Infinite Integrations with SiteSpect

By Justin Bougher

March 7, 2019

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You’ve been hearing a lot about how different optimization solutions integrate with specific softwares — Optimizely for instance just announced new integration capabilities with Lotame. This attention hammers home a critical piece of your optimization puzzle: How is your solution going to work with and optimize your other technology vendors? Really, this heightened attention mostly highlights other solutions’ inability to integrate with your other software. SiteSpect, on the other hand, has always been able to integrate with any part of your ecosystem. It’s a feature of our patented architecture, and we’re the only optimization solution guaranteed to fit into your stack.

How We Integrate With Any Marketing Tech Stack

We talk a lot about how SiteSpect “sits in the flow of traffic,” giving us a unique ability to optimize your site while improving performance. Well, this same feature also means that integrations are easy for us, in a way that they will never be for tag-based tools. If you already have a third-party solution implemented, such as a Web Analytics Tool, a Customer Experience Analytics tool, a Data Layer or Tag Manager, a DMP, or anything else, SiteSpect will work with it and even improve its performance without additional effort.

Integrating with Web Analytics

Let’s take a dive into how we integrate with Web Analytics tools, like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. SiteSpect integrates easily with Analytics packages in real-time, capturing data more reliably and easily than other optimization and A/B testing platforms. With SiteSpect, visitors request your site with Variations already applied, and A/B test data already present in your Data Layer. When the Analytics tag is triggered in the browser, it sends both the original and SiteSpect data to your Analytics instance – no need for an additional request.

Integrating with Customer Experience Analytics

SiteSpect integrates easily with Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) tools, like Clicktale and Decibel Insights through the WATTS® feature which places user and A/B test experience identifiers in JavaScript code on any web page. Integrating with CEA tools allows you to compare A/B test variations side by side using heatmap and visit replays for desktop and mobile. Uncover how the changes you’ve made impact visitors’ interactions. Instill trust in your results by sharing session replays and aligning your team around actual customer experiences.

mobile phone shopping

Data Layers and Tag Managers

Data Layers are used by most Digital Tag Managers, Audience Managers, and Experience Managers and are embedded in your page in any of several common formats. Data Layers are used to transport data between your website, different analytics, marketing, personalization, and management tools. Regardless of the format of your data layer, SiteSpect can use any information it contains. Common use cases include:

  • targeting and segmenting by user attributes such as membership level or gender
  • applying a campaign only to those who have seen a specific product category page
  • personalizing experience based on a preferred bricks-and-mortar store or previous purchases

Data Management Platforms (DMPs)

You can use SiteSpect to customize experiences and A/B tests based on audiences and categories defined in your data management platform. Once the DMP provides data about the user back to your page, SiteSpect can capture it in any of several ways. With BlueKai, for example, a tag is used to pull user specific data onto the page from BlueKai. With Tealium AudienceStream, Tealium stores data into the browser’s localStorage.

Regardless of how your DMP stores data on your site, SiteSpect can use it. There are many different use cases. You can customize experiences based on user preference data (eg: preferred store or user price sensitivity) from your DMP, or pass user data from your DMP back to SiteSpect’s analytics engine by sending a pixel request containing some of the user specific data in the URL string.

You can also send SiteSpect data back to your DMP, using our SiteSpect WATTS® to embed data about the user and A/B test on first page load so that it will be accessible in Javascript for passing on to your DMP.

Visualization, Analysis and Business Intelligence Tools

Rather than use SiteSpect data in real-time in your other data management and analytics packages, you may want to process your data using Excel, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, IBM Watson or other external analytics and business intelligence tools. You can always Export User and Visit level metrics using SiteSpect’s API or manually via CSV file export. Complete visit logs are available upon request.

Tableau Example – ROI Calculator

Using the same API data exports available to our clients, SiteSpect calculates a financial ROI based on client determined metrics for all cloud clients. By pulling the campaign and metric data into Tableau, we have built an ROI Calculator that allows our customers to calculate and visualize the returns of winning variations of different campaigns. Clients can also choose to include risk mitigation in ROI and modify time frames and calculations to best match their preferred ROI modeling. Tableau and the API makes it easy to provide a deep dive into the results of using SiteSpect.

Data Warehouse

Many of our clients aggregate customer data from multiple sources into their own Data Warehouse, for data mining and modeling purposes. Because Data Warehouses often contain a long history of data and are optimized for complex analytics, users can define segments according to similar affinities seen by other users in the past. You can use these segments and audiences for targeting purposes by exporting a set of customer IDs from your Data Warehouse into a SiteSpect data set. Once in SiteSpect, the data set can be used to target users, apply variations, or segment reports. By exposing the Customer ID in a cookie, data layer or custom header, you can ensure that each of your website’s visitors gets a consistent experience, dictated by modeling and research done with your Data Warehouse.

Where Other Tools Fall Short

Compare our integrations with other optimization tools. With them, any integration must be built within their software for the particular instance. Then, when you implement, you need to use extensive tagging to set this up. Assuming you want to capture data, you need to know ahead of time exactly what you want to capture before you go live. This severely limits your ability to grow, adapt, and scale your A/B testing efforts. Don’t let that hinder the overall performance potential of your digital channels.

To learn more about SiteSpect, visit our website.

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Justin Bougher

Justin Bougher

Justin Bougher was the VP of Product at SiteSpect.

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