Omni-channel marketing is extremely difficult to measure. Every channel added to your marketing mix brings more data, another layer in your technology stack, and exponential complexity to your analytics. Many marketers are tempted to throw in the towel and continue reporting on single-touch analytics. But the optimizations and attribution found through omni-channel analytics are well worth the effort. Imagine being able to connect every touchpoint of the customer journey? Or assigning revenue attribution across multiple channels for more accurate ROI reporting?
To demystify things, I’m breaking down 3 steps needed to successfully get your omni-channel marketing analytics up and running.
Ramp Up Your Data Collection
To marketing analysts, omni-channel roughly translates to boatloads of data. You may already be overwhelmed by the amount of the data you’re collecting, but it’s not enough (and never will be).
To truly measure and understand the omni-channel customer journey, you need to capture every interaction customers have with your brand across every channel. When you neglect data in your omni-channel analytics, you run the serious risk of incorrectly optimizing your marketing and misattributing revenue.
3 Must-Have Strategies
Here are a few data strategies that will give your omni-channel analytics a boost:
- Adding URL Tags: This one’s a must-have. Adding URL tags to your web links is a quick and easy way to bolster acquisition data. They give you the flexibility to track the parameters providing the most value to your business.
- Adopting Call Attribution: Offline interactions are just as important as online for omni-channel journey. Understanding which channels drive calls to your business requires call attribution data. Thanks to smartphones, calls to businesses are on the rise and are set to reach 162 billion by 2019. Marketers can’t optimize across devices without understanding what’s driving every mobile conversion.
- Using Google Analytics User ID: This Google Analytics feature connects data from a single user across multiple sessions and devices. The User ID feature gives marketers online omni-channel tracking capabilities and allows you to connect a user’s purchase from their desktop browser to their mobile web sessions from the previous week, for example.
Get All of Your Data Under the Same Roof
In the past few years the marketing technology landscape has exploded. The average marketing team uses 12 different tools to manage and optimize their various channels.
While many of these new tools have some version of data analytics within its platform, extracting the data and analyzing it as a whole isn’t always simple. This might be okay for individual channel optimizations, but siloed data prevents marketers from running effective omni-channel analytics.
Companies that have successfully integrated multiple data sources to capture the complete customer journey have generated up to 8.5x higher shareholder value.
A Single Source of Truth
To create a single source of analytical truth, your omni-channel data sources need to be integrated and accessible within a single tool. You can accomplish this using an analytics tool like Convertro, or build your own analytics using a data visualization tool like Tableau. Here’s how you can streamline this part of the process:
- Integration Partners: Include integration partners in your technology evaluation criteria. These direct integrations between your data sources will be more efficient and reliable.
- API Integrations: Use APIs when no direct integration is available. APIs can be used to create custom integrations to your martech stack, but require coding expertise and deep product knowledge.
Once you have all of your data connected and accessible in a single source of truth, you’re ready to dive into your data and reap the benefits of true omni-channel analytics.
Connect the Omni-Channel Dots
With all of your omni-channel data on hand, it’s time to start analyzing the customer journey and optimizing your marketing to drive more conversions and revenue. Single-touch attribution is no longer sufficient in an omni-channel world.
Customers are exposed to your brand across a growing number of channels and numerous devices. Connecting these channels is the key to your omni-channel marketing success. Macy’s found that customers who shop across multiple channels are 8x more valuable than single channel shoppers. To discover your own omni-channel insights, you’ll need multi-touch attribution.
Why Multi-Touch Attribution Is Essential
Multi-touch attribution analysis allows marketers to understand the amount of influence and the role each channel and campaign plays at different stages of the customer journey.
There are 5 primary multi-touch attribution models that align with different business goals, and which can be used to understand your omni-channel journey and uncover optimizations. Each model assigns value to different stages of the customer journey and can be further customized to assign value to different channels.
Multi-touch attribution can uncover insights such as which early-stage channels have the highest impact on future purchases, allowing you to optimize these channels to drive revenue. Or it can show you which digital channels drive the most inbound calls to your business. These insights, and their resulting optimizations, are why omni-channel marketing analytics are among some of the most powerful analytics available to marketers.
Master Your Omni-Channel Analytics
Omni-channel marketing analytics are only as good as the data they are built on. Without complete and reliable data for all online and offline marketing interactions, your analytics aren’t 100% reliable. When making critical decisions on where to allocate budget and resources, successful omni-channel marketers rely on call attribution data to connect the offline conversions back to their source to remove the blind spot in their data.
This article was originally published at Business2community.com, by author Andrew Sheridan.
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