Lessons Learned From Cyber Monday

Two years ago on Cyber Monday, a faulty advertising tag began causing intermittent site performance issues across Deckers’ online network. Not good timing. The company, a leading lifestyle footwear manufacturer known for its UGG and Teva brands, had recently contracted with Tealium for its enterprise tag management solution, but had only deployed Tealium on one e-commerce site up until that point, UggAustralia.com. Deckers was able to disable the faulty tag (code snippet) almost instantly on that site via an intuitive web interface, saving 100 percent of the online orders. For its other sites, Deckers had to manually remove the code with help from IT, taking much longer and impacting sales. We asked Nick Smotek, interactive development manager for Deckers, to briefly reflect back on that incident and give us an update on how he uses Tealium iQ™, an enterprise tag management solution, and a new product called Tealium AudienceStream™. Deckers now has Tealium® solutions deployed across 17 different web properties. For more information, read the full case study.

Hi Nick, what lessons did you learn from your Cyber Monday experience two years ago?

The holiday season is responsible for a large part of our business. One of the key lessons we have learned from years past is to make sure we add all third-party integrations to our site in a way that will prevent them from having an ill effect on our sites. We use Tealium as a way to do this.

How has tag management changed your approach to the holiday season overall?

Tealium IQ has allowed us more flexibility during the holidays. We are able to add small initiatives to the site on the fly. We are able to quickly test out if tag/ad companies are the right choice for us with minimal or no development efforts. We are able to change the ways we measure customer activity by changing up click events that feed our analytics without having to do a code push.

You recently signed up for AudienceStream, a segmentation and real-time action engine. What excites you most about this new solution?

I am mostly excited about being able to better personalize the content on our sites. One of the things we are seeing is that we are going to have to increase the size of our content production team to handle the increased amount of content variations we would like to have through all of our sites. I was happy we were able to use AudienceStream for our abandon carts program. It’s also going to be a key component to help shape our loyalty program. 

What else are you doing differently this holiday season – any other technologies or best practices that you are leveraging?

We are mostly focused on usability and overall performance of the sites and trying to do more personalization whenever possible.