Creating e-Marketing Spot experiments
E-Marketing Spot experiments display the same marketing message in two or more different E-Marketing Spots. Use e-Marketing Spot experiments to determine the best location on your store pages for your marketing message. For example, you can display the same ad for a shipping promotion on your search results page and on your home page to see which location gets better results.
Before you begin
If you want to view revenue statistics that are related to the experiment, make sure that a Site Administrator has enabled the collection of revenue statistics before the experiment starts.
Procedure
- Open the Marketing tool.
- Open the web activity that contains the e-Marketing Spot that you want to experiment with.
- In the palette, expand the Branching section.
- Drag an Experiment element onto
the flow connector immediately to the left of the e-Marketing
Spot element that you want to test.Alternatively, you can right-click the e-Marketing Spot element, and then click Add to Experiment.A branch is created, leading to a second path through the web activity. This is the experiment path.
- Click the Experiment element.
- Enter the experiment properties:
Property Description Name Enter a meaningful name in the field. This name identifies the experiment. Branch type For e-Marketing Spot experiments, Random path is the only option. Frequency of element changes for each customer Select one of the following options: - No change - Customer always sees the same content
- This option specifies that customers always see the same content during the life of the experiment.
- Session - Customer sees the same content within a session
- This option specifies that customers see the same content during the current session. They can see different content during the next session.
- Request - Customer might see different content on each view
- This option specifies that customers are not restricted to seeing
set content for any length of time. They can see different content
as of the next site request.
When using this option for an e-Marketing Spot experiment, the e-Marketing Spots must be on different pages for the experiment to work properly.
Maximum number of customers This option specifies the number of customers that are to participate in the experiment. If you do not specify the maximum number of customers, you must specify an end date. If the maximum number of customers is reached when a customer reaches the experiment, they continue along the control path. If the maximum number of customers is not reached, then they are assigned to a path according to the branch type. Once the maximum number of customers is reached, those customers already participating in the experiment continues along their assigned path. New customers do not participate in the experiment.
Start Date Define a start date and time for the experiment. You can either enter a date in the field, or select a date by using the calendar tool. Similarly, you can enter a time directly into the field, or you can select one using the clock tool. If you do not specify a start date, the experiment starts when the web activity is scheduled to start. End Date Define an end date and time for the experiment. You can either enter a date in the field, or select a date by using the calendar tool. Similarly, you can enter a time directly into the field, or you can select one using the clock tool. If you do not specify an end date, you must specify the maximum number of customers. Session length The maximum duration of time to consider that the contents of a customer's order were influenced by a marketing experiment. The timing begins when the customer views an e-Marketing Spot that is used in the experiment. The timing ends when the customer submits an order. If the duration of time is less than the session length, then the marketing services check whether the order contains SKUs associated with the experiment recommendations. If so, revenue numbers are included in the experiment statistics. If the Frequency of element changes for each customer is set to Session, the session length is also the amount of time during which the customer sees the same test element. After the session time expires, the customer can be assigned a different test element in the experiment.
Status Select the status of the experiment. You can select either Running or Suspended. - Click the Paths tab, and enter each
path's properties:
Property Description Name Enter a meaningful name in the field. This name identifies the path in both this tab and the Statistics tab. Percentage Enter the percentage weighting for each path. This percentage represents the frequency that a particular path displays. For example, if a path is defined at 50%, it displays half of the times that a customer sees this activity. Sequence This column displays the path's position relative to the other paths in the experiment. This column is hidden by default; to display it, see Using table views. Unique ID This column displays the internal database ID for this object; this ID is used for troubleshooting purposes. This column is hidden by default; to display it, see Using table views. - Optional: You can add more paths to the experiment by right-clicking the Experiment element, and then clicking Add Path. You can delete any paths by right-clicking the path arrow, and then clicking Delete.
- Click the e-Marketing Spot element
in the experiment path.The properties for the element display.
- Identify the experimental e-Marketing Spot to display the
marketing message.You can either enter the name of the e-Marketing Spot and click Find and Add, or click the Show utilities view icon to open the utilities view, and then search or browse for the appropriate content.
- Click Save to save the activity, or click Close to close the Activity Builder and return to the previous page.