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Omniture Test and

Target for Business
By: Casey Fictum

͞Deep web analytics to help you test and

target web traffic͟

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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 ʹ 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+content͙ you get the picture

The tool works by using JavaScript code within your website ʹ that notifys the Omniture servers
when a visitor arrives and what they are seeing. What they see can be a variety of ͞recipes͟
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 ʹ the test and target tool will
be able to deliver your ͞sports related͟ ad copy to that user based on analysis of their prior web
activity ʹ 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? It͛s
not at a high level ʹ it is all about giving specific users ʹ specific experiences and testing those
experiences to improve upon them and understand what works and what doesn͛t.

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Data is sent from your business͛s web server to the end user computer ʹ then to Omniture͛s
data center as in image package ʹ then the data is input to your Omniture user interface.

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

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A recipe refers to the experience or elemental formula you plan to give visitors to your site.
Let͛s 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 ʹ 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

ad version body copy

Picture 2
1 2

Recipe 1 choice B

ad version body copy

Picture 1
2 1

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An mBox (marketing box) is they core of test and target͛s 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 ʹ 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.

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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 Omniture͛s
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.

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Omniture classifies a conversation as ͞the action when visitors perform what you want them to͟
ʹ 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.

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yc î c ccCompare 2 or more versions of content

yc cc Content given to a user coming in from a referral site like a search
engine
yc ¦  c Track website activity over time
yc c Trying out different recipes and optimizing them for max potential
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c c test many variations much quicker than A/B testing
yc  ccA/B with only 1 recipe ʹ meaning 1 vs. another.
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Vvery campaign that you run must have what Omniture calls ͞default content͟ ʹ 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).

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Of course Omniture͛s 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.


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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.

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Once all your results accumulate, you can dive into all your campaigns and recipes to analyze
what is working and what isn͛t. A very cool metric that Omniture gives you is the ͞lift.͟ For each
recipe you have a ͞control option͟ that control option is your most successful recipe in most
cases ʹ 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 ʹ 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 ʹ you know that you
need to do something about the under-performing recipe.

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The Omniture reporting tool also gives you a cool metric referred to as the ͞confidence level͟ ʹ
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 ʹ 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 ʹ this is obvious seeing that Omniture just has more historical data to base their
interpretations off of.


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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 ʹ it is called the
͞push winner͟ 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.

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‘ow that you have a feel for the terms and processes that Omniture͛s 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. It͛s 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:

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COST

The first is always a concern in any business decision, but when it comes to web analytics it is a
primary concern͙why? Because Google Analytics is free. And Google Analytics provides a lot of
cool features͙ 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. ʹ 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 ʹ and that leads us to the second area ʹ
resources.

RVSOURCVS

Omniture has a lot of tools that do stuff for you. Like the confidence and lift formulas ʹ 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 ʹ 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.