– The majority of a customer’s buying journey happens outside of a brand’s website.
– iOS14’s impact on attribution has affected the ability to track customer intent and behavior.
– Companies in the attribution space are using third-party tools to provide “clean attribution,” but the real power lies in their algorithmic machine learning of the data.Collect data directly from customers to create personalized and effective customer journeys on your website, rather than relying solely on first-party customer journey behavior data.The majority of a purchase journey from an ecommerce store happens outside of the actual brand’s store. iOS 14’s real impact maps very closely to this behavior. If iOS was just about attribution, sales would still be rocking and rolling for most people without any dip. Instead, the dip points to the new normal being surfaced. A lot of the customer’s buying journey happens away from the brand’s website. I see an ad on Facebook, I go to the website, I read the page, I leave the page, I Google the brand, I look for websites that have reviews of the product, or YouTube videos reviewing it, or websites that covered it. I probably look at Amazon if I’m being honest. All the reviews on the website aren’t going to be enough if it’s a considered purchase. So prior to iOS 14, when I did these things, Facebook would be able to see that I was visiting websites that do reviews and see that I was actively reading reviews and clicking on other links to understand what my intent was on buying the item in question. They could surface ads factoring in this behavior to gently remind me to make my purchase. After iOS 14, they can’t do that anymore. So we’ve seen this switch to a bunch of companies that are working in the attribution space around 1st party data. But a lot of that data doesn’t show the actual intent of the person because the majority of the decision making happens off their website. It’s kind of a catch 22. The data is better than nothing, but its real impact is really hard to determine quantifiably. So these companies have started to provide “clean attribution,” yet they are all using 3rd party tools to do it. That’s the secret of the attribution space. Pretty much every single “magic pixel” that people are using is actually fingerprint.js, snowplow, segment, or any one of the other software that does identity verification. Most of them are open source, by the way. So the real “power” of what the companies are doing is actually in their algorithmic machine learning of the data. Which could be valuable, just depends. BUT remember… The customer journey isn’t limited to the walls of your website. It’s like looking at hotjars. Usually, they point to a UX issue, not a behavior. Now I’m all for people learning how to better scale their ad budgets but fundamentally, tracking intent based signals and tying those to data provided directly by customers over the long run will do a better job of this. You know how Facebook has said it’s all about the creatives and you should target broad? It’s kind of the same thing, you should stop looking at 1st party customer journey behavior data and start collecting data directly from customers to create really good journeys for everyone that comes to your website.You know the point of highest intent, yeah that signup for a discount where 75% of purchases happen within 9 hours after signup.Be smart people. Happy Friday!https://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco