One of the most strategic components of your digital marketing technology stack is your “data layer.” Simply put, the data layer is the data structure that outlines all the digital data that you want to manage through your digital marketing initiatives. Coupled with a tag management system, you can leverage the data layer to pass data to your various digital marketing vendors or make marketing decisions based on data.
One of the inherent limitations of the data layer, however, is that the data is created at the event level. For example, a well-structured data layer will include page and product attributes on a product detail page, and transactional data on the confirmation page. While useful, this event-level data can be limiting if your marketing strategy is to target different messages to different segments. To achieve a more personalized marketing experience, you’ll need a data layer that contains information both at the event AND user level.
So what exactly do we mean by user-level data? Consider these scenarios.
- On a product detail page, the event-level data layer will include information on the product (i.e. name, price, category, etc.), which is fed into analytics or retargeting solutions. The analytics reports include data on products viewed, and retargeting solutions will target the customer back to the site.
With the addition of user-level information, however, the data layer can also include whether the visitor was a high-value customer (for example, because they purchased more than five times in the past), or merely a window shopper (because they browse the site repeatedly without purchasing). This information can now be pushed into analytics for better reporting, or into the retargeting platform for more effective campaigns where window shoppers are presented with additional incentives to convert. - On your landing page, the event-level data layer will include information about the page. Within your analytics tool, you’ll be able to get reporting on the page (i.e. bounce rate, time on page, etc.); using your A/B testing tool you’ll be able to run tests against the visitors landing on the page.
By enriching with user-level data, you can look at the user affinity towards your different product categories (i.e. electronics vs. furniture). Not only can this information be passed into your analytics tool for better reporting, it can also be consumed by your optimization tool to deliver a more targeted experience, resulting in higher conversions.
Tealium AudienceStream
Data layer enrichment, or creation of user-level data, is one of the cornerstone features of Tealium AudienceStream, a real-time data action engine that is complementary to our Tealium iQ™ tag management system. Through a point-and-click interface, marketers can create and manage user-level attributes that are added to the data layer and available for consumption by Tealium iQ, as well as by marketing execution systems. Examples of such attributes include recency, frequency, lifetime value, customer segment, customer affinity, and more.
If you want to take your marketing to the next level, consider enriching your data layer with user-level attributes. This addition lets you better target your various segments across channels. To learn more, visit the AudienceStream page or schedule a demo.
