Users interact with brands in a wide variety of ways, including on a growing number of mobile devices and over-the-top (OTT) devices, such as smart TVs, set top boxes, and gaming consoles. It’s important to capture and correlate this user behavior across every channel to provide an optimized experience and that’s why Tealium offers native app support for a growing list of devices including those powered by Apple iOS and Google’s Android, as well as OTT devices such as Apple TV, Chromecast and Roku.
This need has led to an industry shift away from traditional session-based analytics as the sole measurement tool, and toward visitor-based analytics to determine the correct way to personalize user experience both on-and-offsite.
The following tips are just a few of the ways companies can leverage Tealium to factor mobile and OTT devices into the experience optimization of their users across every engagement channel.
Tip 1: Message Timing & Sequence
Understanding when and how your audience engages with your content will help you know how to adjust message content and timing.
A study showed 71% of people with a smartphone open their emails first thing in the morning — but only a small fraction of them will actually make a purchase or perform another meaningful action. This is the time to nurture them toward conversion and record engagement preferences to be used later in personalized messaging to drive response.
As marketers we need to understand when our audiences are most likely to engage with our content and use that data to facilitate two-way conversations at the times when they are most likely to respond.
We also want to consider sequencing of messages as we nurture users through various funnels or engagement initiatives. Site personalization and offsite marketing spend for new and anonymous users should be very different than the campaigns and content shown to mid-to-late funnel users.
It’s important to factor the OTT interactions so that the sequencing of content and initiatives can be accurately adjusted. Identifying behaviors of potential or soon-to-be customers through similarities and trends between customer segments, such as similar behaviors and actions users take prior to purchasing across OTT devices, is just one example of how conversion rates are being increased by Tealium customers.
Tip 2: Cross-Device Session Stitching
Users engage with multiple OTT devices simultaneously and that behavioral data needs to be aggregated in real-time to build a truly accurate user profile. In fact, Accenture reports that as much as 87% of consumers use a second screen device while watching TV.
By leveraging AudienceStream, Tealium customers can stitch those users together across all devices in real-time and simultaneously adjust their marketing communications. AudienceStream combines multiple device sessions so marketers can get an aggregate view of content affinity and award badges, which in turn can be used to further personalize user experience on-and-off-app.
Let’s consider for a moment the multiple OTT device user is someone who is on their iPad while browsing an Apple TV application and then leaves both of these devices to convert on their laptop. Traditional session-based analytics would indicate this as three sessions: two abandonments and one conversion. With AudienceStream, this would reflect as a single cross-device session leading to conversion. This matters when retargeting campaigns and ad spend are based upon abandonment and will help companies avoid unnecessary promotion of a product for which the user has always converted.
Tip 3: Protect Application Performance While Achieving Business Goals
The need to personalize the experience of users and accurately market to them has led to an explosive proliferation of marketing technologies. To provide those technologies with data has led companies to include an average of over 20 tags on their websites, according to recent Tealium studies.
Unfortunately, this approach does not scale to mobile or most OTT devices, where performance metrics like data security, memory footprint, stability, battery usage and bandwidth consumed are closely monitored. These application performance factors must be balanced alongside the tracking needs of the business.
To solve for this, companies can utilize Tealium’s data collection and distribution technology. Tealium is capable of collecting and evaluating the data in real-time and serving as a decision engine for not only how the data is combined with other data sets and correlated around a user, but also how it is distributed to other technologies. With Tealium’s cloud-based delivery, data can be communicated through server-side calls, effectively supplying the data to marketing technologies while protecting the critical performance of OTT applications through a net reduction of in-app SDKs.
