Top Gear: Useful Internet Marketing Strategies & Tips to Move You Forward: How Oracle Maxymiser Works and How It Helps Digital Marketers

Thursday, 10 December 2020

How Oracle Maxymiser Works and How It Helps Digital Marketers

I recently did a demo of Oracle Maxymiser Testing and Optimization, our product within the Oracle Marketing Suite that provides testing and optimization capabilities for marketers. While it may seem a bit inside baseball for me as an Oracle Marketing guy to write a blog post on a demo I did, the detail from it of what Oracle Maxymiser is, how it works, and how it can help marketers is valuable to pass along.

What is Oracle Maxymiser?

Oracle Maxymiser Testing and Optimization is used by marketers for testing and optimization of their websites and mobile apps.

Regarding testing, Maxymiser Testing and Optimization provides marketers with testing capabilities so they can determine what works on their website and apps, and for which visitor. Marketers can test different experiences for different segments or audiences to see what generates the most views, click-throughs, and purchases, either in total or by segment.

When it comes to optimization, Maxymiser Testing and Optimization enables marketers to customize the website or app experience for different people. Optimization can be thought of as the implementation of winning experiences from tests, and the using of data from those tests to help drive personalization. An optimized customer experience has both functionality and personalized content, and Maxymiser Testing and Optimization helps a marketer make data-driven decisions to determine which content should be provided and in which way to which online visitors, and then enables the providing of that content.

How it works

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of Maxymiser Testing and Optimization. When a marketer uses it for either testing or optimization, they do so via building campaigns. An optimization campaign provides personalization to different groups of people. A testing campaign also likely provides personalization, but allows for different types of personalization, with changes in offers, images, or layout so a marketer can see what resonates with people, both as a whole and with distinct segments.

The demo that I did of Maxymiser Testing and Optimization centered around a marketer using it to run a testing campaign to determine which of two different offers on the website are more effective, and also, how much of a difference it makes to personalize the offers.

I built out the test campaign by working within Maxymiser Testing and Optimization using elements and variants. An element is the content being tested, or question to answer. Variants are the different versions of each element. I could have either one element or multiple, and each element can have multiple variants. The test I built out was an A/B one, but I also had the option of building out a multi-variate test that looks at different combinations.

In either scenario, I’m testing to find the best experience for website visitors. It’s a straightforward process to create the test campaign via a simple drag-and-drop interface that I, as a novice user of the application, could do without trouble. I was able to self-serve upload content, swap images, change text, and create the experiences for the test. It was definitely something that could be accomplished by someone without a tremendous amount of technical knowledge or much experience with Maxymiser Testing and Optimization.

To determine the impact of personalization, continued to use the elements and variants to build out different experiences. This idea of impact definitely matters, as again, Maxymiser Testing and Optimization lets a marketer make recommendations and decisions based on actual numbers. This, in many cases, may back up hunches that a marketer had, but now they have the data to validate their hunches. It may also yield unexpected results. The numbers tracked include page views and click-throughs, either on pages early in a user’s experience, or on the order confirmation page so the effectiveness of the entire experience is tracked.

The targeting area in Maxymiser Testing and Optimization is where to set which audience would receive which personalized experience. Then tracking views and clicks of those experiences would provide data around personalization. A marketer can also easily connect Maxymiser Testing and Optimization to a behavioral intelligence system like Oracle Infinity Behaviorial Intelligence, data management platform (DMP) like BlueKai Data Managment Platform, or email orchestration systems like Responsys Campaign Management or Eloqua Marketing Automation.

The last area of Maxymiser Testing and Optimization I viewed in the demo was analytics, starting with the Campaign Performance area powered by Group Sequential Analysis, to enable more quickly finding the winning test experience in a campaign. Additionally, Campaign Insights shows a marketer the test experiences that work best for certain audience segments, and Audience Insights dives into those segments to show how they’re performing relative to one another, regardless of the test being run.

How it helps marketers

Everything I described in the demo shows how Maxymiser Testing and Optimization helps a marketer access quality data so they can give smart recommendations and make data-driven decisions. Maxymiser Testing and Optimization enables the marketer to speak with confidence when answering questions about what works online. The tools then provide the best customer experience based on decisions from the data. All this is to help the marketer succeed — both personally and in driving improved marketing ROI for their company.