Site structure: the ultimate guide

Your site needs a certain structure. Otherwise, it’ll just be a collection of pages and blog posts. Your users needs the structure to navigate through your site, to click from one page to the other. And Google uses the structure of your site in order to determine what content is important and what content is less important. In this ultimate guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about site structure.

Are you struggling with setting up your site’s structure? Don’t know exactly what the best strategy is to link from one post to another? Early december 2016, we’ll release a brand new Site structure training. After following this course, you’ll be able to manage your own site structure.

• Why is site structure important?
• How to set up the structure of your site?
  • Ideal blog structure
  • Dividing your pages into categories
  • Equally large categories
  • Internal link structure
• Taxonomies and tags
• Cornerstone content
• Practical tips and quick wins
  • Remove and redirect!
  • Evaluate your menu
  • Rethink your taxonomy
• Duplicate content

Why is site structure important?

Structuring your website is of great importance for both usability and findability. A lot of sites lack a decent structure to guide visitors to the product they’re looking for. Apart from that, having a clear site structure leads to better understanding of your site by Google, so it’s really important for your SEO. In this chapter, we’ll explain the importance of having a good site structure in detail.

1 Importance for usability

The structure of your website is of great importance for the User eXperience (UX) on your website. If visitors are able to find the products and information they’re looking for, chances increase that they’ll become customers. In other words, you should help them navigate through your shop. A good site structure will help you do that.

Navigating should be easy. You need to categorize your posts and products in a way that they will be easy to find. New audiences should be able to instantly grasp what kind of products you’re selling.

2 Importance for SEO

The structure of a website or a shop is of great importance for its chances to rank in search engines. In our opinion, there are three main reasons for this:

1. It helps Google ‘understand’ your site

The way you structure your site will give Google important clues about where to find the most important content. Your site’s structure determines whether a search engine can understand what your site is about and what you’re selling. It also determines how easily a search engine will find and index the content on certain products. A good structure could, therefore, lead to a higher ranking in Google.

2. It prevents competing with your own content

In your site, you might have blogposts that are quite alike. Perhaps you write a lot about SEO. You could have multiple blog posts about site structure (each covering a different aspect). Consequently, Google would not know which of the product pages is the most important one. So you’d be competing with your pages for a high ranking in Google. You should let Google know which page you deem most important. To do this, you need a good internal linking structure and taxonomy structure, so you can make all those pages work for you, instead of against you.

3. It deals with changes in your website

The products you sell in your shop will probably change over time. So could the content you’re writing. A new collection will be added, as the old one is sold out. Or perhaps you think the information of outdated blogpost should disappear from your site. You do not want Google to show outdated products or blogposts which are no longer available.  You’ll have to deal with these kinds of changes in the structure of your site.

How to set up the structure of your site?

So, how do you construct a decent site structure? We’ll first explain what an ideal site structure looks like and then explain to you how to achieve that for your own site.

Ideal blog structure

The structure of your site should be like a pyramid. On the top of the pyramid is your homepage, and under the homepage are a number of category pages. For larger sites, one should make subcategories or custom taxonomies (more on that later). Within the categories and subcategories you will have a number of blog posts, pages or product pages.

Read more: ‘Intelligent site structure for better SEO’ »

Dividing your pages into categories

If you’ve not yet divided the blog posts or product pages on your site into a number of categories, you should definitely do so (right away). Make sure to add these categories to the main menu of your site.

Equally large categories

Make sure that categories are about equally large. If a category becomes too large because you are blogging a lot about a certain topic, you should divide that category into two main categories. A good rule of thumb for the size of categories is to make sure that no category is more than twice the size of any other category. If you have one such category, dividing it into two separate ones would result in a more accurate reflection of the content on your website. Note that if your category name is reflected in your website’s permalink structure, you should make sure URLs are properly redirected after splitting up a category.

Internal link structure

Your linking structure is of great importance. Each page in the top of a pyramid should link to its subpages. And vice versa, all the subpages should link to the pages on top of the pyramid. There should be really important content (cornerstone articles) at the top of your pyramid, and these should be the articles you link to from all of your blog posts.

Because you’re linking from pages that are closely related to each other content-wise, you’re increasing your site’s possibility to rank. Linking this way will help out search engines by showing them what’s related and what isn’t.

On top of that, with all subpages linking to that one main page at the very top of your pyramid, you are creating cornerstone pages (read more about cornerstone content later on). These will make it easy for search engines to determine what your main pages per subject are.

How to incorporate cornerstone content[/readmore]

Taxonomies and tags

Your site will also benefit by adding tags. Tags and taxonomies will give your site more structure (or at least Google will understand it better).

In WordPress there are two standard ways of adding taxonomies: you can use the aforementioned categories (which will give you the pyramid-like structure) and you can use tags. The difference has to do with structure. Categories are hierarchical; you can have subcategories and sub-subcategories, whereas tags don’t have that hierarchy. Think of it like this: categories are the table of contents of your website, and tags are the index.

Try not to create too many tags. If every post or article receives yet another new unique tag, you are not structuring anything. Make sure tags are used more than once or twice. Make sure tags group articles together that really belong together.

In some WordPress themes, tags are displayed with each post. But, some themes neglect to do so. You should make sure your tags are in fact available to your visitors somewhere, preferably at the bottom of your article. Tags are really useful for your visitors (and not just for Google) to read more about the same topic.

Keep reading: ‘Tagging post properly for users and SEO’ »

Cornerstone content

Really important content pages are called cornerstone content. Cornerstone articles are the most important articles on your website. This is the content that exactly reflects your business or the mission of your business. But focusing on the field around your business could also be a fine strategy to increase your audience and potential buyers.

As we’ve discussed before, cornerstone articles should be relatively high in your site structure, focusing on the most ‘head’ and competitive keywords. If you think of four specific pages you would like someone to read in order to tell them about your site or company, these would need to be the cornerstone articles. In most cases, the homepage would link to these articles.

Websites should have a minimum of one or two cornerstone articles and a maximum of eight to ten. If you want to write more than ten cornerstone articles, you should probably start a second website.

Read on: ‘What type of content should a cornerstone article be?’ »

Category pages or tag pages could make great cornerstone ‘articles’ as well. If you want to optimize your category pages for cornerstone content, it is of great importance to provide really awesome introductory content. You should make sure that this page is a compelling overview of the subject and invites visitors to read even more articles on your sites.

Practical tips and quick wins

Your structure is dynamic. Your business might change over the years, and it makes sense your site’s structure will reflect this change. When you don’t think about your website’s structure on a regular basis, it could grow into this monstrous collection of pages. Your pages or products might not fit in your navigation anymore, and the coherence of your website is nowhere to be found.

Remove and redirect!

Lots of shops will sell a different collection of products (clothes; shoes) every season. The old products could go on sale for a while, but eventually they will be sold out. If you don’t expect to sell the exact same product again, you should remove the page. Also, if content is completely outdated, remove that page!

However, you may have had some valuable links to that exact page. You want to make sure you benefit from these links, even though the page does not exist anymore. That’s why you should redirect the URL.

Redirecting pages is not that hard. If you use WordPress, our Yoast SEO Premium plugin can help you to take care of redirects. Preferably you should redirect the URL (301) to the product that replaced the product or, if there is no replacement, a related page. That could be the category page of the specific product,  as a last resort to your homepage. This way the (outdated) page won’t interfere with your site structure anymore.

Evaluate your menu

When your business goals or your website changes, your menu should probably change as well. When you start restructuring your site, making a visual presentation (like an organogram) will pay off. Start with your desired (one or two level) menu and see if you can fit in more of the pages you have created over the years. You’ll find that some pages are still valid, but don’t seem suitable for your menu anymore. No problem, just make sure to link them on related pages and in your sitemaps. This way Google and your visitors can still find these pages. Perhaps the organogram will also show you the gaps in the site structure.

Rethink your taxonomy

Creating an overview of your categories, subcategories and products or posts will also help you to reconsider your site’s taxonomy. Do your product categories and subcategories still provide a logical overview of your product portfolio? Perhaps you’ve noticed somewhere down the line that one product category has been far more successful than others.Or perhaps you wrote many blog posts about one subject and very few about the others.

If one category grows much larger than others your site’s pyramid might get off balance. Think about splitting this category into different categories. But, if some product lines tend to become much smaller than others you might want to merge them. Try to create eight to ten top level categories max to keep your site and structure focused. And don’t forget to redirect the ones you delete.

Tell Google about it

In the unlikely event you have constructed your HTML sitemap manually, update that sitemap after changing your site structure. In the likely event you have an XML sitemap, re-submit it to Google Search Console.

Read more: ‘The structure of a growing blog’ »

Duplicate content

The same content is shown on multiple locations on your site. As a reader, you don’t mind: you’ll get the content you came for. But a search engine has to pick which one to show in the search results, as it doesn’t want to show the same content twice.

Above that, when other websites link to your product, chances are some of them link to the first URL, and others link to the second URL. If these duplicates were all linking to the same URL, though your chance of ranking in the top 10 for the relevant keyword would be much higher. Joost wrote a huge article about this on our website that you should definitely read.

from Yoast • The Art & Science of Website Optimization https://yoast.com/site-structure-the-ultimate-guide/

Vision From the Harbor: How to Make Every Customer Journey Legendary

You’ve undoubtedly seen the iconic Sydney Opera House before — if not in person, then certainly in photos and videos. I’m sure it’s one of the most recognizable structures in the world with its bold design and unique look and feel. It’s truly a modern wonder.

And that modern wonder didn’t happen by accident. It took 16 years of research, speculation, testing, refining, and ultimately, construction to complete — and it was well worth the time and effort invested. The results have brought in an average of 200 million engaged audience members from around the world, year after year, for decades.

Your business isn’t much different from the opera house, really. The Sydney Opera House is known for not only its architectural prowess, but also the experience it delivers. Whether you step inside, stroll past, or even just see it in photos, you know you’re witnessing something truly remarkable — something truly innovative and one of a kind.

And your business? It’s one of a kind, too — with rich, customer-led experiences around every corner. The ongoing conversations you have with your customers are what drives these experiences — those conversations are what they’ll remember about your company minutes, hours, and even years later.

And, like the opera house, those experiences don’t just happen. In this experience-driven landscape, you need to use the same data-driven and entirely iterative process they used in Sydney — test, analyze, and optimize to create something iconic.

A Familiar Three-Stage Blueprint
Done right, it’s an experience consumers will never forget, an experience that follows a very similar blueprint. The Sydney Opera House was built in three stages — three stages that can also help your business create an iconic customer journey.

STAGE 1: Design & Deliver
In this first stage, as the name suggests, the opera-house team worked from a carefully designed plan, and together, they laid the foundation for success.

Think about the journey you’re inviting your customers to dive into with you. It’s not haphazard, and it’s not ambiguous — it’s a powerful, rich, experience-driven journey. And, I’m sure it has a comprehensive blueprint anchoring those first few steps as well as all future efforts — a blueprint with the flexibility to grow, evolve, and deliver increasing relevance as customers continue down the path alongside your brand.

For marketers, this stage is actually twofold. First, you need a blueprint — solid principles you can build upon every time a consumer enters your brand experience. Think about a company like Amazon in which the customer journey is anything but linear. Some consumers visit the site to comparison shop, others look for reviews, and some, of course, actually make purchases. Next, think about a car manufacturer — General Motors, for example. The customer journey is just as complicated — and often roundabout — but it’s a much slower, more deliberate process. You don’t just click to buy a car. But, the goals — reading reviews, comparing prices, and ultimately, making a purchase — are the same in both instances.

Unsurprisingly, the customer journeys for these two organizations are very different, and likewise, the way your company approaches customer journeys will be different. To get it right, you’ll need to understand how consumers interact with your brand, so you can deliver the kinds of spot-on relevance they crave. If you miss the mark, they won’t be customers for long — if ever.

STAGE 2: Test & Triumph
Then, like the Sydney Opera House, it’s on to stage two. Here, the team used testing to overcome some inherent design and architectural challenges — for starters, the “shells” that were originally intended to line the sails.

In the original opera-house design, these shells stretched above the structure. It was beautiful; it was jaw-dropping; and it was — geometrically speaking — fairly undefined at first. When construction began, it was immediately apparent that these shells weren’t there to stay. Pretty on paper but impractical — perhaps even impossible — realistically.

Their solution was to test new designs while remaining true to the imaginative shell design. They were, after all, key pieces of the customer experience, as these shells would make the Opera House stand out and the experience (seeing and engaging with the structure) truly legendary.

When the testing began, they had two goals in mind: find a solution not only that worked, but also preserved the experience by maintaining the desired seashell effect — “concrete sails riding gentle waves,” specifically. Ultimately, the team concluded that the shells could happen if they were built as uniform pieces of a sphere rather than individually from scratch. Problem solved; design perfected.

Testing experiences follows a similar cadence. In the experience business, we need to focus on making sure our shell-building works, too. By utilizing both customer data and the detailed understanding of the customer journey it reveals, you can improve every single relationship — and drive long-term value as well. Data is what helps put consumers and their actions into meaningful contexts. Attribution data, for example, paints a picture of what’s contributing to conversions — when there’s so much noise and so many touchpoints, it’s sometimes difficult to see what’s working and what’s not. This data helps clarify those unique paths to purchase and frames the journeys, allowing you to better wrap your arms around everything, optimizing and personalizing every journey as a result.

Data is also critical for creating meaningful customer personas. By aggressively leveraging customer data, personas can extend beyond the traditional broad strokes, which weren’t actually much more than educated guesses. Tap into the data in a big way, and you’ll be smarter, more strategic, and just plain better at delivering relevance at scale. You’ll have your finger on the pulse, the real interactions customers are having — what they want and what they don’t want as well as the marketing efforts that speak to each persona and their unique hopes, dreams, wants, and needs.

It’s the modern customer journey — a journey marked by modern, data-driven experiences. Based on what the data tells you — where consumers are coming from, where they’re going, and what they’re doing along the way — you can deliver better experiences by creating a clearer path and removing any possible friction. From there, you can test and optimize all over again — the digital-marketing equivalent of rinse and repeat. It took three years to perfect the Sydney Opera House shells. But, they kept at it, optimizing and testing day after day, and the rest is history. Literally.

STAGE 3: Overcoming the Organization
The final step is to overcome the organization — something you have most likely experienced at some point in your relevance-delivery journey. It was something the Opera House experienced head-on when political pressures, paired with funding and organizational issues, derailed construction for years.

And, they’re not alone. Sometimes, all that testing and data collection produces negative side effects. You test, you find the winners, and you set yourself up for success; then, you bring those mandates back to the decision-makers and BAM! Opposition stops you in your tracks. You need this technology and this budget and these resources — it all makes sense to you and your process. But, on paper, it sounds like a lot. On paper, it’s difficult to pull all those levers and shore up the kind of organizational support you need to do the job.

But, the testing outcomes weren’t the only bumps in the road for the Sydney Opera House. The project was rushed from the beginning, which set them up for many missteps in the months and years that followed. The designs weren’t even complete when construction started, which led to tons of challenges and unforeseen delays. By the end of stage two, they were already two years behind. So, going into stage three with all these added needs didn’t bode well when the project was already in the red and appeared not to have well-defined goals or, on the surface, a clear path out of the whole mess.

It’s something that many organizations face. Some have clearly defined goals and clear-cut paths from A to B. Some don’t. The companies with defined goals already tend to be more mature in their data usage, so they also have that going for them. The other companies might know what they need in a high-level way, but they don’t know how to get there or how to leverage the data to lead the way. Often, that starts with both understanding and aligning on which key performance indicators (KPIs) matter — or even, what counts as a conversion.

Organizational and political opposition can also be major hurdles for marketers and brands. If you see the value in what you’re doing but are still hitting a wall, think about your organization and its culture. If yours isn’t a testing culture, you could have some major speedbumps ahead. But, that’s no reason to give up. Instead, focus on these 4 steps:

1. Have well-defined goals from the beginning. What do you want to achieve, what constitutes ‘success’, and what do you need to accomplish with each test?
2. Break down the walls to build success. To be successful, it’s important to break down the silos that keep your organization from achieving true operational unity. All too often, many departments have their hands in customer-journey optimization; but, those departments don’t talk to one another, much less engage and exchange ideas.
3. Consider the human part of the equation. Remember, all the data in the world won’t do you much good if you don’t have the right analysts and data scientists interpreting it and using it to maximize experience delivery.
4. Show off what’s happening. Success breeds success. So, when you achieve success, shout it from the rooftops. Make sure you’re touting your wins — even the small ones. The more value that decision-makers and executives can see in your testing and optimization efforts, the more support you’ll receive now and in the future.

In Conclusion
Put these stages together, and you have an inspired, innovative, and even simplified approach to enhancing the customer journey — and an iconic opera house, but who’s counting? Your business will grow; your customer relationships will deepen; and you’ll drive better engagement, conversions, and other KPIs. You’ll win because your customers will win — and that’s the surest path to lasting success. By understanding the customer, optimizing every experience, and continuing to test and analyze, you won’t just build memorable experiences — you’ll build iconic customer journeys.

There’s much more on this topic in Vision From the Harbor, an in-depth whitepaper that focuses on making your customer journeys legendary. This is most definitely a lofty goal, but also — hands down — a necessary one in today’s hyperconnected, customer-first universe.

The post Vision From the Harbor: How to Make Every Customer Journey Legendary appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/personalization/vision-harbor-make-every-customer-journey-legendary/

Yoast SEO 3.9

It’s high time for a new release of our SEO plugins. Since moving to a two-week release schedule, we’ve fixed more bugs than ever and added some awesome new features. With version 3.9, we are gearing up for the big four-oh. In that last release of this year, we will add something remarkable.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Right now, we’re talking about Yoast SEO 3.9 and the changes and enhancements it brings. So, let’s get right to it, ok?

Yoast SEO 3.9

If you use the free version of Yoast SEO, then the first things you’ll notice are the new banners. These are slightly less annoying, while still informing you of our premium products. Besides that, we’ve moved the reload button for Google Search Console from the header. It is now easier to find and use.

We’ve made it possible for other plugins and themes to add HTML namespaces, via the wpseo_html_namespace filter. By doing so, we’ve also made sure to prevent conflicts with other plugins and themes that also add HTML namespaces.

Yoast SEO 3.9 Premium received the same updates and fixes as the regular one, plus a better title update in the social preview section.

Video SEO 3.9

The Video plugin also received some great updates. We’ve added support for traditional Wistia video URL’s and embed codes. To use this, it is recommended to re-index your video’s. There’s now a fallback for the detail retrieval of private Vimeo video’s, so they will be recognized. The plugin now recognizes //player.vimeo.com/… type URL’s. Force a re-index to use it on existing posts.

Local SEO 3.9

Our Local SEO plugin is undergoing some changes as well. The import function has been overhauled, and there is a new export for Yoast Local SEO locations. You can also find a second address line for business addresses that you can use for room numbers or floors, for instance.

Yoast SEO 4.0

In December, we’ll be releasing version 4.0 of Yoast SEO. This release will come with a genuinely awesome new feature for Premium. We can’t tell you too much about it. However, it is something a lot of you will find extremely valuable. Just a few more weeks…

from Yoast • The Art & Science of Website Optimization https://yoast.com/yoast-seo-3-9/

Building A Winning Strategy That Drives Engagement, Loyalty And Revenue

Somewhere in the world — right at this very moment — there is a good chance a customer is engaging with your brand. We’re living in the age of buyer empowerment, an era in which digital devices provide customers with access to information they want — whenever they want it.

This dynamic has given marketers a lot to contend with. Such challenges include understanding the contexts of customers engaging with your brand, their dispositions toward your brand when doing so, and the fragmented ecosystems within marketing departments that keep teams from working together to obtain a single view of the customer.

Just as architects don’t build homes without an established set of blueprints, connecting with the always-on customer doesn’t happen without first building a winning strategy that drives engagement, customer loyalty and revenue to your brand. Where can your brand start?

Build On A Foundation Of Data
Without a solid foundation of data, companies are setting themselves up for serious problems down the road. Making sure your blueprint doesn’t lead to cracks in the foundation requires answering a few simple questions.

First, think about the data you’re using in the context of the customer lifecycle, and then ask yourself what type of data will be the most impactful for your enterprise. When you acquire customers, what data is appropriate? It’s also important to consider how you can best collect and leverage such data — perhaps using mobile metrics to help you engage your existing customers or becoming more data-driven by applying database marketing principles to future email campaigns.

Building a comprehensive and open architecture will further allow you to add data sources, as needed, to keep up with company growth while enhancing the single customer view as time goes on.

Your Content Is Your Brand
Marketers may appreciate a solid foundation and framework built for data-driven marketing, but customers don’t think that way. In the same way a home-buying decision is influenced by the way a home is decorated and finished, customers interacting with your brand are influenced by the content they are presented.

Customers are also engaging with brands across a variety of marketing channels and touchpoints, making the centralization of your assets into a single source a top priority. Another benefit — marketing collaboration — stems from unified access to content and assets. When marketers are able to share the same depository of assets, choke points are eliminated, time to market is reduced, and teams are able to work from the same playbook to collaborate on the best ways to engage with customers quickly and consistently.

Decisions Drive The Experience
From the foundation to the fixtures, you’ve followed the blueprint to create a winning strategy. Now, it’s time to deliver the experience. You can start by utilizing a centralized decision-making platform that helps marketers understand and interpret all inbound and outbound marketing activities from a single location.

This type of comprehensive audience activation helps marketers leverage data to develop the single view of the customer that is crucial in today’s buyer-centric world. It also leads to the creation of more contextually relevant content that new customers value and advocates demand.

Every solid structure begins with a detailed set of blueprints to guide builders in the right direction. Your brand can begin building a winning strategy today by focusing on data, content and delivery to create a set of blueprints designed to drive engagement, loyalty and revenue right to your front door.

This article was originally published in Demand Gen Report. 

The post Building A Winning Strategy That Drives Engagement, Loyalty And Revenue appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/building-winning-strategy-drives-engagement-loyalty-revenue/

Bridging the Data/Creative Divide With Dynamic Creative Optimization

We can all agree that data-driven marketing (DDM) has crossed the line from being a sleek, sophisticated nice-to-have to being a true marketing imperative. By leveraging customer data, brands can deliver more meaningful, more relevant experiences at scale; deepen relationships; drive incremental engagement and action; and ultimately, create levels of long-term loyalty and advocacy that separate the good from the great. It’s a total gamechanger in any vertical — and, it’s here to stay.

However, while I’m in support of harnessing the power of data to drive superior, customer-led experiences, there still appear to be some decidedly gray areas in the mix. And, oftentimes, those gray areas seem to be tied to the creative process. It makes sense — creative brand content has always had its own parameters. But, now that DDM is more or less the universal mandate, where’s the line? Is data now the be-all and end-all decision maker for customer experiences, including creative touchpoints, or is there a give-and-take that ensures a smart, strategic balance between the two? Further, is this desire for data-driven experiences hindering the creative process as well as content performance — and, if not now, could it down the line?

The Power of Dynamic Creative Optimization
Enter dynamic creative optimization (DCO) — the process that enables brands to use data-driven advertising at scale with redefined creative parameters designed specifically for those ads. Under the DCO umbrella, custom ad creative gives way to custom ad layouts or templates, facilitating broader creativity that’s always underscored by data. Creatives have the space they need to create, but — because ads leverage a set ad layout with dynamic elements — marketers can ensure they’re still wholly data driven, and thus, driving maximum ad effectiveness.

One of the biggest design-focused perks is that DCO removes some of the mundanity from dynamic-ad creation. Let’s say, for example, you’re a travel brand that wants to personalize your digital ads by weaving targeted destination cities throughout the campaign. So, if someone were to search for Seattle, your ad would include a prominent Seattle callout. Changing the travel city isn’t particularly exciting for a designer, pulling them away from more creative tasks, but it’s still very important to the success of your campaign.

And, that’s just a small example. Imagine you’re a retailer with 50,000 product SKUs, and you want your ads to be personalized to display the actual products a consumer is interested in. That could — quite literally — mean millions of potential combinations of products and creative elements. It’s impossible for a designer to shoulder a task like that, but with DCO, a designer can easily create an ad layout and set the dynamic-optimization wheels in motion. Consumers see the right creative content at the precise time, driven by data and supported by the designer. It’s a strong balance that delivers strong results.

The Dynamic Potential
While DCO is primarily used for retargeting campaigns nowadays, infinite possibilities exist for brands and creatives to expand their views of what dynamic creative can do. Done right, DCO can extend across the entire marketing funnel — from personalized experiences and loyalty programs to new-customer acquisition and awareness initiatives. Designers can really dig in, updating ad layouts and creating more personalized experiences for individual audiences — much greater than simply swapping ‘sneakers’ for ‘lightbulbs’ or ‘Seattle’ for ‘New York’.

For example, let’s say that you know User A was just shopping for skis. With DCO in place, you can now do something really cool with that intel — maybe upsell or cross-sell her helmets, ski clothing, or vacation packages as she surfs the web.

But, it doesn’t stop there. The more data you have, the more possibilities you have. So, perhaps, you want to create a “high-intent ski-buyer” segment with an ad layout to support it. By integrating Adobe Analytics, you can segment audiences like this and use those segments to trigger specific ad layouts.

The same applies for data management. Adobe Audience Manager can take an audience segment and use it to inform or trigger an ad layout in DCO. You can even layer on third-party data — lifestyle interests, demographics, and business attributes, for example — creating even more-robust audience segments and even tighter creative messaging. So, maybe you know that the skier researched expensive skis and — based on third-party data — that she’s an avid traveler who buys a ski pass for a nearby resort every season.

To upsell her, you’ll have your templates and layouts that will weave in real-time recommendations and relevance based on her latest movements — and those ads will look and feel much different from ads you show casual hobbyists or first-timers. The layout experience will change based on the audience — with DCO driving hyper-personalization.

Granted, this endless potential can feel a little overwhelming, especially for organizations with less data maturity. So many opportunities can cause marketers to fall into action paralysis much more easily — instead of making decisions, they just choose not to choose. It’s a very real risk that companies need to be mindful of from the beginning. Advertising and analytics teams must be in sync with creatives from day one, working together and focusing on the data — what they have available, what they can use in advertising, and what technologies and systems tie it all together.

By taking stock of the data and working through a typical customer journey, you’ll be better prepared to think cross-funnel and identify the optimal experiences needed. Maybe you only need one ad experience, maybe you need 10 — or maybe you need 100, driving tens of thousands of combinations of creative elements and product messages. Just deciding where you need to land will help your designer determine where to take the ad layouts.

Considerations for Creatives
But, like anything, DCO comes with a host of considerations and tradeoffs. For designers and creatives, the biggest — hands down — is flexibility. Generally, static ads are easier to develop and push out into the market and tend to be less vulnerable and have fewer functionality issues — unsurprising, since static ads have fewer moving parts than dynamic ads do.

That said, static ads tend to tie back to lowest common-denominator messaging. When you use dynamic ads, you have more choices about what to say and how to say it. If a customer is interested in a wide range of products or offers, that can be a real win. However, show one product or message, and you’ll most likely miss the mark with a good chunk of your addressable audience in addition to the potential performance lift. One retail advertiser (and Adobe customer) using DCO experienced an 81 percent higher conversion rate and a 73 percent increase in engagement (click-through rate) versus standard display ads for retargeting. Using DCO to retarget consumers who abandoned the payment page resulted in a 400 percent higher conversion rate!

DCO’s dynamic templates give creatives and designers the ability to present multiple messages, offers, and value propositions based on the data-driven profile of each consumer. DCO facilitates messaging that’s much closer to a 1:1 approach versus the one-size-fits-all approach that static ads provide. Relevance and flexibility increase, time to market decreases — and still, designers can flex their creative muscles more than they can with DDM-centric ads.

Preparing for the Future of DCO
DCO is no longer just for retail and travel advertisers, and its opportunities have expanded beyond retargeting. Now, it’s for all verticals in which granular audiences exist, and it can be used in loyalty programs and for customer acquisition, upselling, cross-selling, and retargeting.

Take the auto industry, for example, in which both potential and existing customers research dealers and customizations. Here, upselling and cross-selling are often welcomed. Likewise, in the financial-service industry, potential customers look for personalized credit-card offers that will meet their reward and rate requirements. In both verticals, advertisers can create lucrative and long-term loyalty by offering exactly what the customer wants, regardless of his or her place in the customer journey. This means that brands are increasingly competing with regard to advertising personalization. In DCO, the marriage of analytics and creative allows for deeper-than-ever ad-layout personalization. But, organizations must be prepared to deliver.

As more and more advertisers in all verticals adopt dynamic creative for cross-funnel use, teams will need to band together more closely — and that means eliminating the silos that tend to separate these core stakeholders. Data and analytics teams need to be in-step regarding that data and the audiences that can be built with it. Advertising teams must have a robust strategy that extends across the entire funnel and into the different programs, campaigns, and initiatives. Designers should work with everyone to generate the right creative for these audiences. And everyone needs to understand a few key details such as what the customer journey actually looks like, where customers need to be delivered, and ultimately, what kinds of experiences will move customers through the marketing funnel and into the conversion zone. It’s about collaboration — plain and simple. Is it already happening? Absolutely — but we’ll need to see even more of it for DCO to reach its full potential.

This is the fifth article in a five-part series on DCO. Check out the first four articles (below) and stay tuned to learn more about what DCO can do for advertisers.

“5 Reasons Now Is the Time to Implement Dynamic Creative”
“Creating Relevant Ad Experiences Without Thousands of Ad Units”
“Supercharge Your Retargeting Campaigns With Dynamic Creative”
“The Power of Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) Beyond Retargeting”

The post Bridging the Data/Creative Divide With Dynamic Creative Optimization appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/bridging-data-creative-divide-dynamic-creative-optimization/

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Are Your Multichannel Marketing Campaigns Flying Blind?

The famous Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” That’s an apt summary of the guesswork many marketers use when allocating their budgets. The process goes something like this: marketers have a budget, run marketing campaigns based on that budget, and then evaluate the results to determine how to move forward.

The problem with this strategy is in pinpointing the best way to proceed. Even when the campaign is successful, marketers have no idea where they should allocate marketing spend for future endeavors.

Fortunately, marketers now have some pretty cool campaign-optimization tools at their disposal that show them exactly what they need to do. One such tool — a marketing-budget simulation — enables marketers to test the efficiency of marketing campaigns in a virtual marketplace that is safe, informative, and cost-effective.

Those who don’t use marketing-budget simulation tools risk sending their marketing campaigns in the wrong direction. Following are three ways to improve your brand’s marketing planning-and-budget-allocation strategy.

1. Get Granular With Your Cross-Channel Measurement.
More accurate forecasting begins with measurement. One brand that has mastered granular cross-channel measurement is Monarch Airlines. Monarch uses a programmatic ad-buying solution that helps them measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as bookings and revenue. This data helps Monarch ensure each channel is correctly valued while continuing to drive customers to their website.

Programmatic ad buying also helps Monarch purchase keywords more efficiently by allowing the brand to bid on thousands of individual keywords each day. This type of granular approach lets Monarch know which keywords are driving conversions so they can place more-competitive bids on the keywords that matter most.

However, there is one inherent holdup to placing a primary focus on measurement and attribution: while attribution presents marketers with a clear picture of what happened in the past and why, it doesn’t tell marketers how to allocate their marketing spends for current or future periods.

Historically, the allocation problem has been partially refined in a very different field: the stock market. Let’s say, for instance, you are an investor. You want your investments to grow as much as possible, but there are two caveats: (1) you have a specific amount of money to invest, and (2) you want to limit your risk.

This leads to the modern portfolio theory (MPT), which helps risk-averse investors minimize risks according to whatever level of risk each can tolerate. The math behind MPT isn’t exclusive to investors. CMOs allocate media spend across different ad types and media channels because they need to make the most of their marketing dollars, but they also must mitigate risks because media does not always work as effectively as planned. That’s where marketing-budget simulations come in.

2. Improve Allocation With Marketing-Budget Simulations.
Every C-level marketer has revenue goals, and it’s up to them to demonstrate how implementing marketing initiatives will drive revenue. Convincing executives to allocate marketing spend on a specific channel based on a hunch isn’t a strategy you want to take to the boardroom.

Don’t get me wrong: a marketer’s experience is an incredibly valuable tool. Spending years in the marketing trenches helps marketers develop opinions and perspectives worth considering. But, marketers are also human and subject to intrinsic biases and beliefs.

Here’s the bottom line: it’s 2016, and if you aren’t using budget-forecasting tools, you are living in the dark ages. By deploying the right programmatic ad-buying solution, marketers can balance long-held beliefs with actual quantitative numerical data that is highly accurate in its forecasting ability. CMOs can then allocate media spend across the different ad types and media channels to help company executives successfully attain the most for their marketing investments.

Running budget simulations also enables marketers to run multiple campaign scenarios without risking marketing dollars. Imagine being able to show your CEO how much of an ROI he or she could expect subject to a certain amount of variability. Budget simulations are essential risk-mitigation tools, and every digital marketer should be using them.

Budget simulations take painful planning cycles and costly guesswork out of the equation. With simulation tools — such as those available in ad-buying solutions like Adobe Media Optimizer — businesses can improve both marketing efficiency and forecasting efforts.

By leveraging signature forecast simulations in a virtual marketplace, you can be sure the decisions you make are backed by data — without the high price of in-market testing. Campaign optimization doesn’t get more sophisticated than that.

3. Support Your Marketing Team With Budget-Forecasting Tools.
Simulation and budget-forecasting tools were never meant to replace marketers. With the help of a programmatic ad-buying solution, CMOs can spend more time focused on their marketing strategies and less time on fierce quantitative planning exercises.

Think about it: machines help marketers predict the future with almost flawless results — provided the future is similar to the past. While we all know there’s much to be learned from previous campaign outcomes and marketing fails, the future can be very unpredictable.

This makes person-to-machine interaction essential. Use these tools to support your marketing team by letting the machines analyze the Big Data you already collect. You can discover which channels are best at driving your customers to conversions — and which can take a backseat.

Then, when you’re testing a new marketing strategy, product, or approach; let human intuition take the reins. Using simulations and budget-forecasting tools to accurately predict outcomes — such as paid search-advertising performance — frees valuable time for marketers to focus on the next big thing.

Know Where You Are Going.
Deploying marketing-budget simulations can help your brand advance your multichannel-marketing efforts without costing a small fortune. Work to improve your allocation strategy by measuring KPIs while giving attribution its due. Then, run simulations to determine which channels your media spend will benefit from the most. Finally, remember to use budget-forecasting tools as essential tools — not replacements — for your marketing department. By incorporating budget simulations into your marketing strategy, the path to cross-channel campaign success will become crystal clear.

The post Are Your Multichannel Marketing Campaigns Flying Blind? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/multichannel-marketing-campaigns-flying-blind/

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Holiday Retail Marketing: Are You An Expert?

In 2016, online holiday shoppers are starting earlier and spending more — a reality that’s creating tremendous opportunity to target high-revenue days with compelling digital strategies.

Are you a holiday marketing expert? Put your know-how to the test with this quiz.

 

 

The post Holiday Retail Marketing: Are You An Expert? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/holiday-retail-marketing-expert/

Top Four People-Based Marketing Use Cases

A few weeks ago, I flew to Houston, Texas. It was great–a short, comfortable flight. And, there were enough vacant seats to give our youngest her own. After an hour, I picked up the shopping magazine in the pouch in front of me, despite having never bought anything throughout decades of flying. I couldn’t help it.

After flipping through page after page of seemingly useful — yet, unconventional — products, I came to the same conclusion that I’ve come to for years: Not one product had a valuable use case for me. All of them were solving problems I didn’t have.

As marketers, we sometimes slip into this trap of spamming our consumers with products that solve problems they don’t have. Oftentimes, it’s not that we don’t have the right product, but rather, we don’t have the right context. A single-device understanding of consumers doesn’t provide enough context to deliver truly personalized offers, especially considering that the average consumer owns more than three devices.

People-based marketing solves this problem. People-based marketing means that you don’t treat a device as a person. Instead, you can link devices that are used by the same person and then treat that person as an individual across all their devices.

Top Four People-Based Marketing Use Cases
With the correct components in place, people-based marketing can have a major impact on everything marketing — from reporting and analysis to attribution and experience. In this post, we’ll walk through the top four use cases for people-based marketing.

1. People-Centric Reporting and Analysis
Historically, digital-marketing measurement was built on a foundation that was intended to understand people but designed to understand devices. When a device graph is integrated with an advanced analytics solution, the device graph can transform the context of reports from being device-centric to being people-centric. This means that — for the first time — marketers can understand how many people (rather than phones and tablets) visited their site, or how many people (rather than laptops and Apple watches) interacted with their brand across multiple domains, apps, or even a brand’s offsite advertising.

To illustrate this point, let’s imagine a marketer launches two campaigns. The first campaign reports $10 of revenue per visitor. The second campaign reports $20 of revenue per visitor.

Using a device-centric metric (like revenue per visitor) creates the impression that the second campaign, costs being equal, is more effective. However, using a people-centric metric to analyze these campaigns, the same marketer might see that the first campaign touched one person across three devices, making the revenue per person $30; compared to the second campaign that touched one person on one device, giving the campaign a $10-per-person revenue. From this insight, an analyst could build a compelling case for promoting the first campaign to hit their quarterly revenue target.

People-based marketing gives marketers insights on people — not devices.

2. Seamless Cross-Device Experiences
Personalization tools strive to deliver meaningful experiences, but these tools alone can only deliver the right experiences to familiar devices. What happens with unfamiliar devices your customers use to interact with your brand? What do they see then?

For example, if an avid reader made it halfway through a riveting article on her tablet, and then visited the same website from her phone to finish reading the article, what kind of experience would she have? She’d likely fumble over the keys to enter a search, scroll down the page, and meticulously comb through each line of copy until she found exactly where she left off — far from ideal.

A people-enabled personalization tool offers a drastically different story. The reader would get halfway through the article on one device, pick up another device that she has never visited the publisher’s website from, and still be brought to the exact article she was reading on the first device.

People-based marketing makes seamless, cross-device experiences possible — experiences that are continuous, consistent, and compelling.

3. Cross-Device Efficiency for Advertising
Traditional advertising platforms, just like analytics and personalization platforms, are susceptible to the same device-centric limitations.

For the display advertiser, keeping tabs on his ROI is a relentless top priority. A common way to assure the return on ad spend (RoAS) is maximized is to apply a frequency cap on the number of times someone sees the same ad. Unfortunately, frequency caps apply to devices — not people. So, a frequency cap of five impressions per person can quickly become 20 impressions per person if each person uses an average of four devices. This leads to wasted ad dollars and perturbed customers.

People-enabled advertising platforms apply frequency caps that span the various devices used by a person. A cap of five impressions means a cap of five impressions for a person. Using the previous example, a people-enabled advertising platform could have delivered a 75-percent higher ROI than the non-people-enabled advertising platform.

4. Holistic Attribution
Attribution is constantly evolving to include more touchpoints, more-accurate weighting, and machine learning. So, it’s ironic that one of the most important factors in understanding the impact of marketing on the buying behaviors of people has always been missing.

Traditional attribution algorithms only analyze pre-login information from a single device. And, considering that the average person owns three devices, it’s likely that a big part of the attribution story is missing.

For instance, if a consumer visited company A’s website from her laptop, was retargeted with a display ad, and then finally converted on the website; a linear-attribution model would yield something like this:

But, in reality, this same consumer also conducted a search on her phone, read an article from company A’s site, and then went back to her laptop to make the purchase. Using the same linear-attribution model that’s being fed information from a device graph would yield this:

After a month, the marketer sees that this same article is among the top-ten, most-valuable traffic sources according to the linear-attribution model. As a result, the marketing team surfaces the article’s dialogue on all product pages (which truncates the customer journey to three touches), decreases their search spend on the keywords that point to the article, and all-in-all delivers a better experience to consumers as well as a stronger bottom line for the business.

With holistic attribution, marketers can now prove the value of all their marketing within the context of people — not devices.

A Very Real Payoff
Marketing has always been about understanding consumers to the extent that our messages and offers deliver solutions for which they are willing to pay. But, it’s only recently that nailing these key ingredients alone won’t necessarily convince consumers to make purchases. Consumers want consistent, continuous, and compelling brand experiences. Device-centric marketing can’t deliver this — but people-based marketing can!

While I haven’t personally purchased anything from in-flight magazines (like SkyMall), they’re successful business endeavors, and their magazines have been my go-to source for in-flight entertainment for many years. With a captive audience of people looking for a distraction while their devices are stowed, SkyMall may not need people-based marketing. For the rest of us, people-based marketing is like setting your tray table and seat in the upright position — you simply have to do it.

The post Top Four People-Based Marketing Use Cases appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/top-four-people-based-marketing-use-cases/

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Measuring the Role of Social Media in the Customer Journey

Understanding your customers’ journeys is critically important to improving their experiences, increasing their satisfaction rates, and decreasing attrition. Social-media channels play increasingly important roles in customer journeys, providing new ways to connect and engage with customers on their own levels. However, measuring social media’s role in the customer journey comes with some inherent challenges.

Social Media and the Customer Journey
Every day, customers engage with social media. However, how they do this is different for each person. With a variety of social-media channels to choose from — as well as a variety of ways to interact with each of them — understanding your customers’ exposures to and engagements with your brand via social media can be tricky. It’s important to be able to understand where your customers enter into the sales funnel — and social media is a key part of that process.

Social-Media Measurement Pitfalls
Social-media measurement can be tough for a number of reasons. One hurdle you’ll face is privacy policies. While certain platforms — for example, Twitter — tend to be very open and allow robust pictures of each customer’s experiences and preferences, others are more closed — Facebook or LinkedIn, for instance. On those platforms, you’re typically only able to see how customers react to your posts and not what they might be posting on their own personal pages. This type of privacy is intentional on the part of the platform. However, it limits the information that you can use to fully understand the customer journey and make strategic decisions.

Three Social-Media Metrics That Enable You to Better Understand the Customer Journey
This can make it difficult to understand how to properly measure success on social media. While success tends to vary according to your goals, a few key metrics can help you understand whether your brand is on the right track. At a high level, three of the social-media metrics you should be most concerned with include impressions, engagement, and brand perception.

1. Impressions
Depending on who you talk with, impressions may also be referred to as reach. Impressions give you an idea of how many people are actually seeing your content. Remember, just because you have one-million followers does not mean one-million people are seeing every update. For some updates, the impressions will be far, far less than one million; while for other updates, they could actually be much higher than one million. Impressions are influenced by things like how many people engage with your post, whether you paid to advertise the update, and more. Knowing whether your message is really getting out there is key to understanding whether social media is right for you. Much as you wouldn’t continue to invest in a billboard on a road no one ever drives on, it doesn’t make sense to invest time and money in updates that no one ever sees. Understanding your impressions can help you determine what is working and what you might need to retool.

2. Engagement
Even if your posts receive one million impressions each, you obviously won’t receive one million likes on each of them. Social media just doesn’t work like that. For your followers to take action — to “like” or “share” your posts, for instance — they need to feel compelled to do so. Engagement is really the measure of how compelling your content is to the audience that is seeing your posts. If you are posting update after update and hearing crickets chirp in return, there’s likely a problem. That issue could be your targeting, your timing, the content you’re linking to, or your updates themselves. If you have a low engagement rate, it’s time to start testing possibilities for optimizing your social-media success.

3. Brand Perception
It can be difficult to decipher what someone really thinks of you. You’ve long had methods — such as surveys and focus groups — to help you better understand how customers perceive your brand. Now, social media allows you to gain a level of insight you’ve never before had. The only trouble with tracking this metric is that the data is voluminous; people may be talking about your brand on an assortment of platforms, each expressing diverse emotions and various nuances. It’s tough to keep up. Many brands purchase social-media listening software to help them understand the perceptions customers have of their brands on social media. However, this is not a foolproof system. Remember, computers cannot understand sarcasm. So, what’s a brand to do? A national airline company actually employs individuals — their social-media support team — who simultaneously respond to tweets and tag those tweets with sentiments and topics to track brand perception in real time. By making this part of their everyday workflow, they save time while allowing humans to interpret the nuance of brand perception.

In Closing
Social-media metrics don’t have to be a mystery. Incorporating the right social-media metrics in your marketing-attribution model can help you better understand whether customers are seeing your updates and engaging with your brand as well as how they are, ultimately, feeling about your brand.

Jay Baer says, “the end goal is action not eyeballs” — and he’s right. However, to get action, you must understand whether customers are seeing your content, how they are interacting with it, and how they are feeling about their overall journeys with your brand. Your goal is to ensure their customer journeys are happy ones. Make sure you understand whether your metrics indicate that they are.

The post Measuring the Role of Social Media in the Customer Journey appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/social-media/measuring-role-social-media-customer-journey/

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The Five Core Components of People-Based Marketing

Fantastic people-based marketing is like a fantastic dining experience. If any part of the experience — the food, ambiance, or service — is three-star quality, then the whole experience is a three-star experience.

Great dining requires that the server make you smile a few times and ideally laugh at least once. When accomplished, every other interaction — cups filled or plates removed or added, for instance — happens without you noticing. The server knows just the right moment to swoop in and exchange your plate without so much as a syllable being interrupted in your conversation.

This is what people-based marketing is all about. Getting what you want without asking and at the perfect time.

The Five Core Components
What exactly comprises people-based marketing? For starters, great content. Then, that content must be delivered through the right medium. And lastly, both the content and medium have to come together to provide compelling experiences. To achieve this, people-based marketing needs five core components.

1. Cohesive Device Graph
This first component allows you to cohesively carry on a single conversation with your consumers across each of their devices — not just individual devices. For that, you’ll need a Device Graph, which links all the separate devices your consumers use to that consumer. There are two primary ingredients to a device graph:

• Deterministic Links — These links use anonymized logins to link devices. For example, if a customer logged in to Company A’s website on her mobile phone and laptop, a deterministic link would connect these two devices to that individual based on that login.
• Probabilistic Links — This second ingredient uses an algorithm to sift through anonymous information — like IP address and geolocation — in search of similar patterns. When the algorithm finds a pattern that meets a certain similarity threshold across multiple devices, the algorithm will link these devices to a single person.

Probabilistic links bring incredible scale to the device graph, while deterministic links bring unmatched accuracy.

To deliver the best possible experience to consumers, a device graph that includes both deterministic and probabilistic links is best. Using a device graph with both key ingredients gives marketers both scale and accuracy. While there isn’t a set ratio of deterministic to probabilistic data, I would have more confidence in a device graph with 20-percent deterministic data versus another graph with only 10-percent deterministic data.

Beyond having a device graph built on both deterministic and probabilistic links, there are two more options that should be considered when exploring device graphs:

• Works with what you have — Marketing technology is growing increasingly complex. Device graphs are no different. To assure that marketers glean all the benefits of people-based marketing, it’s important that the device graph works with the marketing stack already in place. Otherwise, marketers may find themselves with siloed device-graph data that is unable to feed their other marketing tools.
• Integrates with existing tools — Using a third-party device graph with a third-party marketing tool could cost marketers up to half of their device-graph scale due to the two tools being unable to sync cookies. Instead, find a device graph that can be embedded within your existing marketing tools and negate the need to sync cookies.

Until recently, the lack of a device graph created the chasm between marketers and people-based marketing. Today, this chasm is closed. Device graphs can accurately — and at scale — link devices to people so marketers can use this information to deliver the experiences consumers crave.

2. Transparent Consumer Controls
People-based marketing is about giving consumers what they want, when they want it, without being asked for it. It’s about understanding consumers well enough to anticipate their future wants just like a seasoned server at a swanky restaurant.

But, a fantastic experience can’t come at any cost. Consumers today want vivid transparency and control over their identity.

• Transparency — The more transparency brands give to consumers, the better the relationship between the two will be. When it comes to device graphs, the graph is responsible for providing two key dimensions of transparency. The first centers around devices. Consumers have the right to know which devices are linked to them. The second dimension applies to data. Consumers also have the right to know where the device-graph data is coming from to assure it originates from trustworthy brands that respect consumer privacy. After all, no one wants mystery meat.
• Control — Transparency alone is not enough. Device graphs must also give consumers the freedom to choose which — if any — of their devices are linked to them.

3. Advanced Analytics Solution
A robust device graph will produce a tremendous amount of information. To transform this device-centric information into people-centric insights, marketers need an advanced analytics solution. It’s only when these two technologies are fused that marketers are able to gain the insights they need to anticipate consumer needs. A people-enabled analytics solution provides:

• People Metric — Traditional analytics solutions are restricted to providing device-centric metrics. People-enabled analytics solutions can deliver metrics based on people — such as revenue per person, the number of people who visited your website or app, or the number of people who saw your display ads. This foundational shift in measurement from devices to people can impact every report your marketing team uses and, more importantly, the insights drawn from those reports.
• Customer Journey Analytics — Historically, marketers have only been capable of understanding the customer journey from the perspective of a single device. But, people interact with brands from many devices — not just one. With people-enabled analytics solutions, marketers can see the complete customer journey, stitched from device to device, to better understand which touchpoints drive business and which touchpoints hurt it.

4. Integrated System of Action
People-based marketing doesn’t stop at gaining insights. People-based marketing requires that marketers go from insight to action quickly enough to meet consumer expectations. Marketers and analysts should be able to identify an insight in their analytics solution, create an audience segment, and share that audience for fast action in any marketing channel. When the system of action is truly integrated with the device graph, the integration goes beyond audience sharing to triggered actions in one solution based off insights in another. The marketing channels that should be supported by an integrated system of action include:

• Search,
• Display,
• In-app messaging,
• In-store messaging, and
• Website.

5. Fluid, Open Ecosystem
A device graph that’s confined to an ecosystem — whether a marketing-technology partner or a walled garden such as Facebook or Google — is not good enough. The consumer journey is not restricted to one marketing channel, one domain, or one anything. The consumer journey is fluid — and so is true people-based marketing.

For people-based marketing to keep up with the consumer journey, it needs an open ecosystem in which to share device graphs and audiences with technologies outside of the native ecosystem. Open ecosystems give marketers freedom to choose which marketing tools to leverage to best reach their consumers.

The Five Core Components in Conclusion
To enjoy a superb dining experience, the food, ambiance, and service must all be topnotch. If any one of these components is out of place, the whole experience falls short. Much like a fantastic dining experience, a five-star people-based marketing experience needs all five of these core components to empower marketers to deliver what’s wanted — without being asked — and at the perfect time.

The post The Five Core Components of People-Based Marketing appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/the-five-core-components-of-people-based-marketing/

Are You Riding the Third Wave of Enterprise Technology — or Being Drowned by It?

We can’t say it enough — you are now in the experience business whether you like it or not. Customers everywhere want experiences, and they will judge your brand by the quality of those experiences. If you do not excite them in the first few seconds of their online visits, you will most likely lose them — for good. Your digitally sophisticated customer is judging you most on the basis of the digital experience you offer. Is that fair? Doesn’t matter! That’s the way it is.

Experiences are now the prime considerations when consumers make their purchasing decisions — and that must be at the forefront of your company’s discussions. You must learn how customers are changing their behaviors when it comes to how they interact with brands.

The Third Wave of Enterprise Technology
We are on the brink of what may be the third wave of enterprise-technology shifts. The first wave — the back-office wave — was when businesses realized that technology could make their internal processes more efficient. The second wave — the front-office wave — was when we began to consider how our sales teams could better interact with customers, and customer-relationship management (CRM) systems came into their own. Today, however, the CRM system no longer delivers a competitive advantage.

Now, it’s time for the third wave, and this one is about putting the consumer at the center of everything we do. It’s about creating smiles and goosebumps from dynamic, relevant, personalized experiences — a shift of tectonic proportions.

A Single View of the Customer
Now, more than ever before, every business needs a single view of its customers. We must all change the way we think about every aspect of our businesses, put ourselves in the customers’ shoes, and understand every detail of the experiences they are having with our brands.

If we do it right, our customers will experience the Four Tenets of an Experienced Business:

1. Know and Respect Me: “Anticipate, predict, and deliver what I want before I ask for it, while respecting my privacy.”
2. Speak in One Voice, Always in Context: “The organizational structure — marketing, sales, support, and production — of the business is transparent and irrelevant to me.”
3. Technology Blends Into My Life: “Don’t make me download an app if I don’t need it, and let me set the terms of our interaction.”
4. Delight Me!: “My expectations change every day, so you must rapidly innovate and disrupt yourselves every day. What was exciting yesterday is ordinary today.”

Think we are being overly dramatic? At the Adobe Symposium in Los Angeles on June 2, 2016, we illustrated the dramatic change in shopping behavior using a real-world example of someone’s recent digital-shopping experience for a car.

Over a three-month period while this customer shopped — almost entirely online — she had over 900 digital touchpoints. Here’s how it mapped out:

• Seventy-one percent of the time she spent was on mobile devices;
• She did 139 Google searches;
• She watched 14 YouTube videos;
• She viewed 89 images (and saved many of them);
• She had 69 dealer interactions; and
• She had 186 manufacturer interactions.

The Importance of Creating the Right Experience
This example is typical of today’s shopping experience. In fact, 90 percent of consumers conduct their shopping without a brand in mind. They pick brands based on the experiences surrounding the products or services — not just the product or service itself. And, customers don’t care about your departments, don’t think about your business goals, and couldn’t care less about your budgets, politics, or silos.

What they care about is the story you tell through your experience and its relevance and immediacy.

So, how do you create the right experiences and reap the benefits of customer loyalty? Digital analyst, anthropologist, and futurist Brian Solis says it begins with a new definition of the customer experience. Solis defines the customer experience as the sum of all customer engagements in each touchpoint and every ‘moment of truth’ throughout the customer lifecycle.

He says we can only create these experiences by employing what he calls “human-centered experience architecture.” Experience architecture is the “art of engendering desired emotions, outcomes, and capabilities throughout the customer journey. It is the process of strategically designing and strengthening a customer’s entire spectrum of interactions with a product or company.”

Here are some principles behind this new way of looking at your business:

1. You can’t stuff new technology into old ways of thinking and expect it to work.
2. Find ways to understand how people are different, what they crave, what they value, and how to design for those in each moment-of-truth interaction with your brand.
3. If you are not considering micro-moments, you will not be considered!
4. It may not be “mobile first,” as some have said. The correct mantra may be “mobile only.”
5. Innovation begins with perspective — seeing things differently.
6. Think about the last great experience you had. What made it unforgettable? That’s what you are going for.

Bottom Line
The bottom line may be that, to design the right experiences, you have to have empathy. You must walk in the shoes of your customers and understand the experiences they are currently having with your brand and really relate to what they want — not what you think they want. Brad Rencher, EVP and GM of Adobe Digital Marketing, said “We are all of us in the Experience Business … We are now at the cusp of a tectonic Enterprise shift.” Is your organization ready to become an experience business? If not, the time to begin is now!

The post Are You Riding the Third Wave of Enterprise Technology — or Being Drowned by It? appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/web-experience/riding-third-wave-enterprise-technology-drowned/

Adobe Named a Leader in Forrester Wave Report on Lead to Revenue Management Vendors

This year Adobe was invited to participate in “The Forrester Wave:™ Lead-to-Revenue Management Platform Vendors, Q4 2016” report. The research firm took a hard look at the current offering, strategy and market presence of the 11 most significant solutions in market.

With the evaluation now completed, we are proud and honored that we are recognized as a leader by Forrester Research, Inc.

Forrester defines L2RM as, “A business system for marketers whose offerings mandate a long, complex, or highly considered buying process. L2RM mostly applies to B2B marketers, but not exclusively. Consumer marketers who are taking highly considered products and services to market also benefit from the managed process of L2RM and the changing marketing remit that the practice enables. The L2RM business system comprises integrated goals, processes, and metrics that reshape marketing practices to drive effective customer engagement across the entire customer life cycle — from awareness to advocacy.”

Here at Adobe, we realize the lines are continuing to blur between B2B and B2C strategies and our heritage in B2C brings great potential to B2B marketers. Therefore, we are excited about our strategy and vision to support L2RM strategies. Today’s marketer needs a marketing platform that enables them to deliver relevant and meaningful interactions to their customers and prospects, that accelerates the buying process and importantly, differentiates from the competition.

Adobe Campaign is a robust multichannel campaign management solution that can meet the needs of B2B, B2C, and business-to-business-to-consumer marketers. Including integrations into the Adobe Marketing Cloud, we provide a platform that allows marketers to better plan, launch and measure interactions throughout the customer journey, in real-time and at scale.

We recognize that being a leader comes with the responsibility to continue innovating and delighting our customers. We are honored to be recognized as a leader and certainly won’t rest on our laurels. We will continue to provide marketers with best-in-class technology, supported by a vision and strategy that allows organizations to evolve their marketing strategy to better manage the customer journey.

The post Adobe Named a Leader in Forrester Wave Report on Lead to Revenue Management Vendors appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/campaign-management/adobe-named-a-leader-in-forrester-wave-report-on-lead-to-revenue-management-vendors/

Interview with Maile Ohye (Google)

Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly

This week’s articles include details on when US consumers do their holiday shopping, five e-commerce trends for 2017, how companies continue to try to expand Black Friday deals, and more.

• When Do US Consumers Shop for the Holidays? [eMarketer]: More consumers are waiting to start their holiday shopping compared to five years ago.
• Five Digital Commerce Trends That Will Propel Us Into 2017 [Forbes]: Always-on commerce, understanding customers through their journeys, and mobile payments could shape areas of focus for 2017.
• Amazon will offer more than a month of Black Friday deals [Internet Retailer]: Other retailers — including Macy’s, Sears, and Toys “R” Us — are looking to extend their deals beyond a single day as well.
• Holiday Marketing Campaigns: ‘Tis the Season for Pinterest [MarketingProfs]: With Pinterest users spending twice as much as the average shopper, they represent an audience to remember this holiday season.
• More shoppers are finding deals in-store and out through mobile [Mobile Commerce Daily]: More than half of users are expected to use mobile devices to make purchase decisions.
• Travelers Increasingly Use Connected Devices for Planning and Booking, Smartphones Experience Largest Gains in Use [Hospitality Net]: Travelers are planning trips with multiple devices, and cross-device behavior doesn’t stop once the booking occurs.
• Stop declining these travellers’ orders! [Tnooz]: Analyzing the expected behaviors of key consumer segments is an important part of ensuring positive customer experiences.

The post Point of Sale: Retail & Travel Weekly appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/news-and-resources/39366/

The Impact of Dynamic Creative Optimization on Programmatic Advertising

The post The Impact of Dynamic Creative Optimization on Programmatic Advertising appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/advertising/impact-dynamic-creative-optimization-programmatic-advertising/

Watching Primetime TV? Get to Know Your TV App.

Our journey starts at eight o’clock on a Tuesday evening, and you’re a television executive with digital oversight. Do you know how viewers are engaging with your mobile app? Even broadly speaking, do you know whether people are using your app as their first or their second screen?

First-Screen Viewers
When the mobile screen is a viewer’s first screen, is it driving more video views? The average person who watches videos on a smartphone watches the small screen for 2 hours and 31 minutes per week, according to “The Nielsen Total Audience Report.” That could be five 30-minute shows per week, which is almost a show every day. Clearly, personalized video recommendations that can take smartphone viewers directly to shows they love can go a long way toward not only establishing, but also solidifying their preference for your app over anybody else’s.

Second-Screen Viewers
When the mobile screen is a viewer’s second screen, is it driving tune-in to your linear broadcast? Research carried out at University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) found that viewers who enjoy quiz shows, game shows, and reality shows are more likely to use their smartphones as second screens; whereas, viewers of drama shows tend to put their phones away during broadcasts. Does your app have the right features to assure multiscreen viewers continue tuning in?

Answering the Crucial Questions
Some of these questions can be answered through in-app polls. For example, the Fox Now app is currently running a poll that asks users, “Are you looking for a specific episode?” The answers will help them determine whether their audience intends to use the app as a first screen to view specific episodes.

Your analytics team can answer other key questions as well as provide you with access to reports about how viewers engage with your app. You can use the reports to evaluate whether your mobile app is meeting the key performance indicators that you’ve set for it.

Both the survey responses from your app and the reports from your analytics team contribute to a feedback loop, which can be used to inform further improvements to your app and enhancements across the path that viewers take to get there. For instance, you can use Adobe Target to test different methods of personalizing the creative that’s promoting your app, the ads that are driving users to download your app, and of course, the experience within the app itself.

Putting it all Together
You’ll know that you’re on the right track when you’re as engaged with daily app usage as you are with following overnight ratings — not because it’s your job, but because you love the impact that personalized experiences have on your audience.

The post Watching Primetime TV? Get to Know Your TV App. appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/watching-primetime-tv-get-know-tv-app/

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How to Move Customer Relationships From Casual to Serious

Customer relationships have many parallels to every other kind of human relationship. They have stages and must be nurtured, and — if not cared for — they will end. However, the big difference in today’s digital world is that you may never even see or speak with your customers — yet, those relationships must still be cared for.

This is where the right algorithmic-attribution capabilities come into play. Attribution modeling helps brands understand the complete sequence of events that lead customers to conversion — from web visits to email campaigns to display impressions and beyond. With advanced statistics and machine learning, algorithmic attribution can help enterprises objectively determine the impact of each marketing touch, which in turn, creates a better understanding of campaign effectiveness, allowing brands to make smarter marketing-investment decisions for future campaigns.

Of course, just like building a rock-solid relationship, developing your brand’s attribution strategy takes a bit of work. You’ll need to combine a sophisticated attribution model with advanced personalization solutions before you add dynamic-ad-buying tools that turn deep customer insights into truly actionable campaigns — and all while you ensure you have the most profitable mix of ads to both meet your marketing goals and keep customers coming back for more.

In the past, this was very difficult; but today, it is a readily available service. In fact, digitally mature companies are 250 percent more likely to do attribution modeling — and, many say it contributes to their success. Unfortunately, only 54 percent of businesses use any kind of attribution at all — and most only look at the customer’s last click before making a purchase, leaving money on the table.

Improve Your Customer Relationships First.
While determining the best way to implement algorithmic attribution in your business, you can start building into your process some of the characteristics that its leaders all share. First, you must understand how your customers interact with your brand on every channel and at every touchpoint. Then, you must decide what your specific goals are with regard to boosting the metrics that are most important for your business — whether that means attracting new customers, maximizing mobile conversions, boosting average order value, or something entirely different.

Don’t Guess — Know Your Customers!
Find out what inspires new interactions with your brand and what attracts new customers. Use the data you’ve gathered to understand the relevance of every interaction you have with them. When you are ready to explore algorithmic attribution, you can see your customers’ journeys across display, social, paid search, and email as well as direct mail, radio, billboards, and television. You’ll be able to understand exactly what delights them — as well as what doesn’t. You are not only measuring conversion, but also examining which channels build awareness, which drive deeper consideration, which build brand loyalty — and ultimately, which build advocates.

Look at the Whole Picture.
People don’t — usually! — fall in love on their first coffee date; similarly, customer don’t often make purchase decisions after only a single interaction. Create rules to weigh the value of each touchpoint. And, be sure that you not only determine why a customer relationship ended, but also learn from that experience. The live data used with algorithmic attribution allows digital marketers to see the whole picture — from who made purchases and what drove them to make those purchases to who dropped off and where (and why) they lost interest.

Understand the Influences of all Your Touchpoints.
Relationships are complex both in life and in marketing. Identify all your touchpoints and determine the impact each has on your customers’ experiences. Even unpaid touches, like product reviews, have impacts. When you are ready for algorithmic-attribution metrics, you can more easily discover your baseline from which to measure your incremental success. We used this technique at Adobe to measure the success of our Adobe.com ads that our partners were supposed to be presenting to customers. We discovered that two of our media partners’ ads were never even being seen by anyone, but we incorrectly assumed that they were in our success metrics — and, we were spending 26 percent of our budget on them!

Know the Desires of Your Multichannel Customers.
Just as with human relationships, different customers have different needs and desires based on the channels and devices they are using. Understand the desires of your customers on all channels so you can develop highly personalized messages, synchronizing insights across all your departments and business units. With algorithmic attribution, messages can be measured in real time, so you can continually gain new insights and optimize your campaigns based on the most current data.

The tools available to you today don’t just help you understand what is happening now — they help you predict what may happen next. By using attribution, personalization, and optimization together, you can build an adaptive content plan that not only ensures your marketing strategy is always engaging and relevant, but also achieves your business goals.

Learn more about taking your customer relationships to the next level with the Adobe guide, ON LOVE AND DATA. Use algorithmic attribution to define the relationship with your customers.

The post How to Move Customer Relationships From Casual to Serious appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.

from Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/move-customer-relationships-casual-serious/