Website Personalization - A/B Testing Recommendations Strategy in Digital Analytics and WebSphere Commerce

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Website and marketing personalization are valuable parts of the marketing strategies used by many of IBMs customers, and certainly most retailers. Up to 20% of website sales can funnel through recommendations, so it's important to get personalization right - or as finely tuned as possible. Both IBM Digital Recommendations and Websphere Commerce offer A/B testing tools to help you make the most of the opportunities you have to communicate with your customers. They are easy to use and often require no involvement by IT - which means you will have the ability to make data driven decisions about your marketing programs in a more timely manner.

IBM Digital Recommendations A/B testing tool allows you to easily swap out and test different offer strategies in a recommendations zone on a page. Should you offer on-sale items to encourage conversion, or will that reduce your overall $ earned from recommendations? Should you help clients make a decision about what to add to their basket by offering similar products? Or should you show customers the products that are ultimately purchased together? A/B testing is a great way for you to decide what is effective for your business. Most A/B testing doesn't even involve your IT group - which can lead to faster decision making.

Image 1 - Digital Recommendations User Interface: A/B Test of Product Page Recommendation Strategies

*All Digital Recommendations customers have access to A/B testing. Check out The Digital Product Recommendations User Guide to learn more.

In Websphere Commerce 7.2 and later, you take this testing even further-- you can also find the best location on a page for recommendations. How do you do this? In WebSphere this is called Slot Testing and you execute it via a Marketing Experiment, currently only on a cart page or an order confirmation page. For example, test which location will perform better: displaying recommendations on the upper right rail above the submit order button, or further down the page, below cart contents.

Image 2 - Websphere Commerce User Interface: Marketing Experiment Slot Test on Shopping Cart Page

This location-based A/B test works together with the IBM Digital Recommendations tool. You create the offers/zones you want to test in IBM DA Recs, then in Websphere create a marketing experiment to serve the recommendations in one location or in another. Read more about Marketing Experiments at: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSZLC2_7.0.0/com.ibm.commerce.management-center.doc/concepts/csbexpoverview.htm

Thanks,

Beth

-IBM Digital Analytics Team