Understanding the customer journey has always been pivotal for businesses, as each touchpoint can add value, increase brand exposure, and build trust within a customer base. However, many companies often neglect to measure that journey beyond traditional methods. Establishing a solid measurement foundation allows companies to pull together those isolated data points and gain a unified view of the customer journey.

A deep, holistic view of behaviors and interactions along the path to purchase can help businesses make more informed decisions around their marketing efforts. Rather than assumptions, marketers work off data-driven evidence to understand which tactics are successful, where to improve the experience, or if any gaps exist along the customer journey. The answers can be found thanks to customer journey measurement.

More importantly, such a comprehensive view of the customer journey in marketing makes it much easier to overcome the marketing attribution challenges many businesses still face. The influence of each touchpoint on the decision-making process is clear: helping companies identify the most critical brand interactions that drive customers toward conversion. Just because the journey might start online doesn’t necessarily mean it will end with a bottom-line conversion, which can be problematic for pinpointing which channel deserves credit.

Overcoming Marketing Attribution Challenges

As with anything in marketing, attribution has evolved. It’s now become a convoluted maze of models (i.e., first-touch, last-touch, linear, time decay, etc.), making it increasingly difficult to discern the true impact of the customer journey in marketing efforts. Was it the Google ad that drove the offline sale? Was it last month’s email campaign? And what about the recent push on social media? Is there any connection between that tactic and the uptick in sales?

Complicating matters further are the challenges of cookie deprecation and diminished tracking capabilities that will inevitably weaken the reliability of performance metrics. These complications are especially true for those businesses that devote most of their ad spend to Google, Facebook, and Amazon across a myriad of upper- and lower-funnel tactics, from static ads to social posts to digital videos. How does a business attribute a sale to one channel versus the next?

Then, of course, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) presents an added layer of complexity, raising questions about its influence on the measurement landscape and subsequent impact on business decisions. Can a business trust the insights derived? Correlation doesn’t necessarily equate to causation, after all.

Rather than be guided by the ever-changing winds of the marketing industry, businesses must first ground their marketing science (MarSci) and MarTech roadmaps with a solid understanding of the customer journey. It provides a clearer guiding light to set direction across the resources, time, and investments necessary to build awareness and drive sales.

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How to Measure Marketing Strategy

Much like marketing attribution, building a robust customer journey measurement foundation can take many forms. However, the best approach often considers four distinct areas within the overarching strategy of a campaign. Here’s what businesses should be looking at:

1. Engagement strategy across the journey.

The MarSci and MarTech roadmaps should be based on how customers interact with the brand, where they engage with it, and their decision and purchase cycles. Those maps should delve deeper than the myriad clicks, links, events, or triggers often involved in a campaign. To be of real value, the customer journey measurement should map to the touchpoints, decisions, and actions that reflect the building of relationships that ultimately led to the desired action. Mapping the customer journey in detail provides comprehensive insights into critical engagement points that can be used to optimize marketing strategies.

2. MarSci strategy across the journey.

With the journey set, attention can turn to the MarSci strategy, generating specific insights and signals that map back to key engagement points. Businesses can more easily set their MarSci requirements based on engagement optimization. If sizable portions of a business have similar decision requirements (i.e., time windows, activation levers, etc.), unified reporting views might be viable. If advanced budgeting is the goal, data modeling might be a better option due to its ability to forecast and predict performance. Regardless of the insights’ source, mapping back to the customer journey ensures that analytics align with the goals and allows businesses to extract meaningful information from data.

3. MarTech strategy across the journey.

To support their MarSci strategy, a business’s MarTech strategy will be essential in defining an effective tech stack and selecting the proper platforms to support the MarSci initiatives. While there are a host of options across each layer of the stack, keeping the customer journey top-of-mind will be key. The same can be said for the subsequent needs to drive business outcomes. Enterprise-level solutions already incorporate different add-on capabilities that allow a stack to integrate with automated business intelligence and marketing tools for real-time optimization. These solutions might include unified dashboard suites timed with data refresh cycles. It might also include site testing tools for optimizing landing pages and AI modeling that defines next-action personalization, among others.

Also, remember to establish a tagging, tracking, and taxonomy strategy to support the measurement framework. Ensure the framework addresses industry issues, such as the cookie-less future, deprecated tracking, and various workarounds (i.e., 1PD, clean rooms, walled gardens, preferred modeling approaches, etc.). Doing so guarantees that the chosen technological infrastructure aligns seamlessly with the overall measurement strategy, enhancing efficiency and reliability.

4. Workflow strategy across the journey.

With MarSci and MarTech roadmaps aligned, successful implementation hinges on an effective workflow strategy, considering the many process steps, handoffs, and timelines that can lead to bottlenecks and pain points. Use these workflows to create process and project management roadmaps, which should align with both the MarSci and MarTech roadmaps. These roadmaps ensure a seamless process from one stage to the next and improve the efficiency of the entire measurement system. Besides, defining workflows and timelines allows businesses to identify streamlining opportunities in their processes and helps them adapt to changing circumstances.

Businesses can cut through the fog surrounding attribution, cookie deprecation, and AI by focusing on people, platforms, and processes, which offers a structured framework crucial for defining and refining customer journey measurement strategies. The best path forward remains to master the basics to create robust and adaptive measurement capabilities.

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Bonus read: Episode 188 Of The SalesStar Podcast: Optimizing Customer Journeys with Debbie Braney, Vice President, Demand & Brand Marketing at Glassbox