We see trends come and go, buzzwords reach fever pitch and the latest tech platform saturate the market before they have even delivered on their promise. Is Optimisation the new ‘black’? We think yes, but like all ‘next big things', we all struggle to integrate this technique into BAU and leverage it to make our marketing dollars and effort more cost effective. Find out how, download the presentation
2. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
“Optimisation…
is the new black”
| Forbes Magazine 2015
3. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
“Math…
is the new black”
| Econsultancy 2013
4. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
“Content…
is the new black”
| Content Marketing Institute 2011
5. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
“Big Data…
is the new black”
| Said everyone 2013
6. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
“Mobile…
is the new black”
| Everyone still saying
7. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
“[Insert Buzzword]…
is the new black”
| In this industry there’s always a new
black.
8. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
An act, process, or methodology of making
something (as a design, system, or decision) as fully
perfect, functional, or effective as possible;
specifically : the mathematical procedures (as
finding the maximum of a function) involved in this.
SOURCE: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/optimization
Optimisation:
[op-tuh-muh-zey-shuh n]
9. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
We see there being two distinct kinds of digital optimisation:
Optimisation
through Testing
vs.
1.
A
X
Y
X
show
they did
Optimisation
through Personalisation
2.
10. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
What we’re
talking about
today:
A
X
Y
X
show
they did
Optimisation
through Personalisation
2.
11. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Personalisation is
all about relevance.
what you
want to say
what they’re
interested in
Relevance
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So why are we struggling?
We think there are two key reasons why.
15. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Which makes governing the digital experience difficult and limits the depth that we
can personalise.
1# The majority of tools are rule-based.
16. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
It’s a mapping exercise.
Where does this
need to happen?
Where
Homepage,
Category page,
Product pages
What is the single
most distinguishing
factor about the
audience?
Audience
Prospect
What other things can digital tell us about
this audience to paint a clearer picture of
their needs?
Attribute 1 Attribute 2
Life Stage (single)
Age range
(20-30)
What digital
information can the
website gather to
understand what
the audience is
trying to achieve?
Scenario
Looked at a credit
card 3 times in
the last 5 days
If a person
demonstrating this
intent walked into a
branch, what would
the customer
service rep do/say?
Business Rule
Re-assure with
brand and
product value
proposition
What is the digital
version of this?
What needs to
change on the site
to deliver on the
business rule?
What
Change tag lines
in relation to Life
Stage andAge
Range
Audience Attribute 1 Attribute 2 Scenario Business Rule What Where
17. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Audience segmentation can make
rule based get big fast…
16 Geotribes
9 life stages
2 genders
8 age ranges
5 defection scores
11,520
combinations
=
20. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
What needs to happen to help deliver
personalisation with more complex
audience segments?
21. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Automation.
Advanced machine learning algorithms.
Automated personalisation uses visitor data to match
the most relevant experience with a given visitor
(basically “letting the machine do it for you”).
It’s really useful when you are not sure which rules are
most effective – so its solves that ROI problem. Over
time, the algorithm learns to predict the most effective
‘thing’, for example content to achieve your goal.
This is what the tech giants use to personalise the
digital experience. Think Facebook, Netflix and
Amazon – in fact Amazon originates 35% of sales
through it’s automated personalisation strategy.
22. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Are there any Australian brands
playing in this space?
23. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Australia Post saw a 35% uplift in
conversions using automated
personalisation.
It’s a big risk to dedicate resources and budget to automated
personalisation experiments.
We helped Australia Post engineer a test to determine if automated
personalisation would work better than rule-based.
The automation experiment used a random forest algorithm to
determine the best content to show a visitor based on their
behavior.
The test proved that automated personalisation did in fact drive
better and faster results than rule-based automation – resulting in a
35% uplift against the control.
We are now helping Australia Post scale-up automated
personalisation across the wider business.
24. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Should all Australian brands roll out
automated personalisation?
25. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Automation can be costly and resource heavy –
and probably not a viable option for every day
Australian brands just yet.
=
26. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
So our advice, if you are tackling personalisation is to
start simple.
27. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Start here.
SOURCE: HUGE INC.
Business rules-based logic. Manage the process between rule-based
logic and algorithmic includes operations,
analytics, content and testing.
Machine-based, algorithmiclearning to
make personalised recommendations.
28. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Just pick 1 audience. Pick one scenario, for example
Repeat Customers.
Lets not make this too big – we don’t want to build
11500 variations to start with.
29. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Do we know:
• what they just looked at?
• if they abandoned something?
• what they bought last?
Don’t over complicate it. A lot of the time,
people jump to the end goal – the vision, and
that’s when it’ll get complex.
Start with the most
differentiating
thing you know
about a visitor.
30. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Companies are not ready to invest in the
people power needed to run personalisation.
2#
33. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
“Technology, data, strategy. These are necessary elements to
make personalisation function…
34. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
But people — the importance placed on developing and enabling
talent in your marketing organisation — they are what make
personalisation thrive and succeed.”
-SOURCE: SCOTT BRINKER
35. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
To succeed there must be a willingness from
stakeholders and management, giving permission for
teams to try and fail (and oodles of platform training).
‘Doh!’ ‘’Whoops!’ ‘Darn it!’
36. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
“Optimisation…
is the new black”
| Digital Balance 2016
37. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Start here.
SOURCE: HUGE INC.
Business rules-based logic.
38. DIGITAL EXPRESSO | NOVEMBER 2016
Thank you.
www.digitalbalance.com.au
Digital Balance
Melbourne +61 3 9020 7340
Perth +61 8 9227 8073
hello@digitalbalance.com.au
Notas del editor
We had planned for our Founder and CEO, Tim Elleston to share some of our learnings with you,
But unfortunately he’s had a death in the family and couldn’t be with us today.
We’ve had the pleasure of working with some great brands – like newscorp, Foxtel, iSelect, AUS POST etc
So I think we have some really interesting experience to share with you today.
I’ll did co-write this deck with Tim, so this is not without his input
But I come at it much more from a planner/strategist angle (rather than a technical one).
So – optimisation is the new black?
Forbes magazine made this claim last last year
Just like econsultancy claimed that math is the new black in 2013
CMI claimed content was in 2011
And certainly someone said mobile is
And you know what, in this industry, there’s always a new black
We see so many new trends come and go
and optimisation is the same as any other trend
And like all those other trends,
It struggles with definitions of what
it is and what it isn’t
So let’s make this clear
What is optimisation?
If you look up the dictionary it says something like this
Within that there’s two distinct kinds
Testing – so AB, multivariate that kind of thing
And personalisation
We want to talk about personalisation
Because its been touted a lot lately
And a lot of technology is claiming to be the silver bullet to doing it right
but as I’ll talk about in this session, it’s a whole lot more than that.
What is personalisation?
Personalisation is about making something more relevant.
Its about displaying relevant, tailored information usually based on browsing behaviour, in real time.The most popular form being product recommendations (think Amazon)
But there’s also search personalisation, onsite, social and mobile
off site to include things like doubleclick and facebook advertising to name a few examples.
And it’s easy right? The vendors in this space all appear to make it look really easy don’t they?
But how many here are personalising an onsite experience? (not email)
So why aren’t many companies doing it? I mean if it really is that easy…
And why are there even less companies doing it well?
Technology – we’ve got the sitecores, the adobes, salesforces, marketos
We’ve certainly got the data - and in fact Forbes said its all about the data -but one thing I know for sure is that its definitely not about the data alone
And we’ve got the strategy right? - we’re all aiming toward a utopian channel/platform/device agnostic experience, specific to me.
I think the biggest problem is that the majority of tools are rule based
that means you have to set up a rule for each of the experiences to show to a particular audience.
It’s great for very simple personalised experiences, but difficult to run something at-depth
So taking that rule-based approach
It’s essentially a mapping exercise.
These are what we consider the 5 things that we map to bring a personalised experience together
Audiences, and audience attributes is where we start
Scenarios that include intent
Business rules (what would we do as people if we knew about a visitor)
Experience is what personalisation should we apply
Location is where we should apply it
@DE I HAVE MADE THIS BUILD, SO YOU CAN RUN THROUGH THE EXERCISE AT ONCE.
So easy right?
The problem we see is that our clients think about audiences in a really granular way
Geotribes/helix personals and so on
Beyond what rules based personalisation can realistically deliver on.
Just to give you an idea of this…lets do some simple math to illustrate how this gets really big.
Let’s personalise content based on this…that’s 11,520 possible combinations.
And that’s before we figure out when and where we want to personalise.
And it just gets too big
we don’t want to do any of that, we just want to do a few rules – but which one is going to bring us greatest ROI?
We don’t know
We’re essentially just stabbing in the dark and hoping something sticks
And we go back to what we know, which is batch and blast, because we can do that, we can measure that, we can tick the boxes.
And we go back to what we know, which is batch and blast, because we can do that, we can measure that, we can tick the boxes.
what needs to happen to help deliver personalisation with more complex audience segments?
Automation.
advanced machine learning algorithms to automatically provide personalised content
based on behavioural data, providing a personalised experience.
It’s really useful when you are not sure which rules are most effective– so its solves that ROI problem
Over time, the algorithm learns to predict the most effective content and displays the content most likely to achieve your goals.
Those that are doing really well, have gone down the automation path.
The Facebooks, the Netflix’s, the Amazons - Amazon originates 35% of sales through personalisation.
And we go back to what we know, which is batch and blast, because we can do that, we can measure that, we can tick the boxes.
Some of our clients are playing in this space.
AUST POST have literally last week released a test
The campaign is an automated personalisation test that uses an algorithm (random forest) to determine the best content to show a visitor based on their behaviour and collected data.
What makes this different to other tests it that there are no manual targeting rules – the algorithm optimises content shown against people landing on the shop and collect @ post pages.
The whole purpose of this test is to figure out whether the ‘rule-less’ approach is effective.
Where yet to find out...
So should we all be aiming for automation?
Of course not, its got to be in more affordable automation.
But automated personalisation is pretty costly.
It’s not viable for every day brands right now.
So our advice, if you are tackling personalisaiton is to start simple. So simple you’re crawling.
just pick 1 audience. Pick one scenario (e.g. Repeat Customers).
Lets not make this too big – we dont want to build 11500 variations to start with.
What do we know about them, that is in real time? We know what they just looked at. We know if they abandoned something. We know what they bought last.
Don’t over complicate it. A lot of the time, people jump to the end goal – the vision, and that’s when it’ll get complex.
So our advice, if you are tackling personalisaiton is to start simple. So simple you’re crawling.
just pick 1 audience. Pick one scenario (e.g. Repeat Customers).
Lets not make this too big – we dont want to build 11500 variations to start with.
What do we know about them, that is in real time? We know what they just looked at. We know if they abandoned something. We know what they bought last.
Don’t over complicate it. A lot of the time, people jump to the end goal – the vision, and that’s when it’ll get complex.
So our advice, if you are tackling personalisaiton is to start simple. So simple you’re crawling.
just pick 1 audience. Pick one scenario (e.g. Repeat Customers).
Lets not make this too big – we dont want to build 11500 variations to start with.
What do we know about them, that is in real time? We know what they just looked at. We know if they abandoned something. We know what they bought last.
Don’t over complicate it. A lot of the time, people jump to the end goal – the vision, and that’s when it’ll get complex.
So our advice, if you are tackling personalisaiton is to start simple. So simple you’re crawling.
just pick 1 audience. Pick one scenario (e.g. Repeat Customers).
Lets not make this too big – we dont want to build 11500 variations to start with.
What do we know about them, that is in real time? We know what they just looked at. We know if they abandoned something. We know what they bought last.
Don’t over complicate it. A lot of the time, people jump to the end goal – the vision, and that’s when it’ll get complex.
Personalisaiton is a lot of work
As with every new trend, its risky to employ people or teams just to personalise.
And especially when we haven’t seen truly significant returns from personalisation yet
So, here’s a typical adoption curve we see in organisations.
Time along the bottom. Success up the side.
We start all gung-ho, get a couple of wins, which may or may not be successful, but then it starts to get harder.
There’s no governance in place – every stakeholder wants some part of it.
Soon enough, you’ve got no consensus, no plan and no results. You start to come down this curve. Then you re-group. You know whats wrong. The ad-hoc approach is killing it. Not in a good way either. And so you restructure. You put some processes in place. You put some governance in. And you start to mature your program – and this might be true for any new trend - content marketing, mobile, what ever
But for personalisation right now, we’re seeing most brands end here.
And to be honest, most are still catching up on some of those other trends,
There’s not the capacity to build a team for yet another new trend
There’s not many of these types of studies available but this is a study on effective personalization by CEB Global,
demonstrates that organisations performing above median ROI – where ROI is increased click through rates
on personalisation, are also 7x more likely to rank people as the top enabler of personalisation.
That’s above technology, strategy and data. That is a massive deal.
Because its not something a vendor can sell you, it’s something has to be built and fostered internally
You may or may not see the similarities of this quote with the famous line in the movie – ‘dead poets society’
Which makes similar comparisons of the sciences to the arts
I think its an apt way to put the context of people within such hardline things such as tech, data and strategy
People is probably the most hardest thing to obtain
You may or may not see the similarities of this quote with the famous line in the movie – ‘dead poets society’
Which makes similar comparisons of the sciences to the arts
I think its an apt way to put the context of people within such hardline things such as tech, data and strategy
People is probably the most hardest thing to obtain
Sitecore & adobe hold them to their promisses
Hold your vendor accountable
Enlist the help of some great marketing technologists (ahem) to mentor your team
So yes, optimisation is the new black
Well perhaps nearly the new black.
But first we’ve got to get over that first adoption curve
And to do that…
Start small, don’t get complicated
If you think it viable for your brand, Work your way toward algorithmic,
or wait until it gets more obtainable/affordable
But get the operational proceedures in place before you do so.
And finally, know that people trump technology any day.