Unlocking the Power of Touchpoints: Wizaly's Customer Journey Tracking and Attribution vs. Google Analytics

As the digital landscape evolves, businesses must measure their marketing efforts across various channels. While Google Analytics and other traditional analytics tools are popular for tracking web visits, they fail to comprehensively understand the customer journey across all touchpoints.

Google Analytics primarily focuses on website visits, leading to a potentially skewed perception of marketing results. It emphasizes performance-based marketing, including SEM and SEO, often at the expense of upper-funnel touchpoints that contribute to brand awareness, such as video, display, and social media. This approach overlooks upper-funnel touchpoints' role in building awareness and engagement, ultimately driving purchases.

Furthermore, a click-centric approach omits crucial interactions like offline advertisements (TV, Radio), word-of-mouth impact, CRM, and loyalty programs. It also neglects online-to-offline interactions, such as ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline). These data points can be essential for understanding customer journeys and maximizing conversions, loyalty, and upselling opportunities.

Customer behavior is complex and constantly changing. Wizaly prioritizes collecting and analyzing all available data, whether paid or free, online or offline, to create the most accurate model of customer behavior. This process involves two critical steps: precise, comprehensive, and granular data collection and optimized algorithms to analyze the collected data.

Comprehensive Omnichannel Touchpoint Tracking

Thorough and granular data collection entails:

• Gathering all clicks, navigation, and conversions through websites and apps, while connecting touchpoints from the same customer using a social graph.
• Individually tracking all clicks and impressions from online channels, such as display, video, SEO, SEM, affiliates, retargeting, and CRM.
• Employing statistical tracking for channels where individual paths cannot be traced due to technical or website restrictions (Walled Gardens), including social networks, display and video after third-party cookies are phased out, as well as offline media (TV, radio).
• Integrating store and brand visits for online-offline connection.
• Incorporating detailed product basket information and customer profiles, essential for customer segmentation and lifetime value analysis. This may involve collecting data on products purchased in industries like insurance, where most transactions occur offline, or in sectors like footwear, where significant discrepancies exist between online purchases and actual purchases due to product returns.
• Lastly, accounting for various factors that may impede accurate data collection, such as technical reasons (adblockers, though there are workarounds), privacy settings (iOS ITP2.3 or Firefox ETP2.0), or legal restrictions (CCPA in California, GDPR in Europe).

Enhanced Algorithmic Attribution with AI

After collecting comprehensive data, developing sophisticated algorithms that consider lower-funnel interactions and branding is crucial. Conventional formulas often reflect a marketer's bias in a complex world rather than accurately representing reality. Analyzing the role of each touchpoint and the interaction between channels is vital for adjusting marketing campaigns and increasing ROI (up to 30% for some Wizaly customers).

Algorithmic attribution comes into play at this point, utilizing AI to let the data shape the model that best represents customer behavior. An optimal model should incorporate three distinct algorithms addressing three separate concerns:

• How can each touchpoint's contribution within a path be allocated? A model developed by Nobel Prize winner Lloyd Shapley is commonly used to assign credit to each player in a cooperative game.
• Which methods, such as time series correlation, are suitable for evaluating the impact of social media or TV campaigns on free traffic and search marketing performance when collecting individual touchpoints with timestamps is impossible?
• How can touchpoints not collected due to privacy, ad-blockers, and other issues be assessed? This complex extrapolation needs to consider factors like the different behaviors exhibited by iOS and Android users.

Integrating Wizaly into Your Marketing Strategy

Incorporating Wizaly's customer journey analytics software into your marketing operations offers a seamless experience that complements your existing tools and platforms. Adopting Wizaly can unlock its touchpoint-focused attribution capabilities without disrupting your marketing workflow, allowing you to make data-driven decisions and increase the ROI on your marketing investments.

Examples:

• One of our clients, a comparison-shopping insurance platform, increased its insurance quote volume by 25% once they realized their CRM campaigns (mail and SMS) had a much bigger role in driving conversions than initially thought.
• For another client, a chain of furniture stores, it was discovered that the ROI of their online investments was 31% higher than initially estimated when accounting for offline sales driven by online efforts. Interestingly, they found that their most profitable customers were those who made online and offline purchases.
• A major airline improved the ROI of its paid marketing investments by 10% by properly analyzing the impact of each channel on the sale of airplane tickets.

Here are some benefits of integrating Wizaly into your marketing strategy:

1. Effortless implementation: With its intuitive interface and simple setup, Wizaly ensures a seamless integration experience.
2. Compatibility with current tools and platforms: Wizaly is engineered to work harmoniously with your existing marketing tools, including CRMs, marketing automation systems, and ad platforms.
3. Customizable tracking and reporting: Configure Wizaly's tracking and reporting features to match your specific business goals and marketing objectives.
4. Continuous optimization: Leverage Wizaly's sophisticated analytics to consistently refine and enhance your marketing strategies based on data-driven insights.
5. Expert support team: Depend on Wizaly's knowledgeable support team for personalized guidance and help throughout the integration process.

Overview

Google Analytics:

• Mainly focuses on lower-funnel attribution, excluding non-Google impressions, CRM, or offline media.
• Skews analysis by reassigning free traffic to paid traffic when a paid touchpoint precedes a free one.
• Primarily concerned with website visits.
• It Doesn't consider ROPO effects.
• Struggles to incorporate customer profile data, such as demographics or loyalty cards.
• Fails to differentiate between actual and online conversions.
• Cannot extrapolate for uncollected data due to cookie or privacy issues.
• Lacks distinction between acquisition and upsell and neglects lifetime value calculations.
• Offers a free version with sampled data and a premium version for large enterprises.

Wizaly:

• Incorporates both lower-funnel interactions and upper-funnel touchpoints.
• Integrates CRM and ROPO effects.
• Delivers unbiased tracking across all channels and interactions, including app-installs and app-openings.
• Considers customer profiles and segmentation.
• Factors in product segmentation to understand the relationship between marketing channels and products sold.
• Analyzes acquisition, upsell, and loyalty effects to evaluate the impact of marketing interactions on lifetime value.
• Extrapolates for uncollected data due to cookie or privacy issues.
• Utilizes advanced AI-based algorithmic attribution to combine individual paths and upper-funnel influences, such as social networks, TV, and CRM.
• Offers seamless integration with existing marketing tools and platforms.
• Provides potential customization of the platform with proprietary data.
• Features a subscription-based pricing model and a dedicated support team for data quality, technical support, and analytics consulting.

Conclusion

This whitepaper shows how Wizaly's sophisticated customer journey analytics software surpasses Google Analytics regarding attribution and customer journey tracking. Wizaly's core objective is to analyze customer behavior by incorporating all potential interactions into its models, allowing data algorithms to generate insights without undue bias. Wizaly's comprehensive multichannel touchpoint tracking and robust algorithmic attribution give businesses a deeper understanding of the customer journey, empowering more informed decision-making and optimized marketing strategies.

As the digital landscape changes, businesses must adjust their marketing strategies to remain competitive. Wizaly is dedicated to staying at the cutting edge of attribution and customer journey analytics by constantly developing and refining its software to meet marketers' evolving needs. By choosing Wizaly, businesses can trust that they are investing in state-of-the-art solutions that will grow and adapt with them.

To truly appreciate the benefits of Wizaly's customer journey analytics software, we encourage you to explore its touchpoint-centric attribution capabilities for yourself. By harnessing Wizaly's advanced features and advantages, you can unlock the potential of touchpoints, enhance your marketing strategies, and outpace your competitors.