I'm going to show you how straightforward it is to target visitors that have abandoned a shopping cart without purchasing, we'll retarget these visitors with personalised homepage content related to what was in their shopping cart, at the same time we'll run an A/B test to report on whether there's uplift. This article will demonstrate how quickly you can implement more advanced testing/targeting that prior to DTM would have involved passing parameters via mboxes and possible intervention from IT. Now with DTM we can do it in no time without having to change any page code!

Step 1) We want to target visitors that had iPhones in their shopping cart for future retargeting, to start with we'll create a 'data element' in DTM that accesses the iPhone product name from the cart, this could just as easily be a SKU/product id or other similar unique identifier. Here's what it looks like in DTM:


This is where we're grabbing the product name from:


Step 2) Now we create a Page Load rule that is triggered when our data element (from previous step) has the value 'apple iphone'. In addition we set a cookie for 30 days - this will be our retargeting window and we'll use this cookie for targeting our personalised homepage content.


And setting the cookie in the 'JavaScript / third party tags' section:

 _satellite.setCookie('cart-contents-iphone', 'true', 30);

Step 3) Next we create an mbox named 'homepage-remarketing-iphone' that will wrap the remarketing content, for this example we'll assume it's the main homepage banner. So we create another Page Load rule which targets the homepage URL and we conserve our precious mbox server calls by only outputting when visitors have the 'cart-contents-iphone' cookie value set as 'true'. Prior to DTM we had to burn mbox server calls on 100% of our homepage traffic.



Step 4) Now we login to Target and create a 'Landing Page Campaign' (this forces our targeting to be evaluted every time, A/B would probably work too though). We target the mbox location: 'homepage-remarketing-iphone' and we only want visitors in this campaign that have *not* purchased, so we target our campaign with a custom segment from the 'Marketing Cloud Audiences' target of 'Non-Purchasers':


We'll use default content for the control and personalised iPhone content for the variant. Once this campaign is live we can report on whether our personalised experience is yielding incremental revenue.

What the default content/banner looks like:

And our superduper, optimised & personalised version:

How easy was that?! These type of tests before DTM could have been more of a multi-department project and now it's more like BAU.