Test&Target Now Offers Engagement Metrics

Hello. My name is Adam Justis. I’m pleased to begin posting on the Omniture blog as the product marketing manager responsible for Omniture’s Test&Target products. I’ll be posting regularly on updates to our products and some of the cool things our customers are accomplishing with them.

Today I’d like to present the exciting news that Test&Target now enables online marketers to measure and compare visitor engagement metrics for testing and targeting campaigns. Having spent a few years as a product and monetization manager supporting several channels within MSN, I’m well aware how valuable engagement measurement can be, particularly for publishers and other content owners with more open-ended, non-transactional definitions of conversion. These metrics will allow marketers to capture tangible data about the customer impact of their marketing efforts when success isn’t always a confirmed transaction or a completed form.
The new metrics are now live within the Test&Target application and allow users to measure:

• Page Count Per Site Visit
• Time on Site Per Visit
• Visit Score - this is determined by aggregating marketer-defined “scores” that are associated with different content elements served during a visitor’s session. For example, a marketer may assign a score of 1.0 to a landing page and a score of 0.10 to an article page. When a user starts his visit on that landing page and then visits two article pages, that session’s aggregate score equals: 1.20. Scores for individual elements are set by the Test&Target customer.

TechTarget and bizjournals, both content-rich and largely ad-supported sites, are two Omniture customers who have been employing the new engagement metrics to better understand how updates to their sites impact visitor behavior.

TechTarget is working to determine the effect on engagement of exposing vs. hiding a secondary navigation bar on its network of sites which include SearchCIO.com, SearchDataManagement.com and SearchNetworking.com (see screenshots below).

The control version displays a primary navigation bar

TechTarget is testing the impact of a secondary navigation bar

TechTarget found that showing a secondary navigation bar yielded a 4% increase in the average number of pages for visitors from Yahoo. And while the TechTarget team hasn’t wrapped up these tests yet, so far they’ve also been able to easily see how different segments of users are interacting differently with their network sites which has provided lots of food for thought for future tests. That feeds right into one of my mantras - we can always learn something from EVERY test, so Always Be Testing!
TechTarget’s Renee Thompson also notes that “For a media company, being able to measure by engagement is critical. In the past we would have to manually cross-reference campaign data with analytics data in order to determine downstream effects such as page views, but now that it’s all contained within Test&Target, it not only makes the process much easier, but it allows for a more complete and reliable look at the data.”
Our friends over at bizjournals are testing how different treatments of the “Latest News” results page on many of their local sites influence total number of pages viewed per session.

bizjournals is testing different treatments of its “Latest News” results, such as displaying it with or without underlining and testing other variations in font size, color and columns.

“We’re focused on finding ways to deepen engagement as it indicates a more loyal user base and creates more ad inventory. Page Count is a critical engagement metric to influence for the sustained growth of our business,” shares Susan Huntington of bizjournals. “We’re still testing optimal ‘Latest News’ treatments and deriving results. We’re constantly learning throughout the process, as we try to take our insights from each testing iteration and use them as a catalyst for new tests.”

I’ll keep you posted on other interesting ways our customers are putting these new metrics to use. I’d also love to hear about your experiences with the new release so feel free to comment here or email me directly at ajustis at omniture.com.

• Adam Justis
• 2 responses
•  Testing and Targeting

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