Have you ever been exposed to an online advertisement selling you a product after you have purchased that same product? You’re not the only one! Marketing campaigns are often not optimised. This is typically due, in part, to a lack of visibility into customers. Indeed, if you lack information on your users’ behaviour at key touch points with your brand during their customer journey, you will undoubtedly have an inaccurate vision of their needs.
A lack of the right data means an incomplete picture of consumers
As interactions between brands and consumers become increasingly complex, data inadequacies will only occur more often. Customer relationship management software gives marketers new opportunities by collecting and storing psychographic and demographic information, but this information usually remains incomplete. This is especially true within the sphere of online targeting and one-to-one marketing, where CRMs can provide benefits but often lack richness of information relating to online user behaviour. Unfortunately, this means advertisers have to take decisions without having access to the full picture of their audience’s actions, resulting in situations like the one mentioned above. This is an extremely common problem which will only happen more frequently as touchpoints continue to multiply.
A growing number of touch points – but an increasingly complex environment
Though it may seem contradictory, another factor which will impact marketers’ ability to target users efficiently is the increase in the amount of data at our disposal. With the arrival of an ever-growing number of web technologies, trackable IOT devices, as well as “smart” out-of-home advertising mediums, marketers can measure more accurately than ever how consumers interact with the full scope of their brand online and offline.
Unfortunately, it would be too easy if it stopped there. This increase in complexity can lead to touchpoints not being measured, creating gaps in consumer visibility, or even worse, failing to detect tracking errors, leading to misleading analyses. This, ladies and gentlemen, is another one of the main reasons why marketers fail at understanding their consumers – however, web analytics can play a big part in fixing this problem by providing detailed insights into user behaviour. Indeed, accurately measuring your consumers at all critical touchpoints with your brand is the only way to ensure you correctly understand their experience with your brand. When implemented and leveraged correctly, web analytics can provide endless benefits, the first of which is more efficient marketing initiatives! In order to achieve this, your web analytics data from all your digital platforms needs to be collected, analysed and acted on properly.
Four key factors that can help improve automated marketing and targeting
Improving the following four aspects can greatly improve your knowledge of consumers and boost marketing ROIs.
Data quality: To make the right decisions, you need the right data – high-quality data that is accurate, complete, clean, timely and consistent. By verifying and improving your data quality, you can ensure you have a full, authentic picture of user interactions with your digital touchpoints. AT Internet’s solution comes with a “data quality toolbox” to help you quickly and easily verify your analytics tags and their implementation.
Get your users to log in: While very useful,cookies have their limits. Without disregarding GDPR legislation, it’s valuable to encourage your users to log in and stay logged in – you get more precise information and better identification of your users to understand and reach out to them. Although this could result in a smaller set of users compared to visitors identified using cookies, you can still identify significant behaviours that can lead to valuable audience insights.
Quality analyses: Once the data has been collected it is important to analyse it correctly and efficiently. This requires performing the analysis with the right scope. Remember, brands interact with users, not machines – so if you’re analysing your site’s conversion rate, for example, what’s important to analyse is how well it converts users, and not the conversion rate of visits. You need time-relevant data, and your analyses need to lead to actionable outcomes.
Actionable insights: Even a flawless analysis will lose its value if you can’t take away any actionable insights. Being able to extract the data behind your insights to feed it into other systems in the digital ecosystem is paramount to achieving this. With AT Internet’s User Insights tool, you can extract ready-to-activate data in two clicks from a particular user-segment (clustered based on their behaviour) straight from the interface, as you continue your data exploration. You can also use our dedicated API to regularly extract, transfer and feed the granular, user-centric data we collect into your other third-party tools. All anonymised, of course!
Bottom line benefits
Truly understanding consumers’ behaviour will have multiple benefits for your business beyond simple monetary returns.
Better service, happier customers: Providing consumers with smooth and streamlined interactions with your brand is crucial to them feeling valued. This is incredibly important as consumers now more than ever look back on good or bad service experiences and become advocates (or critics) with significant reach within just a few clicks, thanks to today’s social media means.
Recurring purchases: If your customers like the experience, chances are they’ll come back for more. Providing a great consumer experience will lead to repeat purchases from the same people!
More efficient marketing processes overall: By optimising your marketing efforts you’ll waste less time and effort to achieve the same goal overall. Indeed, the effort spent tagging your website initially will be worth your effort as the ROI can be truly impressive when done correctly.
Measuring consumers accurately and paying special attention to the quality of your analyses will lead to a better understanding of your customers and, in turn, a positive impact across the bottom line.
Photo credit: Photo 1 by Engin Akyurt from Pexels, Photo 2 by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash
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