Brandon Bunker, senior manager of analytics at Sony Electronics, has been in the analytics and optimisation business for many years. Before coming to Sony, he was responsible for driving optimisation for site search, creative, and navigation at Nike. At Sony, he now manages web analytics, tag management, direct marketing analytics, and testing.
Sony, as an early adopter, has been using a TMS for over two years. They originally brought in Ensighten Manage to help with managing their tags and to increase site performance. But they also needed the ability to have different servicing levels for tag delivery, and their TMS vendor of choice made this possible. The servicing level capability allows Sony to add and execute tags at different stages of rendering the page in the browser. They have implemented global tag deployments that are of high priority and get served at the page head, before any content is processed. This is incredibly important when delivering testing code to avoid replacing control content with test content right in front of users – also known as ‘flicker.’ It is highly problematic when a site visitor sees control content with a 20 per cent discount offer, which is suddenly replaced with test content offering a 10 per cent discount offer on the same item.
The next level of tag delivery service is of medium priority – primarily used for first-party analytics. This is considered a best practice because placing such tags at the bottom of the page runs the risk of having them not fire when users abandon the site (or close their browser altogether) while the browser is still processing the page. The final level of service is of low priority, encompassing all third-party pixel tracking (e.g ad or affiliate conversion tracking) for the site.
Brandon and his team are an innovative group and Ensighten’s servicing capability has allowed them to implement cutting-edge cross-marketing at Sony, empowering advanced targeting and segmenting for their testing efforts. With respect to the data layer, Brandon suggests that “if you don’t have a rich data set, you are under utilising the testing platform. We have a rich data layer that comprises data from SiteCatalyst, email platforms, CRM’s, ATG chat, and many other systems. This gives us much better and more robust targeting. We went from having twenty valuable data layer variables to dozens of them.”
For example, Sony uses the data layer to collect product prices and order IDs from the page and distribute this data to its third-party vendors. Some data elements appear in different formats across the site. Ensighten enables Sony to standardise the data into a single format and syndicate the data to vendors consistently. Sony was using Adobe’s Test&Target long before they brought in a TMS. Deploying tests was a long and arduous process, requiring many cycles to coordinate and get tags in place. While they still saw value in going through these cycles, TMS has enabled them to deploy the tags needed for testing in a much more timely manner. “We are now deploying our mboxes in one or two minutes tops,” says Brandon. This has not only allowed them to get tests out more quickly but also get more tests executed.
Additionally, Ensighten integrates the data layer into mboxes for advanced profiling, segmentation, targeting and personalisation. Ensighten Manage also populates the SiteCatalyst tags with data layer elements to power business decisions on customer experiences that otherwise would not be possible. The other big boost that tag management gave Brandon and the optimisation team at Sony was the ability to control when and where their Test&Target mboxes would fire. The cost savings that Sony realised by leveraging this capability was significant. Sony has now run dozens of Test&Target Tests via their tag management system. “We have a handful of tests that actually print money for us,” says Brandon. “Ensighten has allowed Sony to execute more tests and discover those winners more easily and in a much more-timely manner.”