New Technology Integration Between Tealium and Optimizely Offers Exciting Opportunities for Advanced Testing and Optimization

The ultimate goal of mature testing programs is to develop a deeper understanding of customers—uncovering their needs, desires, and goals. Once this knowledge has been attained, it’s possible to adapt website messaging, design, and functionality to create more relevant, personal experiences for users. Leveraging data from various sources, it’s possible to build robust models to guide such decisions, but most marketers are faced with two problems hindering such an approach: There’s a shortage of talented and experienced data scientists capable of performing such advanced analysis, and customers themselves are constantly changing in response to trends, markets, and the general environment. Together, these problems form a hurdle that may seem impossible to clear.

Fortunately, developers of testing, optimization, and analytics tools are working to address this challenge—and an exciting new solution has been announced today. Through a new partnership, Tealium is bringing the advanced segmentation capabilities of its Tealium AudienceStream™ solution directly to Optimizely, one of the most popular testing platforms available. Through the integration of these two tools, marketers will be able to quickly create nuanced segments based on actual customer behavior in AudienceStream, and then transfer those segments seamlessly into Optimizely as targets for A/B testing.

Once a segment has been created in Tealium AudienceStream, it can be easily added to the testing campaign within Optimizely.

“[Optimizely’s] integration with Tealium AudienceStream will make it easier for marketing and product teams to take action on the audience data that matters most to them,” Dan Siroker, CEO and co-founder of Optimizely, explained in a press release. In the same announcement Mike Anderson, co-founder and CTO of Tealium, commented that, “This collaboration enables a new level of marketing agility. Marketers can design more effective campaigns with the ability to more efficiently test new messages and run site experiments based on specific audiences, resulting in improved customer experiences and ultimately more conversions.”

In essence, AudienceStream makes advanced testing easier by enabling advanced clustering—which can now be used immediately and easily to inform testing. “Without a tool like AudienceStream, an analyst must manually join many disparate data sources by user ID. When you have access to data collected from website behavioral measures, in-store purchase records, third-party sources, and many other data sets, this process can become burdensome,” Brooks Bell data scientist Reid Bryant explains. Performing cluster analysis is a complicated task, but the quality of the results can increase with by leveraging many distinct data sets. This allows the most important variables for each audience group to be identified and eventually extracted. “Products like AudienceStream,” Reid says, “take a lot of the grunt work out of the process and allow the analyst to spend more of their time on variable selection and modeling rather than data pre-processing.”

Furthermore, a close integration between audience analysis and testing platforms could help marketers extract deeper insights from test data, too. “By pulling test data from Optimizely into AudienceStream,” Brooks Bell optimization analyst Jeremy Jordan explains, “it would be possible to mine the data to discover unexpected customer behaviors and characteristics that may have been lost through the traditional test segmentation and setup process.” This feature, he adds, could be especially useful during periods like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when new groups of consumers with unique needs flood sites looking to complete their gift shopping.

Overall, the integration between Tealium and Optimizely reflects a broader trend in testing and optimization—and ultimately, marketing—as a whole. Consumers today are shopping all the time, across many devices and contexts, and data, carefully collected and smartly applied, are the most powerful resource for connecting with them. Marketers, as a result, demand quick and effective tools for organizing, analyzing, and applying this data—and the new integration between Tealium  and Optimizely is one way this is getting easier.

For more information about the new Tealium and Optimizely integration, read the official release. Then, join Tealium, Optimizely, and Brooks Bell for a webinar exploring the integration and its opportunities on November 13—register today!