Well, it’s August and true to their word, Adobe upgraded us to SiteCatalyst v15 on the 1st, and so I thought I’d share a few of the golden nuggets within v15.

I was thinking about how to order them…do I go by not bad to flamin’ eck, that’s awesome? Or start with the big bang and then let it continue to smoulder throughout?

The problem is there are too many new and great features that you can’t really put them in any type of order. They appeal to you on different levels, from functionality, to UI, to analysis, to reporting, to combination segmentation and sub reporting.

So I promised that I would finally put fingertip to keyboard and talk a little bit more about using Visitor Scoring…to finish up the series that I started a while ago.

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that we implemented a series of metrics for engagement measurement, culminating in a per-visitor score.

I wanted to share with you some of the insights and benefits of doing all of this, particularly in Discover.

When it comes to searching across the web, we all know that Google is king, but does this still hold true across your own internal network?

Over the past 12 months we have wrestled with this question, particularly in an environment with multiple search mechanisms, manually maintained indexes, and masses of sites that were created when metadata was primarily used to categorise instead of search.

This is the third (but not final) post in the series on Visitor Engagement. One of the problems with the Visitor Scoring method that I previously described, is that, at the end of the day, you’re still somewhat limited to viewing scores at the “average” level, by segment.

That presents a number of challenges because the average is precisely that…and the underlying scores vary dramatically within each segment.

But there is a way to see what each and every visitor score is, or even within the different segments…and it’s called the Unique Visitor ID. You can see at the visitor level, how many times they’ve returned, how many “things” they’ve done, such as searches, product views, revenue etc.

This is really the icing on the proverbial cake.

This is a follow on post to my previous one about measuring that elusive engagement. This post focuses on the aspect of applying a score to visitor interactions, as they interact with your content and applications.

Visitor scoring is fairly simple – especially in SiteCatalyst, and by leveraging the data in Discover through segmentation, (and ultimately in SiteCatalyst 15), it’ll give you even more insight into visitor engagement.

Visitor scoring measures and assigns a relative value to individual customers and prospects based on their actions and behaviors over time. You can determine intent and engagement – even before visitors convert.

Once you’ve identified your most valuable visitors, you can dissect their actions to determine the campaigns, keywords, referring sites and offline touch points that engage them – and invest more on these efforts.

Here’s a real humdinger with you.

It’s campaign time again. Not just any old campaign; it’s our main recruitment campaign of the year.

What we normally do on this campaign is behaviorally target content to users based on their application stage.

Why? Because we know from previous tests that behaviorally targeting content for re-engagement purposes not only lifts our application completion rate, but provides more relevance to the user when they visit our site – instead of just seeing a standard campaign message each time. And relevance is proven to lift conversions.

But this time, the gates of hell opened and out rode the fifth horseman…with a complicated double somersault backflip twist.

One of the most powerful ways to enable an audience connection is through behavioural segmentation.

Many companies today segment from a business standpoint. Don’t get me wrong, this is a good strategy and aligns your measurement and optimisation strategy with your business segmentation model.

Customer / non-customer segments. Product A owners / product B owners. Mosaic-based segments. Geographic segments. Lead / Non-lead segments. These are all typically business-based segments, and you should definitely be segmenting using this methodology if your overall business does.

But I think there’s a higher level of segmentation – behavioural segmentation. Read on to see how we easily achieved this.

In many cases homepages are either relatively static, or promotional driven. The problem is that homepages are often still the starting point of a users journey on the site and not every user should see the same content.

Enter Omniture Test and Target. A very powerful application that can dynamically change content based on previous user behaviors. Content relevance yields greater conversion, so it makes a lot of sense to include it in your overall online strategy.