In the past, analytics focused on what happens with “visitors.” In that world of analytics, “visitors” meant devices, not people, because brands didn’t have the strategies and tools to get to know a person at the individual level or get a complete view of their behavior and preferences. They could only see what happened on disconnected devices.
In a world with customer journey analytics, it all changes. Like the oxygen we breathe, analytics brings life to the customer behind those devices, over time getting to know their favorite pastry choice, when they’re most likely to buy gas, and how long they stay online while in the station’s café. And brands can adjust in real time to make all of those interactions even better.
With customer journey analytics, you can stitch data together from your customer relationship management system, content management system, analytics, social media and paid media to help you visualize how customers move through their journey — including where they’re succeeding, and where they’re dropping off or having problems. You can share knowledge and analysis to more quickly understand what’s happening, take action and stay aligned.
When customers log in to your site, it’s easy to find out what they’re viewing and how they’re behaving. When they use different devices but don’t log in each time, you could end up marketing to them like they’re four different people rather than one person using four devices. This is because each time a customer switches devices, you lose a little bit of context around their journey.
Customer journey analytics can help you understand how people are jumping from mobile to laptop to desktop, and then back again by tying every device to a person, whether they’re logged in or not. So when a customer browses for a bathing suit on their tablet, a retailer can feature that same bathing suit on the customer’s desktop home page and send a relevant special offer to their mobile phone the next time they pass by the physical store.
Understanding which interactions entice people to read, click, or buy, as well as how much credit each interaction deserves has never been a cut-and-dried process. And with the number of consumer devices growing, attribution is becoming even more complicated.
With customer journey analytics, however, every ad or interaction that influences a conversion — from mobile to smartwatch — is brought into the equation. So you can give credit where credit is due.
