SPONSORED CONTENT
Tsahi Ben Yosef
Vice President, Digital Innovation, Toluna
tsahi.benyosef@toluna.com
When and how can digital tracking be used to obtain a true competitive advantage and “future proof” your consumer insights approach?
Digital tracking provides behavioral data that helps companies optimize their marketing channels, reduce costs and increase ROI by understanding where consumers are online, what they are doing and learn more about their behavior to uncover inefficiencies, competitive threats or, best yet, uncover new opportunities. Digital tracking is ideal to help brands understand path-to-purchase, deepen consumer profiles that can inform segmentation and understand the competitive landscape.
Marketers can follow consumers from the real to the digital world and back again, gaining a clear understanding of touchpoints and brand awareness along the way. Digital tracking provides a precise record of what a consumer is doing at any given moment rather than a close approximation. Its value is almost immeasurable.
Digital tracking and the resulting behavioral data provide significant advantages even in cases where companies already have access to behavioral data. Imagine a large travel Web site wanted to understand actions of its online users: browsers vs. buyers. The company has Web and customer data but little insight into what visitors do outside of the company’s Web platform. Digital tracking can provide additional insight and help deliver a more comprehensive view of consumers.
This project collected behavioral data to understand how customers could be segmented using data collected from their own Web site’s platform and from competing platforms. As a result of the findings, segments developed based on the frequency of travel and which devices were used during the three stages of the travel planning process. In addition to finding out the preferred device for travel planning, they also discovered a surprising parallel activity. While planning trips, consumers also viewed fantasy trips. Survey research was used to better understand consumers’ motivation for doing so and largely leveraged the behavioral data captured using digital tracking to more aptly inform the study design and respondent selection. Armed with this new information, the company both optimized their Web design and enhanced messaging and offers.
In this example, as is often the case, digital tracking was used as part of a blended approach of market research, existing data and new behavioral data to yield insights that were never before available – not only future-proofing the client’s research but providing a unique competitive advantage that the client was able to capitalize on.