Don’t Put the (AudienceStream) Data Before the Horse

The opening discussions of deploying the Tealium AudienceStream™ real-time action engine always revolve around use cases and data. Often times the discussion quickly jumps from the use case right to the data, i.e., which attributes to create, but this skips over many important details and is not our best practice.

Let’s think about this using some (hypothetical) weekend plans.

Let’s say I received an invitation for a party this Saturday night at an unfamiliar venue. It would be unwise of me to jump in my car and just start driving without knowing where to go, how to get there, or when I’ll show up. So the two key data points of this party that I need are 1) when and 2) where. By knowing where the venue is located I am able to figure out how long it will take to drive, which will tell me when I should leave. Now I can jump in the car, buckle my seat belt, whip out my Rand McNally Road Atlas and wonder, “Hey, why do they call it Arby’s?” I mean … enter the address into the navigation system.

Building off of this in the AudienceStream, we can think of the invitation as 1) which vendors you have, and 2) which visitors do you want to target. Then a series of questions allow you to work backwards to the data. Here is a sample questionnaire to use:

1. Do you want fries with that?

1. Determine which vendor(s) you want to use (connectors)
2. Determine who you want to target (audience)
3. Determine when you want to target them (action)
4. Determine what message will be delivered
5. Determine the event and data required to deliver the message (attributes)

For example:

• Make it the curly fries!

• I have an ESP (e-mail service provider)
• I want to target cart abandoners
• I want to target them one hour after the session ends
• I want my email to include details around all the items abandoned in the cart
• I need to capture:
  • The cart abandonment event
  • The visitor’s email address
  • The products IDs abandoned
    • I can upload a product feed to my ESP, which will perform a lookup on the IDs to provide the product image URL and name

This is one approach that will help ensure you have all the necessary information to target the right visitor at the right place at the right time as part of an effective cart abandonment campaign. This type of approach can be applied to many other important use cases.

Fun fact, in case you were wondering: “Arby’s” is the phonetic pronunciation of “R.B.’s”, which stands for … “Roast Beef.”