How to Improve Customer Journey and Attribution with an ID Graph

In today’s digital world, there’s an explosion of data as customers interact with brands across multiple marketing channels—websites, apps, social media, email, and beyond. If you’ve ever asked yourself how to improve customer journey from the very first to the last interaction, or how to improve customer journey on website touchpoints, you’re in the right place.

The essential in brief:

The customer journey as a map through your website

The customer journey is essentially the path a visitor takes before, during, and after an interaction with your brand. Imagine it as a roadmap or a blueprint that shows every single way a customer interacts with your products, services, or communications. When you’re mapping the customer journey, you’re looking into all the touchpoints and experiences a person has—from seeing a social media post (first interaction) to making a final purchase (last interaction).

The importance of customer journey optimisation

If you’re wondering why is marketing focusing so heavily on the customer journey, it’s because effectively mapping and optimising these paths leads to better engagement, more lead creation, and ultimately higher revenue generation. The concept of the customer journey goes well beyond simply plotting a few steps in a sales funnel. Optimising each phase of the customer journey is crucial for aligning your marketing strategies with real-world interactions. By doing so, you gain a comprehensive understanding of where your marketing efforts succeed or fall short. This insight enables you to deliver personalisation at scale, ultimately boosting marketing performance.

In practical terms, an optimised customer journey ensures that your visitors don’t drop off halfway through the funnel, especially during longer sales cycles. It also means you can effectively assign credit for the conversion to the right marketing touchpoints and better measure your marketing effectiveness.

The role of ID Graphs in the customer journey

An ID Graph helps unify different data points across multiple marketing channels. Think of it as a central hub where separate pieces of customer information—like cookie IDs, mobile device IDs, and email addresses—come together. Instead of having a fragmented understanding of user interactions, you get a single, connected profile. This consolidated perspective makes it easier to see exactly how customers progress through each stage of their journey and helps answer:

• Who is visiting your website,
• How they engage with your brand,
• Where they’ve come from, and
• What stage of the journey they’re in.

But how does this translate into real-world success? One of Teavaro’s retail clients took advantage of the ID Graph solution and achieved remarkable results. By integrating data from multiple channels, Teavaro’s ID Graph solution allowed the client to engage the right shoppers at the right time with tailored experiences—ultimately driving higher conversions and brand loyalty.

This example highlights how an ID Graph doesn’t just merge data; it empowers you to act on it in real time, creating a smoother, more personalised customer journey from start to finish.

Mapping the customer journey

Mapping the customer journey is the process of visually plotting all the stages and touchpoints a person might have with your brand. It’s a critical step in discovering what resonates with your audience, and how your marketing channels work in unison—or potentially conflict with one another.

Steps to map the customer journey

By systematically identifying and analysing each interaction point, businesses can uncover insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and pain points. This process not only reveals how marketing channels contribute to the overall journey but also helps in crafting strategies that align with customer expectations. Let's explore the essential steps to effectively map the customer journey and optimise your marketing efforts.

1. Identify Key Personas: Understand your primary audience segments. Each segment may have different goals, pain points, and triggers.
2. List All Touchpoints: Think of every channel or medium where a customer interacts—website visits, email campaigns, social media ads, offline events, etc.
3. Gather Data: Use a marketing attribution tool, your CRM, and Google Analytics to collect all customer interaction data across different marketing channels.
4. Plot the Phases: Typically, these phases include awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention. Some businesses with longer sales cycles might add more stages to fit their unique funnel.
5. Identify Pain Points: Find out where customers struggle or drop off.

Assign Credit: Start defining how you’ll measure each stage’s contribution (this is where attribution modelling comes in).

Tools for customer journey visualisation: The ID Graph

The ID Graph is a key tool for piecing together insights from each touchpoint. It consolidates disparate data—like cookie IDs, mobile device IDs, email addresses, and even offline purchases—into a unified profile.

• Machine learning: Automated algorithms can help identify patterns in cross-channel behaviour, refining your view of each customer.
• Predictive analytics: Tools powered by an ID Graph and advanced analytics help you anticipate future actions, so you can intervene or guide the customer in real time.
• Multiple touchpoints: Capturing data from multiple sources gives you a holistic understanding. In turn, this helps with multitouch attribution since you’re linking all interactions to a single individual.

By analysing data from your ID Graph, you can see how well your marketing campaigns are performing, identify the best routes for customer attribution, and discover which specific marketing efforts truly make a difference.

Customer journey optimisation using an ID Graph

For many brands, the real puzzle is not just about mapping the customer journey but making that journey as smooth and personalised as possible. An ID Graph fills in the gaps, helping you refine each stage with greater accuracy.

Data collection and integration

The first step in effectively using an ID Graph is robust data collection and integration. Your brand might be using various other marketing channels, from PPC ads to social media to email marketing. Bringing data from these sources into a single repository is essential. This is not always straightforward because:

• Legacy systems might not share data properly.
• Different marketing efforts may have unique metrics and KPIs.
• Privacy regulations need careful compliance.

Once integrated, the ID Graph acts as your single source of truth for marketing data. It becomes simpler to see how to improve customer journey because you’ve got every relevant touchpoint in one place.

Customer data platforms and the customer journey

Many businesses use a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to handle the massive influx of customer data. These platforms typically incorporate or integrate with ID Graph technology. The synergy between a CDP and an ID Graph allows for:

• Real-time Segmentation: Group customers based on in-the-moment behaviours or attributes.
• Personalised Journeys: Deliver messages tailored to an individual’s stage in the funnel.
• Better Attribution: With consistent user IDs, an attribution model or combination of multiple attribution models can more accurately assign credit for conversions across a broad range of channels.

If you’re still searching for ways how to improve customer journey on a website, a well-structured CDP plus ID Graph combo is an excellent place to start.

Personalisation and customer engagement

One of the biggest benefits of an ID Graph is the ability to tailor experiences based on real-time insights. Personalisation goes beyond simply using someone’s first name in an email—it’s about offering the right product, at the right time, via the right channel. This is where customer journey attribution meets actionable personalisation:

• Dynamic Website Content: Show product recommendations based on browsing history or purchase history.
• Adaptive Email Campaigns: Trigger emails based on specific actions (like visiting a pricing page or abandoning a cart).
• Consistent Messaging: Ensure that the same user sees a cohesive story, whether they’re on mobile, desktop, or offline channels.

Ultimately, personalisation driven by an ID Graph fosters stronger customer engagement because you’re meeting people where they are with relevant, timely content.

Want to know more about identity resolution and how a first-party ID Graph will help unlock your business’ true potential? Get in touch with us today:

Enhancing marketing attribution with an ID Graph

Attribution is all about understanding which marketing channels, touchpoints, and campaigns deserve credit for a conversion. Or, in simpler terms, how you measure the success of different marketing efforts in driving a desired outcome.

Understanding marketing attribution

Attribution helps you see which parts of your marketing strategy truly drive results. For instance, are your social media ads more effective than search campaigns? Do your email newsletters nudge customers further along the sales funnel? Or are offline efforts also playing a critical role?

Common types of attribution models include:

• Single Touch Attribution Models(like first touch attribution model or last click attribution model, also known as the last interaction attribution model).
• Linear Attribution Model(where each touchpoint gets equal credit).
• Time Decay Attribution Model(or time decay attribution) where recent touchpoints are given more credit.
• Position Based Attribution Models(like the U shaped attribution, W shaped attribution model, or full path attribution model, which distribute credit in specific patterns).
• Custom Attribution Modelor “multiple attribution models” that a business tailors to their unique data.

For multitouch attribution, you’re looking at how multiple marketing channels and multiple touchpoints collectively influence a conversion. This can get complex fast, especially when you factor in offline interactions, longer sales cycles, and non-direct click model conversions. That’s where the ID Graph becomes crucial.

Implementing attribution modelling in your marketing strategy

If you’re weighing up multitouch attribution vs marketing mix modelling, remember they’re not mutually exclusive. Marketing mix modelling looks at the bigger picture over a broader timeline, while multitouch attribution model focuses on the unique journey an individual takes. Integrating them can provide a well-rounded view of marketing effectiveness.

An ID Graph streamlines this process. Because you’ve got a single identity for each customer across different attribution models, it’s easier to:

1. Assign Credit: See which channels and campaigns contributed to the user’s final action.
2. Choose the Right Marketing Attribution Model: Test a range of multiple attribution models—like linear attribution, position based attribution, or a custom attribution model—to find the best attribution model for your goals.
3. Optimise Marketing Touchpoints: With the data in one place, you can quickly shift budget or focus to the marketing channels driving true results.

By using an ID Graph, you effectively unify your marketing data, improving your brand’s marketing attribution strategy. This leads to more informed decisions about your marketing campaigns, ensuring each pound you invest is spent on the best-performing channels and tactics.

Example case: Success in customer journey optimisation with an ID Graph

Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario. Suppose a retail brand, “ShopX,” struggled to figure out why their online ads weren’t converting, even though marketing attribution helps them see some results trickling in. Customers would visit their website (first interaction), browse product pages, then mysteriously disappear. Later, many would return via a different channel, like email or even a direct search.

1. Implement ID Graph: By unifying data from multiple marketing channels (PPC ads, emails, retargeting, offline loyalty programme), ShopX discovered that many customers researched products on mobile (first and last touchpoints) but completed purchases on desktop.
2. Attribution Tool: Their chosen attribution tool, integrated with an ID Graph, revealed that a single user might have touched four or five marketing touchpoints before converting. They decided that a touch attribution model (a form of multitouch attribution model) provided more accurate results than their old single touch attribution models.
3. Customer Journey Optimisation: With the new data, ShopX streamlined their mobile site and improved email retargeting, ensuring seamless cross-device experiences. They adopted a custom attribution model that properly credited each channel involved.
4. Outcome: Conversions increased, the brand identified the best marketing attribution model for their funnels, and they improved overall marketing performance by investing more in the channels that truly drive ROI.
   

This example underscores how an ID Graph can be the missing piece in your puzzle, helping you see the bigger picture when mapping the customer journey and deciding on the right marketing attribution model.

Conclusion: Leverage the potentials of an ID Graph

Investing in an ID Graph can radically transform both your customer journey attribution and your approach to attribution modelling in marketing. By stitching together fragmented customer data into a single view, you can deliver personalised experiences across multiple marketing channels, harness predictive analytics to anticipate behaviour, and guide customers through each stage.

This approach allows you to employ different attribution models to evaluate which specific marketing efforts are truly effective, ultimately maximising your marketing effectiveness by focusing on what really works. In essence, if you're searching for how to improve the customer journey, start with the core of your data—an ID Graph. Not only will you gain clearer insights, but you'll also be able to refine how you measure success across a variety of marketing channels and campaigns.

For more detailed insights and tailored strategies for your business, contact us for a free assessment today!

FAQ: How to improve the customer journey