How can you identify the most influential touchpoints in the customer journey using marketing analytics?

Mapping touchpoints is important, but tracking awareness and consideration touchpoints is challenging and attribution will often bias towards lower-funnel interactions. At best, one can track fragmented pieces of the customer journey. While analytics tools help visualize engagement patterns, understanding the full customer journey requires innovative approaches to capture these elusive touchpoints effectively.

Marketing analytics plays a critical role in understanding the intricate web of interactions that constitute the customer journey. By leveraging data, we can move beyond guesswork and pinpoint the touchpoints that most significantly influence customer decisions. Here's a thoughtful approach to achieve this: Mapping the Customer Journey: The first step is to create a comprehensive customer journey map. This visual representation outlines all the touchpoints, from initial awareness to post-purchase interactions. Marketing analytics tools like web analytics, CRM data, and customer surveys can help identify these touchpoints.

Identifying influential touchpoints in the customer journey is key to effective marketing. With marketing analytics, one can track customer interactions across various channels. Start by mapping out the customer journey, noting all potential touchpoints. Then, use analytics to measure engagement at each touchpoint. Look for patterns - which touchpoints lead to conversions? Which ones have high drop-off rates? This data-driven approach helps pinpoint the most influential touchpoints. Remember, it's not just about quantity, but the quality of interactions that matter.

? Identifying Influence: Leveraging Marketing Analytics for Touchpoint Analysis ? Data-Driven Insights: Uncovering Influential Touchpoints with Marketing Analytics ? Touchpoint Attribution: Strategies for Identifying Key Customer Journey Points ? Analyzing Impact: Using Marketing Analytics to Determine Touchpoint Influence ? Journey Mapping Precision: Leveraging Marketing Data to Identify Influential Touchpoints

In my experience we need to start with the business goals and objectives for a journey before we start mapping it across channels and touch points. It is also important for us know what good would look like i.e. what do we want to achieve from our ideal customer journey. Once this is done then we need to ensure the right data is getting collected across the various tools and touch points and we should identify a unique idenfier to join or map the data journey dots across all the tools before we get into analysing the data.

One thing I've found useful is to ensure that first all the data touch points are accurately tagged for us to collect the right data attributes, which also means that we are using the right business nomenclature to identify all of of data touch points. This includes all quantitative data. This will ensure that when we map these data attributes with other data sources like survey data, CRM data etc...it would be easier for us to align it with our customer journey business goals and objectives. This will always enable accurate analysis of all of our customer journey touch points.

Identifying influential touchpoints in the customer journey is now more precise with incremental attribution in marketing analytics. Unlike traditional models, this approach isolates marketing impact from other factors, considering natural demand and external factors. It attributes value directly to impactful touchpoints, enabling informed decisions for optimizing ad frequency, messaging, and budget allocation, ultimately driving better results.

Absolutely this is the key, once we start with mapping the touch points, followed by collecting the right data points and by analysing these datasets we can come up with cohorts or segments based on buying patterns, behaviour, intent, demographics etc...This level of details help us to run specific campaigns based on the past behaviours of specific user segments or cohorts of users. This will enable us to identify the most influential touch points from one segment to another.

If you want to analyze your conversion path, first, you need to map all stages to understand the user flow*. *great example is a simplified e-commerce funnel (website visit -> product page visit -> add to cart -> begin checkout -> purchase). Once you've done that, you need to understand 2 metrics at each stage of the funnel: - CTR (clickthrough rate) - how many people progress to the next stage - drop-off rate - how many people drop off, and don't progress to the next stage Stages with lowest CTR (and highest drop-off rate) are your so-called *bottlenecks* - and once you identified them, you should do your best to: - understand what causes low CTR (UX, unclear messaging, poor page speed etc.) - fix it & increase your conversion rates??

As a matter of fact, path-to-conversion methods are one of the best approaches you can chose to shed light on customers' journeys and behaviour flows. In a job past we used path-to-conversion analysis as a diagnostic tool to pinpoint bottlenecks along the overall conversion pathway. By comparing paths that led to a conversion to those that did not, we identified a handful of critical drop-off points on our fairly cumbersome signup process. These, once addressed, reduced drop-offs by 30%, directly increasing conversions and significantly boosting overall marketing ROI.

It is fair to assume that the touchpoints you define as "influential" can change with time. Therefore, it is essential to continuously* track all touchpoints (funnel stages) on your website to make sure that you spot any fluctuations, and can react to them rapidly. *my personal favorite cadence is weekly - as it: - prevents you from over-analyzing / over-optimizing - which can frequently happen with daily reporting - allows you to react much quicker than with monthly reporting