Visits, Bounce Rates, Page Views and Marketing Campaign Data?

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✅Check!

I got that!  I’m delivering that to the marketing managers and senior leadership.  We know what our most successful marketing channels are, we’re in great shape when it comes to our data.  The executive team is receiving their weekly reports and we’re able to report on our site’s performance.  We’re in “tip top” shape when it comes to reporting on our identified KPIs!

But are those still the right KPIs?

Let me pose another question.  How long ago was your analytics implementation designed and since that time, how many new marketing tools, advertising pixels and customer touch points have been added to your company’s efforts of increasing revenues?

Customer Experience Management is Driving the Need For Change

If your company hasn’t began to incorporate the advancements in customer experience management, artificial intelligence and data modeling for audiences,  it could be leaving your team and senior leadership  in what I call “Blissful KPI Ignorance“.  That blissful ignorance could be a liability to you’re company’s efforts to stay ahead in your market and take advantage of ever growing opportunities.

The technology that is advancing the integration of data for the intent of personalizing the customer’s experience, lends to proving that there’s a lot more to a client’s visits than just the pages they saw, the time on site, bounce rate or the marketing channel the visitor came in on.  As companies get more adept with customizing the customer experience to particular audiences, the sophistication of analytics and data consumption needs to broaden.  

In a prior post, about the Foundational Elements of Audience Building, I described a possible client journey.

Take for example a customer journey that involves a customer who engages with a display ad, gets sent an email, website visits for research, going to a a physical brick and motor store, using mobile application while in the store and finally making a purchase at a point of sale (POS) system using a coupon within an application, text message or email?  In this scenario you have numerous conversion points and numerous systems that all have customer engagement data.  As this example demonstrates, only one or two (depending if you count the coupon as one) conversion points involved a financial transaction, but all of these engagements were a conversion point that could be used to move the customer/visitor though defined customer journeys.

If your team is only reporting on the website or mobile application visit and the KPIs you identified when you first started the site or marketing campaigns, in the above example, you would be only getting data from 2 touch points in the customer’s journey.  You’d be missing a major chunk of analysis into the entire customer journey.  As the touch points in the customer journey broadens so should your data architecture and analysis.

Rethinking Your Data Architecture

The availability of tools like Tableau, Domo, Splunk and Hadoop as well as cloud services like Amazon Web Services have companies reevaluating how their data in disparate systems can be joined for in-depth analysis, creating relevant data models, and propensity scoring.  All of this goes beyond clicks and page views on a website or a screen swipe in a mobile app.

The rise of multi-solution tools stacks or services, such as Adobe’s Experience Cloud, empower teams to share data and audiences across the platform’s tools.  The recent announcement of Adobe‘s new Experience Platform even furthers the ability of data integration.    The ability to easily consume data from data streams and data stores, is a huge step forward in being able to create meaningful analysis, models and audiences that influence the customer experience.

Recognizing all of this new technology and changes to the ability to influence the client experience means there’s likely a need to reevaluate your data architecture and the architecture of your analytic tools.  If your implementations are a few years old, it’s likely time to audit what you currently have and see how it aligns with how 1) your marketing tool stack can currently integrate all your sources of data, and 2) are you currently collecting all the data you need to currently analyze the customer experience along all your documented customer journeys.

If you’re company’s efforts have now expanded to multi-solutions in your Marketing Tool Stack, and you haven’t updated your KPIs, reporting or data architecture, you’re likely have considerable holes in your reporting and are also likely missing out on major opportunities to influence your customer’s journey with your brand.

Time to renounce the “Blissful KPI Ignorance” and get to work on using the data your customers are giving you to give them the great customer experience they expect from you!