Optimizing the Visitor Experience with Category Affinity at PenFed

PenFed is a United States federal credit union headquartered in McLean, Virginia. Founded in 1935, PenFed serves over 2.6 million members worldwide. With financial products ranging from checking, savings, credit cards, mortgages, auto, and personal loans, PenFed strives to deliver excellent digital experiences for members and prospects alike. Due to the diversity of PenFed’s product offering, tailoring the digital experiences to align with the many unique interests of site visitors is paramount.

With the guidance of Softcrylic, product and sub-product pages across PenFed.org were indexed by page path within AEP Data Collection, enabling Adobe Target category affinity functionality. This native affinity functionality assigns a “favorite category” for all site visitors and stores that data in the Visitor Profile. Favorite categories are determined by a native Adobe algorithm that assigns points to all categories viewed within a user’s session, with the first category weighted the strongest. Product affinity campaigns have been executed on multiple pages across PenFed.org and encompass hero banner testing, product layout ordering, navigational tests, and article content delivery. Over 50 unique subcategories are indexed in total.

Initial A/B tests were designed to serve more relevant content to prospect visitors. Optimization efforts have expanded to include content delivery in the Featured Articles section of the homepage, hero promotions, navigational elements, mobile testing, and product page layout iterations. Affinity as a methodology has outperformed various other targeting strategies to-date onsite.

Affinity analyses typically focus on both content engagement and click-through-rate, as well as product application start rate. While many financial products have longer conversion cycles, content CTR is the most effective measurement of improved content relevance. To-date, affinity targeting has driven over 270% lift in CTR on mobile web navigation, 119% lift in CTR on homepage hero, and 170% lift in CTR on Featured Articles. Planned iterations include expanding this affinity logic to include more granular subproduct audiences.