Must-have-metrics for Shopper Journey

In this article we would go in detail the metrics that are essential to be tracked across a shopper journey, whose ultimate goal is to make a purchase online. At the end of the article you should be confident enough to identify metrics that are valuable to associate to a customer in your business and also gain understanding of techniques on how to avoid analysis-paralysis across several metrics for your customers.

The metrics could be discovered at random basis, but that is not the reason you would be reading this article. Here we would be presenting simple models to organize your metrics in to categories. One of the widely used models for understanding Shopper Journey’s would be the Customer Life Cycle model, which has the 5 stages (as depicted below):

1.       Awareness

2.       Consideration

3.       Conversion

4.       Retention

5.       Loyalty

Across the 5 stages it is possible to associate a customer ID or CRM ID or infact an Email ID. How you do it ? Use strategic Tag Management and Data Enrichment practices across your Customer Touch points. It is not necessary to associate all metrics to the Customer ID dimension, but having some significant ones will help on the larger vision of Data Driven Customer Experiences.

Now let’s get into the group of metrics that should be focused on each Customer Life Cycle stage:

Customer LifeCycle Stage

Metrics

Awareness

Ad Impressions

Ad Clicks

Site Visits

Consideration

Internal Search

Product Views

Cart Views

Email Subscriptions

Site Registration

Conversion

Order Value

Order Counts

Membership Subscriptions

Retention

Lifetime order value

RFM scores

Propensity Scores

Loyalty

Customer Satisfaction Rate

Reward points

The metrics may add up or reduce based on the retail business design. Like Direct-To-Customer retail business designs have primarily subscription value as a key conversion metric rather than a total order value.

As mentioned earlier, it is not necessary to associate a customer ID to all the granular metrics that you see in the customer journey. Instead use Data Enrichment techniques to move away from granular non-actionable data to strategic actionable data. Here are some examples on how to do it.

·    Ad Impression/Ad Clicks: If you are running offsite campaigns for your potential high value audience, which invites to your retail ensure you are tagging your Campaign Landing Page URL with your Campaign Tracking Codes. Persist their tracking codes through-out the session. On the landing page, personalize with hero banners to help audiences login/identify themselves. Now your customer id will be associated with marketing campaign metrics. Use Data enrichment strategies to create metrics by marketing campaigns and tactics.

·         Internal Search, product views, product purchases: Assigning metrics for a customer ID across all search keywords, all product views are actually a fancy. You need not require that. Instead use Data Enrichment Strategies like Keyword Topic Groupings and Product Hierarchies to get metrics at an actionable level rather than a granular level.

By now, you should be able to identify your key metrics for your retail customer journey and also avoid analysis-paralysis by leveraging Data Enrichment Techniques. Happy Building Customer Profiles.