How It Works
Click Truth is a hosted solution that works independently of any existing site infrastructure to provide a comprehensive, intelligent supplement to traditional advertising and promotional techniques.
Click Truth's goal is to track each site's users across their visits to deliver tailored content to them. It also provides visibility into how well site visits are generating conversions as well as the performance of the tailored content itself to create conversions. The system analyzes this data to ensure its decision-making engine always delivers the best advertising content to each visitor.
Bob is a first-time visitor to ItemsForSale.com. When he arrives at the site he is automatically registered with a tracking cookie. As Bob navigates to each micro-site on ItemsForSale.com the number of Flags associated with his account grows. Flags are triggered by a variety of events, such as simply navigating to a page, spending time on pages, signing up for newsletters, making purchases, or requesting information. As Flags accumulate, Click Truth assigns general attributes to Bob that groups him with similar users. The site can now display promotions and special offers based on Bob's unique preferences. Bob likes what he sees, and buys more.
Click Truth flags are used to identify various user activities and behaviors. The more flags you enable across your network, the better the Click Truth Decision Engine becomes in considering advertisements and content. Flags are small snippets of Javascript easily integrated into your website and distributable across your affiliate network. Since Click Truth is a hosted solution, we're able to track the entire life-cycle of a visitor. This means the more flags you and your affiliates enable, the better the conversions and affiliate commissions will become.
With your flags in place, Click Truth will begin rapidly profiling and segmenting user behavior. From day one the decision engine will begin making better considerations for which advertisements to serve users across the various networks.
With ever-richer profile flagging, the decision engine is able to determine the best possible advertisement for each user on your or your affiliate's websites. Similar to the tracking snippet, Click Truth advertising snippets replace traditional static banners providing fresh new content delivered specifically for each user on their site.
While so much of Click Truth is automated, the hosted dashboard provides reporting views for everyone. Quickly determine which advertisements perform best for which user segments. See who is contributing the most number of flags benefiting your overall conversion. Identify user segments who have abandoned a sign-up and provide them with custom promotions later. The visibility and functionality is endless when you're able to manage all your website and affiliate visitors on one platform.
Digging Deeper
Click Truth stores two broad classes of information about each visitor: low-level tracking information and high-level attributes. The tracking information covers the user's site activity and history and is recorded as Flags, Goals, and Decisions. Attributes are interpreted values that are created by finding patterns in a user's tracking information.
Flags are a set of unique events for each micro-site that are triggered by a specific activity on a site. Any important activity can be represented as a Flag. Examples include filling out a form, navigating to a different page on the site, or clicking on an advertisement. Flags can also require a visitor spends a certain amount of time on a page, or visits a sequence of pages (or even other flags). The requirements of a flag can also depend on referrer information and demographic information that can be supplied by the visitor's web browser such as geographic location.
Goals are a subset of Flags, which represent valuable user actions that can be assigned a worth. This worth can be defined by dollars, or just an arbitrary "point" value. Site owners can setup Goals ahead of time, or choose from the list of recorded Flags to define their desired Goals. Examples of Goals include making a purchase, referring a friend, or a visitor providing their contact information.
A Decision is simply a record of the content that has been served to the site visitor and the conversion rate for that content. For each visitor a full Decision history will be maintained allowing more intelligent content Decisions in the future.
The high-level attributes that are stored with each visitor's profile aggregate similar visitors by common characteristics. When a group of visitors have a similar pattern of tracking information, an attribute is created and assigned to them. The content delivery system relies on both attribute data and tracking information to serve content.
In addition to the information stored for each visitor, Click Truth also stores common values, metrics, and tags for each micro-site and goal. Each micro-site has associated flags, goals, and decisions that allow the site provider a view into unique visitors, conversions, and available advertisements. Also, the worth of each goal serves as a general performance metric that is attached to visitors (total worth), attributes (average worth), and decision items (expected worth).