People generate massive amounts of content daily. Think about how much you use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or blog on a daily basis. As an example of how much content is out there, Facebook has 2.5 billion pieces of content and 300 million photos.

Are companies capitalizing on user generated content (UGC)? For some, the answer is a resounding yes. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 78% of B2C companies plan to leverage UGC in their marketing strategies this year.

Adobe recently acquired Livefyre, a solution that curates UGC, because the technology supports the Adobe Marketing Cloud and provides marketers quick access to authentic, user-generated content.

In an interview with CMS Wire, Loni Stark, senior director of strategy and product marketing for Adobe, reveals more about the strategy behind the acquisition. Giving marketers full access to Livefyre, it allows them to tap into billions of pieces of UGC to use on their websites, ads, emails, apps, and more.

Brands typically use this content for brand advocacy. According to Adobe, UGC is revered as more trustworthy by consumers.

“Our content research found 81% of respondents considered a product that was endorsed by a family member or someone they were related to or a friend,” said Stark.

With more authentic user-generated content, brands have the opportunity to create more compelling and engaging experiences.

“That’s why we wanted to work with Livefyre,” Stark remarked. “It’s to bring the joint story of professional and user-generated content and deliver it in creative ways through the marketing cloud.”

This thought should give us pause as marketers. Rather than creating and pushing more of our content out there, shouldn’t we be creating opportunities and experiences for our customers that inspire their content creation?

Let us hear from you. How do you plan on taking advantage of user-generated content to enhance your marketing efforts?

The Clicktale product pulls all the information about everything someone does on the site.  It’s an easy integration to the web site.  They also integrate to Adobe Analystics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Experience Manager. By getting these deep insights, you can use that to create better tests and more efficiently optimize your site.

AEM Integration

There’s a button on AEM site and you get a heat map to show you what users are doing on the site.

Many companies like CNN and Ancestry.com are using Clicktale

Mobile vs desktop: There are a number of use cases suited to mobile vs desktop.  In other words both have their place. Neither is going away.  That’s why Clicktale supports both channels.  You can get full session playback for a mobile site.  You also get a heat map for the mobile page.

Ancestry’s Usage

Arran has been with Ancestry.com for quite a while.  He ran the Australia office for a while but recently moved to the Bay Area.  He’s the senior director of conversion.

Ancestry

• leading online family history service
• Subscription allows you to access voer 2B document
• leading DNA test for family history
  • Genotyped 1.5 M customers
• $680M revenue in 2015
• 1,300 employees
• Offices in US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Sweden

Conversion and Insights, a love story

A lot of Ancestry’s brand is about storytelling.  The story

• Uses Adobe Analytics to get data insights and see what opportunities exist
• Create the hypothesis and then test it in Adobe Target
• Use Tableau dashboards to see the data in Target and the actual revenue.
  • Business impact
  • Lifetime revenue
• But were missing the customer insight.  Over 80% of the time, people were doing unexpected things.
  • Wanted to know why a test won and why a test lost
  • It’s about that true insight in actual usage

Case Study 1

Ancestry DNA is a simple $99 test to find your ethnic mix and uncover distant relatives.  This gives

• New audience
• Significant increase in traffic to home page
• But limited insight into customer behavior

Ran a test on the Ancestry DNA page.  They wanted to find out about the impact to different sections.  The results were good with an overall increase in sales.  However, ClickTale showed that all the middle content had little engagement.  The bottom section for FAQ’s had 53 seconds, almost 3X the other sections.

Then changed the banner image from white male to Native American

Case Study 2

Iterative testing into a great experience.   This test was about onboarding.  They used a testing process:

• Think it
• Test it
• Build it

So new functionality gets tested before rollout of functionality.   In this case, they wanted to make it really easy to run through your family tree.

Outcome:

• Increase bill through of customers in free stage trial
• Users more likely to bill through after the trial if they actually build their family tree
• Quicker speed to discovery and to building a full product for A/B test validation (get product to release quicker)

The process

1. Setup four rounds of the experience
2. Look at the Clicktale videos
3. Build second prototype and test again
   1. Also looked at if users were building trees quicker, etc.
4. He showed how they were able to see the test results

Happy Customer, Happy Life

The voice of the customer amplified

The team with members who spent a minimum of two hours every six weeks watching what a customer does on the site saw far greater improvements to their designs’ user experience.

With Clicktale, can view videos by interest (

• Customer device
  • destktop
  • tablet
• customer profile
  • customer type
  • product purchased
• entry page
• Specific Tests
• Specific page visite

Quote: Combining conversion testing with the videos creates a better customer experience and happier results.

He started out with a couple polls, most of the attendees basically love the intellectual stimulation so obviously there were a bunch of data geeks involved.

What’s the end goal?

In ascending order

1. Data exploration
2. Data visualization
3. Insights
4. Action (there is a key chasm between insights and action)
5. Automated action
6. Results

Some of the questions to ask: what, who, why and then so what.

Quote: What got you here won’t get you where you want to go

Quote: Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication (Leanardo DaVinci)  You have to keep your data explanations  as simple as possible.

Key best practice: Communicate visually. A picture is worth a thousand words.  Use them to better relay key concepts. He showed several examples including some bar charts of pencils.  But the key is to tell a story with the data and visuals.

The same goes for infographics.  You can use various stock photography libraries to make your own infographics.

Best practice: Tell me what to think.  Don’t just throw data at it.  Add a little color to highlight things people should see.

• Good things are green and bad are red btw.
• Label the outliers.  you see a peak or a dip, highlight that it was “Memorial Day”
• Show benchmarks for context.
• Avoid the mistake of now showing bad results
• Include goals in charts.  Show what you want to achieve vs what you achieved
• Show a trended view, not just a point in time.
  • Can also show a trend vs target

Best Practice: Align to your corporate objectives.  Then measure yourself in those terms.

Best Practice: Use composite metrics.  Composite metrics is a combination or index of things with an average.  Nasdaq composite, Dow Jones Index, Quarterback ratings, etc.

Chris George, VP Product Marketing at Pop Sugar

Pop Sugar is a media and technology company that caters to 18-35 year old women.  Popsugar.com and shopstyle.com.  Mobile is hitting them in a big way.  Over 70% of visits come from a mobile device.  It’s really hard to create ads for mobile.   That means they are putting a lot of investment in content marketing (easier on mobile) vs display advertising (banner).

Problem: Marketers are not content creators.

Pop Sugar is focused on using data to identify places to focus on content.   To that end, they’ve tried very hard to define key content metrics like social sharing.  They created a composite metric: the POPSUGAR engagement score: composits of vists, time spent, social score.  They then plot the composite score over time.   You can then use that data to define what content will have the most relevance to a brand or company.

End result: Data helps you focus on what content will have the most impact.

Questions for evaluating your game:

1. Are you good at recognizing patterns and breaks in patterns?
2. Are you better known for the insights you discover or for your ideas or for acting on them?
3. Are you good at advocating for your ideas?
4. When someone asks the wrong question, do you answer the question they should have asked?
5. Do you tend to look for the story in the data of for the data to support your story?

Note: this is less about your technical skills and more about just getting the right answers and acting on them.

How to do it:

1. Get your core services up so that insights can be actioned
2. Free up your time by delivering self-service analysis to the business
3. Get strategic

Predictive analytics is like planning for a Marathon. It’s a series of steps.   You start simple with a 5K and then move on to a 10K, half marathon, and finally a full marathon. Here are the steps:

1. Descriptive analytics (tactical) – what happened
2. Diagnostic analytics – why
3. Advanced diagnostic analytics – why and for whom
4. Predictive analytics (strategic) – what’s next or what could happen
5. Cognitive analytics- newer with machines making decisions in context

How do you get there?  The Analytics Plan

It’s about freeing up your time and where to get started.  It’s an analytics maturity plan.

Descriptive Analytics

You need to collect, connect, and democratize.

Challenges:

• It takes a long time to manage code
• You get an endless stream of question from the business
• You have limited time to execute

Objective

• Reduce time to configure data collection
• Reduce dependency on IT resource

Outcomes

• Foundation for taking action on insights
• More time to focus on analysis

First mistake: Not having objectives that align to your vision

Gear for success

• Tools
  • Marketing cloud org id
  • Dynamic Tag Management (DTM)
  • Regional Data Collection (RDM)
  • Visitor ID Service
  • This will give you the access you need while reducing your need for IT.
• People
  • people
  • Device graph
  • To get to people, you need to publish and share audience segment in the new co-op
  • This will allow you to connect he consumer journey across devices
• Analysis workspace: democratize the process
  • This will give you rapid data analysis and visualizations.
  • It will also free up your time for deeper analysis
  • Note: Analysis Workspace is the home for all future Adobe Analytics features
  • Now you’ve got self-service up and running.  This include new features like Segment IQ

Diagnostic Analytics

Take care of significance, unify, compare

Challenges

• Massive amounts of valuable analysis time is spent trying to answer “why”

Objective

• free up your time for higher value analysis and sneure insights can be executed

Outcomes

• More tie for higher value analysis and clear paths for optimization

Gear

• Anomaly detection
  • Why: It’s a starting point for analysis and audience discovery.  It reduces the risk and improves efficiency and uncovers opportunities.
  • Anomaly detection also automates advanced statistical analysis for the non-statistician
• Marketing cloud audiences
  • Gives you enriched segmentation with online and offline data (third party
  • real time integration
  • allows you to analyze audience reach, demographic data, and psychographic data
• Segment IQ
  • Segment IQ helps you discover differences between segments with automatec analysis
  • You can uncover the key characteristics of the audience segments that drive your KPI’s
  • You can also identify overlap between your segments

Advanced Diagnostic Analytics

Move onto enrich, explain, and uncover

Challenges

• Audiene and customer profiles are partially understood and incomplete

Objectives

• Enrich understanding of the customer and reduce analysis time

Outcomes

• Deepen your understandg of the customer

Gear

• Customer attribute
  • Understand the entire customer journey across channel
  • Deliver more relevant and timely content to prospects
  • Identify and target key micro-segments
  • Need Analytics Premium or Premium Customer 360
• Contribution analysis
  • Intelligently identifies possible cause for anomalous changes in data
  • Reduces analysis from days or weeks to seconds or minutes
  • Provides data science as a service for the business user
  • The new contribution analysis tool in beta drove or saved $50M across 12 customers
    • One client identified where cart removal increased by 300%.   Needed to know why.  The analysis identified two specific products and the tag management solution.  Tag Manager was kicking it out of the cart.
    • Anotehr client used it to identify an important change in a campaign.  Saw a decrease in revenue for the brand.  One campaign was killed because they used the wrong metrics for measurement. They reactivated and closed the gap
• Audience clustering
  • Uncover relevant, valuable, sizeable audiences of customers for targeting
  • Move beyond simple segmentation towards actionable audiences
  • Forget educated guesses… uncovers meaningful patterns
  • Need Analytics Premium. It’s part of Workbench

You are now halfway to Predictive Analytics

Predictive Analytics

It falls into two areas. First is making predictions around your business. (forecast revenue.) Second is making predictions about your customers (churn, buying patterns, etc.)

Challenges

• measuring true impact of marketing is back-breaking
• What is likely to happen next?

Objectives

• Connect the entire cstomer
• Predict future customer actions

Outcomes

• Assist with better budget planning
• Targeted customer experience

Gear

• Algorithmic Attribution
  • Ensures impartiality through a data-driven approach. Not just you deciding what whether first touch is the biggest indicator.(or some other model)
  • Accurately quantifies the impact of marketing in driving success
  • Combines interactions across paid media and brand-owned experiences
• Propensity Scoring
  • Predict how likely customers are to complete a future action
  • Market to the most relevant audiences
  • Predict ho much lift to expect before you target an audience
  • need Analytics Premium Complete or Premium Predictive Intelligence
• Decision trees (classify)
  • Rapidly analyst the probability of all possible outcomes
  • Easy to interpret and explain
  • Deploy the models for real-time decisions and personalization
  • need Analytics Premium Complete or Premium Predictive Analytics

Elevating the Role of Analytics

Don’t forget one key aspect here. You have to organize for success.  You can take a variety of approaches like centralized, COE, consulting, functioal, and decentralized.  Turns out consulting is the least effective. Centralized or COE is the most able to allow you to mature.

Key Consideration: nurture a mutualistic relationship between analysts and data scientists.  (get data scientists if you don’t have them.

Next steps

1. Get strategic. Evangelize the insights and become the secret weapon to the C-Suite
2. Key strategies
   1. be a trust builder
   2. go the extra mile to foster learning
   3. Be the guide to which the enterprise turns
   4. Speak your audience’s language
   5. Tell the enterprise what’s possible

“I can’t live without my… [fill in the blank].”

Many of us might answer smartphone, tablet, eReader, or wearable device (like our smartwatches or FitBits). This rampant proliferation of technology has opened our eyes to the possibilities of customer engagement.

It’s no wonder that capitalizing on analytics is a top priority for marketers. According to a recent Forbes article:

• 89% of marketers have predictive analytics on their roadmap for 2016
• 49% use predictive analytics today
• 40% plan to implement analytics in the next 12 months

In our interview series with Robert Sumner, principal of Perficient’s Adobe practice, we talked about the path to personalization and the challenges of implementing a personalization strategy.

However, the insights gained from analytics make it possible to create engaging, personalized experiences. Sumner shares his perspective on analytics:

No matter where you are on your digital marketing journey, we’re ready to help you navigate your transformation. Come chat with our team in booth #530 at Adobe Summit, March 20-24, 2016. You can also follow members of the Perficient team on Twitter during the event, @PRFTDigitalTech.

Are you excited for Adobe Summit? I know I am!

We’re now down to the last few days before Adobe Summit starts on March 22^nd and I’m getting my bags packed.

This year, I’m bringing something new: a video camera! Every day, I’ll be sharing a video of my thoughts, insights and views on what I’ve learned at Adobe Summit. Joining me will be a collection of my colleagues, comerades and partners.

I’ll be posting at least one video a day for the duration of Adobe Summit, so make sure to stay tuned in to get the freshest scoop of industry insights, reactions and the latest news from Adobe Summit.

Don’t Miss Out!

To ensure you don’t miss an update, follow myself and Perficient Digital Tech on Twitter, where I’ll be posting updates:

Follow @KlcoDanR

Follow @PRFTDigitalTech

You can also subscribe to the Perficient Digital Tech Blog for a weekly digest update after Adobe Summit to enjoy all of the Digital Marketing goodness at once:
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Most of today’s savvy digital analytics marketers are already either using a tag management system or started migrating their legacy clickstream hard code implementation to a TMS approach. To successfully audit your Adobe Analytics implementation, you must first understand the full process of data collection for your specific implementation. For the purpose of this post, our use case will be focus on auditing our Adobe Analytics and DTM implementation.

DTM Process

Potential Issues:

A data element (Cookie, URL Parameter, Custom Script, CSS Selector, or JS Object) that is mapped to a tool such as Adobe Analytics can return empty if the wrong load rule was selected.

Source: https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/reference/processing_rule_order.html

Solution: Disruptive Advertising’s Adobe DTM Debugger

Description: Easily view your Processing Rule Sets and Processing Order.

Pricing: Free

Link: http://www.disruptiveadvertising.com/analytics/introducing-the-adobe-dtm-debugger/

Adobe Analytics Process

Potential Issues:

If the selected Dimensions (Custom Values, Context Data, Traffic Variables, Hit Attributes, Conversion Variables, Success Events) uses an incorrect conditional logic statement, your data collection could cause major ramifications such as overwriting variables and incorrect mapping.

Source: https://marketing.adobe.com/resources/help/en_US/reference/processing_rule_order.html

Solution: Stratigent’s Adobe Analytics SMART Bookmarklet

Description: Easily view your Processing Rule Sets and Processing Order.

Pricing: There are two pricing models for the application:

1. Current version, no updates:  $5,000 for unlimited use, one-time fee
2. Current version, plus any future updates to it:  $10,000 for unlimited use, one-time fee

Link: http://www.stratigent.com/our-solutions/partner-specific-solutions/adobe-analytics-smart-bookmarklet

Other Considerations:

Adobe DTM Switch: Adobe self-owned plugin extension that allows you to toggle the debug mode and staging mode for Adobe Dynamic Tag Management.

Web Analytics Solution Profiler (WASP): Digital Analytics quality assurance auditing tool created by Cardinal Path that allows you to visualize what and where tags are firing.

ObservePoint Tag Debugger: Creates a new tab in the developer tools to enable quick finding and detailed viewing of analytics tags and other technologies on the current page.

There are a number of digital data collection auditing options available from web packet sniffers, browser plugins, console add-ons and QA tools, but these solutions were selected for 2 reasons, which are 1) Adobe centric and 2) User Friendly. These solutions should help get you started and up and running with safe guarding your Adobe Analytics implementation.

IT has been treated as a cost center for years if not decades. The result` is enormous technical debt. IT has been turned into package implementers and outsourced for over a decade and now, when deep technical capabilities are needed, technical competencies are hard to find. The CMO may have great ideas but when faced with aging systems, huge sunk costs, mismanaged data, inefficient processes and a lack of talent, they would become mired in the complexity that is the reality of most IT environments.

What is needed is for the CIO to modernize IT systems, clean up data and create agile processes so the CMO can deliver on a digital vision. A transformational CIO is needed and the mission of IT needs to change from cost containment to digital innovation. Does the CMO really want to deal with an aging ERP system, an out of date waterfall methodology, or moving CRM to the cloud? I don’t think so. And I don’t think the answer to achieving a digital transformation is in filling the execute suite. It’s going to take a lot of hard work to rationalize and modernize systems and information management. There needs to be a shift from keeping the lights on as economically as possible to a rapid transformation. The CIO and CMO need a shared vision for the digital transformation and a practical roadmap to get there.

The perceived lack of IT business alignment is caused by the misalignment of shared goals. Think about the goals of outsourced IT – reduce cost and stabilize systems to meet SLAs. This is a barrier to change! IT must have a goal of digital innovation and not cost containment to the point of sacrificing technical capability including systems, processes and human capital. A transformational CIO must share the same goals as the CMO.

The following is an excerpt from the CIO article:

The rise of the digital customer has sparked a battle among executives — namely, CMO vs. CIO — with lots of online sales at stake. In turn, this has led some companies to create new executive positions, such as the chief digital officer, chief data officer, chief analytics officer, chief marketing technologist and chief experience officer, all charged with taking a holistic view of the digital customer and reaching out across the enterprise…

Proponents of a new C-suite executive argue that the need for business-tech alignment is greater than ever. Companies must survive and thrive in a digital world where relationships with the customer, employee and supplier require emerging technology. The responsibility for this alignment has often fallen on the shoulders of CIOs, and every year for more than a decade CIOs have reiterated that this is their biggest challenge.

Michael Krypel from Adobe talked about using optimization techniques to improve the customer experience. Optimization means testing different concepts, measuring their effectiveness and then adjusting the experience to make it better.

Businesses must translate their ideas into something that the customer can see, touch, feel, talk to, or listen to. This is the definition of customer-centric design.

Three tenets for customer-centric design:

1. Qualitatively and quantitatively understand customer goals. Quantitave aggregates the What, while the Why is discovered qualitatively.
2. Continually realign the business  and customer goals. Only the most customer-centric business survive.
3. Experiment with new products and services is the only reliable way to determine if a product or service is useful for customers.

Strategically, optimization requires a program maturity model to evolve the culture of optimization.   Organizations have to be organized for optimization because there are a lot of roles involved in testing and learning cultures. A key skill set of the future is the ability to solve visual and auditory problems at the intersection of design, data, marketing, and technology.

T-Mobile’s Ryan Pizzuto spoke about tests that T-Mobile has run to optimize their customer experiences. They start with a control experience. They first removed a central link on the page and tested the experience.  The resulting data showed that removing that link on the page resulted in a 24% lift in conversion rate.

In another test, T-Mobile started selling phones independent of the plan, which exposed the full price of the phone to the consumer.  So instead of getting a free phone and paying for the true cost in the monthly services fees, T-Mobile wanted to lower the price of the plan.  In the first try at this on their site, they made the full price not so apparent of the site, and it apparently caused confusion among the consumers and orders dropped off.  They decided to test the way the prices was displayed, and created a better version of the price section on the site.  In the new version they saw a 16% improvement in conversion and 56% improvement in average order value.

T-Mobile’s examples really showed true wins for the optimization of the content on the site.

Everybody is in content marketing, whether you are a producer or consumer.  Consumers have a choice of where to go for content so content marketers have to work hard to attract, nurture and retain audiences.  Content saturation is a real problem today.  There is so much content available in text, images and video that it’s hard to attract attention to your content.  “More content is being created every 2 days in 2015 than has ever been created from the beginning of time”, says Google’s Eric Schmidt.

Here are some stats:

• 35% of businesses have a documented content strategy.
• 42% of business create content weekly.
• 55% will increase their content marketing spend this year.

In B2B:

• 70% of companies are creating content at a faster pace than even last year.
• 77% of companies create content at least monthly.

How to get better at content marketing?  Having a content strategy is key. Here are top 5 best practices to follow:

1. Focus on your audience.  Instead of starting with the product or brand, start with the audience.
2. Map content to sales cycle.  If you focus on your product, you develop content for the top of the sales funnel.  As you look at your audience, you will understand that as customers travel through the sales process, they want content specific to their needs at that time.
3. Create personalized content.  Personalization is not just adding the customer name at the top of an email or letter.  A challenge to personalized content is to create the right structure of the content to make it personalizable.
4. Promote content.  We used to just create content like a white paper and maybe send an email to drive customers to that content.  Now you want to create that content and then proliferate that content into different channels.  For example, turn the content into an infographic that can be added to a blog.  Tweet segments of the content with links back tot he original.  Provide contests to access the content.
5. Measure, Analyze and Optimize content.  70% of organizations still struggle with content measurement.  They struggle with tying(attribute) content reading back to sales goals or other KPIs. However, to optimize your content, you must measure it and analyze what’s good, what’s bad,e tc.

One aspect of a content strategy is to have content governance.  This should be a formal set of rules and processes to make sure content is produced and delivered appropriately. However, don’t make these governance rules into roadblocks, but rather provide guard rails.  Governance requires participation by everyone in the organization.  Content should be part of the culture and subject matter experts should be called upon to be key content contributors.

How to enable better content marketing using Adobe Experience Manager:

• Annotations in Adobe Experience Manager is a good way to enhance content.  Peers can review the content and make comments right in the content using Annotations.
• Structure content so it can be reused easily
• Tag content for the audiences that would be interested in the content
• Data quality rules enable the rest of the organization.  We usually think of data quality in relation to enterprise databases. This same quality should apply to content.  Meta data on content increase search ability and decrease duplication. Within AEM you can automate Data Checks in the approval workflow to make sure meta data is getting filled in appropriately.

How to create engaging content:

1. First, make the content relevant. Check to see if your content answers a key question that keeps a customer up at night.
2. Have a new or unexpected perspective.  What are you saying different from everyone else.
3. Tell a story and connect your content to that story. This helps create an emotional connection with you.
4. Make sure the content is useful. Can the customer do something new or think differently.

What makes content Intelligent?

• Semantic organization helps the customer understand where the content fits in the overall picture
• Rich Structure
• Findability
• Reusability across channels, screens and devices
• Deliverability

You typically judge intelligence by metrics.  So intelligent content requires good data so measurements can be made. This data is also tremendously useful for personalization.