Ford.com Personalization and Optimization

Over the past 5 years or so, I managed the technical delivery of solutions focused on personalization and optimization on ford.com.

The Ford website was built on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). The site uses Adobe Tags (formerly Adobe Launch) and Adobe Analytics for data collection. Together with Adobe Target and Adobe Audience Manager, this data ecosystem is used to deliver personalized experiences, product recommendations, journey orchestration, and optimization testing. We worked with our Ford business clients to develop data layer standards and implementation guides for development teams, ensuring the data we wanted to collect or use as a signal to take action against was available on the page when we needed it.

We collected data points about what our visitors viewed or searched for on ford.com and used Adobe Target to deliver relevant content and messaging on subsequent visits. As you can see in the image above, when a visitor views the home page on their intial visit, they are served default content that has been developed for the page. As the visitor navigates around the website looking through vehicle pages, vehicle features and other content, we used a mix of Adobe Analytics and cookies to display relevant context-based content to the visitor on subsequent visits. You'll notice on the right side of the image above that the billboard component content has been updated to show a Ford Explorer as opposed to the Ford F-150 shown on the intial visit.

Additonally, there is also a rules-based component that becomes populated with up to the last three vehicles visited by our visitor. This personalization has now become the expected experience when vsiting ford.com. Our results showed that our Vehicle Aware experience resulted in a 71% increase in our Purchase Intent (PI) score as well as a 17% increase in click-thru-rate (CTR) on our personalized home page billboard content.

Regional Targeted Rollout of Features

Ford clients wanted to test their new eCommerce functionality over a limited geographical area and across only two vehicles, the 2022 Mustang Mach-e and the 2022 Escape. We leveraged Adobe Target to inject Ford's 3-tabbed Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) component into the home page, vehicle home page and model details pages of the two vehicles for visitors geographically located in New York, New Jersey and Massachussets.

This was purely a Journey Orchestration activity with Adobe Analytics implemented throughout the journey for data collection. We also ensured that we had Akamai redirects and fail-over pages in place for edge cases so that we could serve a graceful experience to visitors trying to access the content from outside the designated geographical regions.

Implementing Unsupported Features

From time to time, our team was asked to temporarily create features that did not currently exist within the Ford AEM ecosystem of components. In one instance, our Ford clients wanted to serve a reminder to website visitors that had previously made a reservation for a new 2021 Ford Bronco, to convert that reservation into an order.

This was an operational use of Adobe Target for Personalization as well as Journey Orchestration. We utilized an Adobe Audience Manager segment of Bronco Reservationists to target visitors and provide ordering instructions. We served the alert messaging once to each qualified visitor on one of three pages based on which page they visited first.

We saw call-to-action (CTA) click through rates between 13-17% on the reminder message depending on which page the message was served from. Of those that clicked our message, we saw a login rate between 68-79%, which is the first step in converting a reservation to an order. Unfortunately, the Ford Order Management page had some know analytics/data capture errors at the time of this test, so I am unable to provide conversion stats on reservation to order rates produced from this activity. However, our Ford clients were able to retrieve this vital sales data from their back-end ordering systems.

Targeting Content to Specific Audiences and Tracking Performance

The Ford Private offers program was implemented to determine if serving a $750 private offer discount to select audience segments (owner, conquest, import, domestic, no KBA engagement within 45 days) would drive a lift in sales.

We utilized an Adobe Audience Manager segment in an Adobe Target activity to deliver the offer to visitors across all pages of ford.com. The experience was served to 100% of visitors that match the audience segments. My team delivered over 100 targeted activities for Private Offers each calendar year that I worked on the account. We saw a 4% submission rate, a 22% redemption rate and we did a CRM sales match analysis determined pending a 60 day redeption period.