Leveraging Coremetrics Real Estate Tags to Perform A/B Testing
Real estate tags can be leveraged to track not only creative performance on a page but also A/B and multivariate testing. As you may recall, the real estate tag track how similar links on the same page perform. However, you can also leverage it to track A/B and MVT testing.
Since real estate tags allow users to break down reports by creative version, creative position and link name, one can take the tag and pass in the components of the A/B test. Then you can see how the version is performing (A or B), which call to action (if there are multiple ones on the page) drove the user and .
To do this you will need to tag every destination link on the A and B copies with cm_re parameters. The tag would look similar to:
http://www.xyz.com/?cm_re=Holiday Sale Version A-_-holidaybanner_jpg-_-728×90
Using the versioning in the first parameter, you can know exactly what copy is being tested without having to stuff too much into the parameter. Holidaybanner_jpg is the name of the image that drove the click. Putting the jpg or gif or fla can let you see which one drives higher conversion on your site (static vs dynamic). The 728×90 is the image dimensions and can be handy if you test many pages (then you can easily see my creative dimension which size is driving more people in. You might initially think its your larger images but in fact it might be a text link.
However if you want to know more about the link (i.e. revenue and other conversion KPIs), you should also add a cm_sp or site promotion tag to it. Site promotion tags follow the structure of promotion group, promotion name and link (creative) name. If you wish, you can add in whatever parameters in place of the three out of the box ones (however if you are using site promotion tags elsewhere, you will want to follow that established naming convention).
So the new tag would look like:
http://www.xyz.com/?cm_re=Holiday Sale Version A-_-holidaybanner_jpg-_-728×90&cm_sp=Marketing-_-Holiday Sale-_-holidaybanner_jpg_728x90
If you plan on using for multivariate testing, you could shape the tag similar to above just making sure each test case can dynamically pass in a new version value to the real estate tag.
This is a nice initial way of A/B and MVT testing but by no means is it the best. This will help you build up the business case to bring in a more robust package to automate this process.
Written by:
Dorian D. Regester
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I love reading your blog.