ion interactive : LiveBall Client Blog

New Release! Track Parameters Reporting Gauges

Faith Hoefner — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:02:58 +0000

We’re excited to announce our latest reporting feature that allows you to track and analyze the parameters you pass into LiveBall. This new release is intended to help you analyze how your pre-click advertising impacts your post-click performance. There are six new reporting gauges available at every performance level, from the portfolio all the way down to the traffic source!

The first step is to tell LiveBall the parameters you’d like to track. When adding or editing a portfolio, you’ll be able to enter the parameters under advanced options. Let’s say you are passing a keyword variable in on the query string and it’s data name is “kw”. You’ll enter “kw” into the “Track parameter 1” field.

You’ll be able to use the new gauges once you’ve defined the parameters you’d like to track. There are four new data clouds for the parameters, two small clouds that display the top 25 values and two large clouds that display the top 250 values.

Track parameter data clouds display the following within each parameter value:

number and percentage of respondents
segmentation rate
conversion rate

The rates will be color coded:

Blue = +/- 10% of the average conversion rate
Red = below +/- 10% of the average conversion rate
Green = above +/- 10% of the average conversion rate

There are also two large table gauges, one for each parameter you track, that display the following within each parameter value:

number of respondents
percentage of respondents
number of segmented respondents
segmentation rate
number of converted respondents
conversion rate
conversion rate margin

These gauges will help you determine if your pre-click advertising dollars are being spent effectively, and generating conversions in your post-click landing experiences. Feel free to contact your Account Manager with any questions.

Launching a print dialog box

Megan Leap — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:33:32 +0000

Are your LiveBall pages works of art? Do you offer printable coupons or white papers? Launch a print dialog box by adding this Javascript to any page in LiveBall. It works with either “interpret as text” or “interpret as html”.

When users click on the print link, a print dialog box will launch.

NEW: Click-free thumbnail previews!

Julie Diano — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:01:44 +0000

The ion team has recently released yet another time-saving feature in LiveBall—by simply hovering over the magnifying glass (edit) or blue preview icons next to a path name, a large thumbnail image of the landing page will be displayed. I’m loving this new feature, because it saves me a click (or two) when I want a quick reminder of what a path looks like.

This same feature applies in the path management tab as well—just hover over a page thumbnail for a larger view of the page. No clicking!

Fabulous Flash Editing

Jessica Frobel — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:56:13 +0000

We’ve just deployed several new features for editing Flash objects in the LiveBall page editor.

Now, instead of a dropdown of Flash variables at the top of the page, each Flash object has a little toolbox in its own upper left corner. From this toolbox, you can edit image, text, and “action” variables with a single click.

To edit the underlying image for the entire Flash, click anywhere else on the object outside of the toolbox. Enjoy!

Quick tip: Take Note

Megan Leap — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:40:13 +0000

To increase your conversions, it’s essential to continuously test, iterate, and improve your landing experiences.

LiveBall’s note feature makes it incredibly easy to annotate your landing experiences with ideas, questions, and analysis of test results. The notes don’t need to be long, but quick comments on the thinking behind different tests. You can pick up a thread weeks or months later, without straining your memory, and jump right back in the flow!

There are note boxes at the bottom of each portfolio, campaign & path. Simply add your thoughts and press the green plus note button. Your notes will be saved until you delete the landing experiences.

Happy note taking!

New feature! Create Facebook branded-landing experiences

Faith Hoefner — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:11:46 +0000

Many LiveBall clients have expressed an interest in creating Facebook-branded landing pages, and we’re excited to announce you can easily do so! LiveBall now supports Facebook’s Comment Box social widget.

By using a simple copy and paste code, visitors to your Facebook-branded LiveBall page will be able to comment and interact with each other and your brand. In turn, the Facebook user has the option to announce their comment as part of their news feed.

Contact your account manager and we’ll supply the code needed along with simple directions.

Before you get started you’ll need to have a Facebook developer account. Dont worry, anyone can be a Facebook developer.

Visit http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php to create a new application.
Enter an Application Name, such as “Landing Page Comments Box”.
Accept the Developer Terms of Servce and click Save Changes.
Keep all of the defaults on the Basic tab but add an icon.
Note the API Key. You will need it later.
On the Connect tab, set the Connect URL to your subdomain that you use for your LiveBall pages.
Save changes.

Once you have your code and Facebook developer status, you’re ready to create the LiveBall page you’ll implement your Facebook Comment Box on. Be sure to pick a master page template with a dynamic widget space that can support a 600px wide widget.

We look forward to hearing from clients ready to create social landing pages!

Form fans rejoice with 5 new features.

Julie Diano — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:31:18 +0000

You already know how flexible LiveBall forms are. Or do you? Last week, our clients were introduced to 5 brand new form features that take landing page data collection to the next level. The Fun with Forms webinar demonstrated how these powerhouse techniques can make your LiveBall forms more flexible than ever.

2-Column Forms

When you create a form, you now have the option to layout the fields in a 1-column or 2-column format—this is really useful for longer forms to help make better use of the form real estate. You can even customize the form space by specifying the label, field and gutter widths (default specifications are already provided for your convenience).

If you’re creating a new form, you’ll add form fields as usual, then you’ll be able to specify the ‘column placement’—this lets you choose whether the field appears in the left column, the right column, or across both columns.

It’s not uncommon to have a combination of all 3 on the same form. For example, contact info fields fit nicely in the left and right column layout, but if you include a multi-line text field for ‘comments’ you may want that field to be as wide as possible and span across the full width of the form.

Multi-Column Choice Sets

This new form feature is exclusively available for choice set fields that use radio buttons or checkboxes as the ‘input type’. No matter whether you’re using a 1-column or 2-column form layout, you can list the choices across up to 5 columns. The direction of choices may be:

horizontal—so choices are listed left to right across all columns
vertical—so choices are listed top to bottom across all columns

Hidden Field Text

This next feature is for passwords—or any other fields where you’d like to hide the value as it’s typed in by the user. This may not be one you’ll use very often, but it’s the perfect way to give respondents an added sense of security when they’re asked to submit private information, like passwords or PIN numbers.

For any single-line text field, simply check the box to ‘hide as password’ and the characters entered will automatically appear as asterisks on the form field.

CAUTION: unless the respondent is in a secure HTTPS session when this data is collected, it will be sent in cleartext over the network or URL string to an external site. Passwords and other secure information are best passed on to third party sites using secure Javascript APIs or form post exports. If you’re considering collecting such information on your form, please reach out to your account manager with any questions.

Conditional Fields

This is my personal favorite! There are now 5 conditions you can apply to a single field. The first 2 are options you may be familiar with already, since most of your forms probably include both required and optional (or ‘not required’) fields. New conditions include:

Required to match [field]—this is an excellent way to validate data before the form is submitted. For example, if you ask a respondent to provide an email address and re-enter it in a separate field, you’ll use this condition for the ‘confirm email’ field to ensure the data value matches the first email field.

Required if [field] is filled out—this option lets you require a field ONLY if another field on the form is filled out. For example, let’s say you have an opt-in checkbox field to send email about your company—if this box is checked (meaning the field is filled out by the respondent), you may want them to provide follow-up information about the types of email they’d like to receive (e.g., special offers, product news).
Required if [field] = [value]—this one lets you require a field ONLY if the value of another field on the form is equal to a particular value. For example, if a respondent answered ‘yes’ to the question ‘Are you a current subscriber?’, you may want to require a follow-up form field to ask what type of subscription they have.

3rd Party Javascript

The last feature we covered lets you add third party Javascript on your LiveBall forms—this can be useful for Javascript that lets you route form data to another system, perform client-side validation, analyze partial form completion and lots more.

Suspicious clicks can't hide from LiveBall.

Julie Diano — Thu, 07 May 2009 14:30:29 +0000

We’ve just added an exciting new report in LiveBall to identify suspicious clicks—I wouldn’t go so far as to call it click fraud, but they’re probably worth investigating. This report is available at four levels:

System-wide
Portfolio
Campaign
Traffic source

Simply click on Reports in the navigation at the top of your console (if you haven’t explored this before, you’ll be delighted with all of the automated reporting features at your fingertips!)—click the ‘+ Report’ button, then choose the report scope, type and time period.

There are Excel and HTML versions of this report. In the Excel version, each suspicious click is listed as a row with the following columns:

Portfolio title
Campaign title
Traffic source: media
Traffic source: vehicle
Traffic source: title
Time/date stamp of first contact
IP address
Referrer URL (when available)
Web User Agent (i.e., web browser, search engine crawler, etc.)

The HTML report is a streamlined version of the Excel report, displaying only the last 4 columns (Time stamp, IP address, Referrer URL and Web User Agent). The rows in both report versions are sorted by ascending date/time. While it’s normal to have some suspicious clicks, a high volume occurring in a short time span may warrant further investigation. Read more about click quality.

1 week. 5 new features.

Julie Diano — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:52:41 +0000

The ion team is continuously working on new features to make LiveBall an even more flexible and powerful post-click marketing tool—many of these are requests direct from those of you on the front line, our clients. Over the course of about a week, we added 5 brand new features. Here’s a quick recap of the latest and greatest to explore in your LiveBall console:

Day-parting performance gauge—this new summary gauge offers a great way to view traffic and conversion trends over the course of a week.
New ‘formatted email’ data export type—lets you send a customized email message to a specified address for each exported respondent.
Preview forms in the forms library—you’ll now find a blue preview button in your forms library that lets you view the form as you’re working on it.
3rd party Javascript on forms—for the technically inclined, LiveBall forms now support the use of 3rd party Javascript.
‘Social content’ media type—a new way to organize your paths and traffic sources designed specifically for social networks.

Got an idea for a LiveBall enhancement? We’d love to hear from you! You can submit a request from your LiveBall console under Support > Feature Request, or just contact your account manager.

LiveBall forms + 3rd party Javascript

Julie Diano — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 18:40:21 +0000

Attention all LiveBall form users: I’m happy to announce that LiveBall forms now support 3rd-party Javascript! What does this mean for you? A number of marketing software packages out there provide Javascript that their customers can just plug into their HTML form pages to seamlessly route form data to another system, perform client-side validation, analyze partial form completion, etc. To better integrate with these services, every form in LiveBall is now identified with “name” and “id” attributes of “liveballform”. For example:

This makes is easy for Javascript to quickly reference the form. In addition, all of the fields in LiveBall forms now have the name and id of their underlying data collection data name. For example:

This makes is easy for Javascript to look at the specific values of fields (and, at their option, dynamically tweak them) in a consistent and predictable manner. To further leverage this capability, there are now two additional features in the “page script” editor:

A hook for a form’s onsubmit Javascript event, for instance to plug in a “myvalidation();” in the form tag, like this: <form name=”liveballform” onsubmit=”myvalidation();” …>.
A hook to insert additional HTML or Javascript (“Form script”) in between the <form></form> tags. This is primarily intended to enable “hidden” form fields to be added to a form, as a way of passing extra info to a 3rd-party system during an “onsubmit” event. For instance, to dynamically add a hidden form field that includes an assigned CampaignCode, you would add the following form script:

Notice the ability to use @@ variables to substitute any data that you’ve already collected or assigned to the respondent at the time which the form is rendered. I know this is a rather tech-oriented announcement (contact your account manager with any questions), but the net result should be much broader support for cool 3rd party features and integrations in LiveBall forms. Enjoy!