Targeted Surveys - Suite Talk

For my first post in the Suite Talk series I am going to show you how to target surveys using T&T. Surveys are useful tools for getting inside people’s heads. They give insight into what people are thinking, what they intend and the way they feel. Most surveys are trying to assess very specific things about specific groups of people. Targeting surveys helps you zero in on only the people you want to reach, which in turn reduces the complexity and can increase the response rate. Adobe Test&Target and Adobe Survey can be used together to target your surveys to the audiences that you are most interested in.

Targeting Surveys

To setup a targeted survey there are a few prerequisites:

• Test&Target
• Survey
• Something you want to find out
• SiteCatalyst

There are 4 steps to setting up a targeted survey:

1. Create the survey
2. Set up the targeting parameters
3. Create the offer
4. Build the targeting campaign

For this example I will use the following business question. Do people who look at lots or products on my site have problems finding what they are looking for or are they just comparing all the options?

Step #1: Create the Survey

Create a survey that will help answer the business question. There is just one question, “How difficult is it to find what you are looking for on our site?”, in this example to keep it simple.For a targeted survey there are a couple of settings that are important.

• Set the survey launch to Manual so the survey is only launched by Test&Target.
• Set the display options to “always serve” as targeting is handled in Test&Target.
• Don’t limit the respondents, if you want to use this as an ongoing benchmark.
• It usually isn’t necessary to have any filtering question like “how many products have you seen in this visit?” because the survey is already targeted to the audience you are interested in.

Step #2: Setup the Targeting Parameter

Many times T&T will already have the targeting parameters available to you (e.g Browser, Geo, etc.). However, in this case I want to target people who have seen more than 12 products on my site. To do this setup a simple profile script to keep a count of the number of product pages a customer has viewed.

This code will be different for each site as implementation will vary between sites.This logic will look for a product page mBox and then increment the value each time that mBox is viewed.

Step #3: Create the offer

The HTML for the T&T offer is pretty simple.

There are few things to note with this.

• Line 1: creates a div for the survey to be served into, this is optional but can add a lot to the experience (see the Survey User Guide).
• Line 3: Checks to make sure the s object is available and that Survey is installed, this will help avoid javascript errors on the page if the s_code is unavailable.
• Line 5: Launches the survey, the first argument is the survey id and the second argument is the name of the div that the survey should be launched into (again see the Survey User Guide).

Step #4: Setup the Targeting Campaign

The final step is to setup the targeting campaign. This campaign is very simple it will have one recipe and be targeted at the campaign level. The targeting will be user.productViews is greater than 12.

Next, setup one recipe with the offer created in the previous step.

Finally give the campaign a name, set the conversion to “**display mboxes**”, test it and push it live. This is what the final result looks like.

Run the survey long enough to get enough responses to feel comfortable with the answers. Then make decisions based on the data from the survey in combination with analytics data. The simplest way to do this would be to create a segment in SiteCatalyst of those who found the site very easy and another segment of those who found it very hard.  Then compare their activity on the site, specifically which sections of the site they visited, whether they used search, or just browsed for products, and even where they entered the site. That information will help decide which features resonate with customers and which ones didn’t. It will also help generate additional ideas for testing.

Other Use Cases

This technique can be used in a number of different situations. Say you have a segment in T&T that commonly under performs, you could target that segment with a survey to see if you can find out why that segment might be underperforming. Even if you get a hundred responses to the question “how could we improve our site?” might give you enough direction to start testing against that group. Another use case could be that you or your analyst find something interesting like, people from the west coast don’t consume nearly as much content on you site as people from the east, for which you can’t explain. This would be a great way to get some qualitative data to add color and dimension to your analysis.

Are there other use cases that use targeted surveys that you can think of?

• Justin Grover
• 0 responses
•  Marketing Integration, Online Marketing, Testing and Targeting, Web Analytics

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