goal.
A 'reporting segment'
is not the same as an 'offer'.
Reporting segments give you insight in your visitor’s behavior. With an
offer you try to increase your ROI. Reporting segments can help you determine
which offers to create. They can also be part of an offer’s target audience
(but don’t have to be).
More information on creating offers can be found here.
