Badgeville Integration with SiteCatalyst – The New Engagement Score

Engagement scoring has been around in the web analytics industry for a long time. The idea behind this kind of score is to give visitors points based on actions they perform that are positive for the business. If a visitor does something important (like viewing certain content) then you give a few points. If a visitor does something very important (like contributing content) you might give them a lot of points. In the end, the goal is to come up with a final number that summarizes just how valuable that visitor has interacted with your site. The most valuable visitors should then be examined and compared with visitors at lower tiers to better understand how the groups differ and how you might encourage visitors to move to a higher score which provides more value to your business.

The rising trend of gamification introduces an interesting twist on engagement scoring. Gamification is the way that you make your site, intranet, or portal more engaging by using elements borrowed from games such as points, achievements, and missions. These intrinsic rewards encourage deep engagement without increasing the cost of the campaign. Previously, engagement scoring was a passive indicator that was often arbitrarily assigned. Now, however, it is a score that visitors to your site see and are interested in improving. As marketers, we can now not only observe engagement but actually be involved with the engagement as it is unfolding.

Introducing the Badgeville to SiteCatalyst Integration

To measure this new type of engagement Analytics Demystified and Badgeville have teamed up to bring you a new integration between Badgeville and SiteCatalyst. This is a Genesis integration that will help you bring your Badgeville gamification data directly into SiteCatalyst. You will then have the ability to see your Badgeville data in the context of your larger SiteCatalyst dataset. Additionally, you can use the powerful features of SiteCatalyst and other Adobe Marketing Cloud tools to analyze the data and even export the augmented data to other systems.

This is the first version of the integration which gives you a solid foundation in understanding the engagement of your visitors or “players” and how they are interacting with your gamified site. The integration currently offers the following reports:

• Badgeville Player ID: The unique ID for each player. The web behavior associated with these IDs can be tied to your Badgeville and CRM information to create a rich and personalized dataset.
• Badgeville Total Points: The lifetime value in points for a player. This report will give you the total sum of points a player has earned in its lifetime which is helpful in understanding the level of experience a visitor has had with your site.
• Badgeville Total Point Groupings: This is similar to Total Points but combines many unique point levels into larger groupings which analysts will find easier to analyze and compare.
• Badgeville Incremental Points: This is the number of marginal points awarded to the player from page to page as they interact with the site and play the game. This is a great indicator of the current level of activity and what is happening now on your site.
• Badgeville Behaviors: As visitors perform actions on your site this will tell you just what it is they are doing (view a video, post a comment, read an article, etc) and how many times they are doing it.

We have created quite a bit of information around these reports which are in the Badgeville Integration Guide (see the Getting Started section below) and how you can use the data. One of the examples that you might find interesting is looking at the Badgeville Total Point Groupings and include other data points that may or may not be part of your game design. Here is an example of how players are combined into general point groupings for analysis. Below we see that the group of 1200-1299 points is amazingly active with the 4th highest number of Video Views. This is apparently a group that has had a history of being very engaged with the site and is still consuming a lot of video content.

All of the other groups at the top of this report are much “younger” groups as far as their total point value. Somehow, though, the 1200-1299 group is behaving very differently and you wouldn’t have even known that was happening before. You can now dig deeper to understand just why that group is so special and if you might be able to adjust your campaign to help improve the performance of the other groups.

On a negative note, we see that the video views per visit for the 400-499 group is lower than what we see in the other groups (red arrow). With this information you might be able to modify your game design by introducing a level or status to help bump that group to a higher Video Views/Visit number.

How to Get Started

If you are a SiteCatalyst and Badgeville customer you can get started with this integration right away. To enable the integration and to access all of the documentation log into SiteCatalyst and navigate to Genesis:

Once you are in Genesis, select Add Integration on the left. Then switch over to the Labs section of Genesis by modifying the dropdown as shown below. Labs is where Genesis places integrations that don’t have any professional services built in. This allows the integration to be completely free if you choose to rely solely on the documentation. If you would like expert assistance, you can contact me (kevin@analyticsdemystified.com).

Once you see the Badgeville icon you can drag the integration over to the Adobe Marketing Cloud on the right to start the configuration process. You will see a popup with instructions that contains links to access the integration documentation. This documentation thoroughly outlines all steps and technical considerations you will want to keep in mind with this integration. Additionally, the document provides many examples to get you started in analyzing the data.

Keep in mind that, as with any Genesis integration, you should thoroughly QA before committing anything to production.

Final Thoughts

I hope that you enjoy this integration and are able to quickly implement it on your site. There is documentation available to help you if you decide to do the integration on your own; however, if you would like assistance putting the integration in place please contact me (kevin@analyticsdemystified.com). I created the integration so you might find me useful in helping you set it up. We have consulting packages available should you need assistance.

There were other attributes and metrics that we considered including in this integration that will be saved for the next version. As you work with the integration please provide feedback to the Badgeville support team. This will then help to mold future enhancements to the integration.