Seeing Through the Click - Content Awareness

Seeing Through the Click - What’s Happening Inside the Content

Often, our customers and prospects ask for some insights into how their audiences are engaging at a lower level than just simply counting a click on a landing page.Their use cases involve multiple solution components such as marketing automation, CRM and analytics software.  There are many great pieces of software available in the market that do a fantastic job however when it comes to creating an integrated view across them with other tools, their ability is limited.

The Sensor Network Concept 

Extending the point of data collection beyond just a single event into a series of events to create a time based view of behavior. A sensor is deployed in any website/landing page/web app tracking particular types of activities that can be aligned to the use case. These sensors are deployed as a network across multiple types of content and web sites to form a comprehensive content or usage data input stream. They are always listening and collecting activity data in the background.  Which is then coupled with background capabilities such as identity resolution and prediction to understand what intent is.

Figure 1.  Content sensor network

The Limitation of Marketing Automation Tools To Create Understanding

All Marketing Automation products include a module for Web Activity tracking. Every vendor solution tells the marketer how many clicks (for tracked links), visitor demographics (based on IP geolocation) or conversions are you having on your websites. All of these tracking solutions are great as long as you are concerned only about your landing page activities alone hosted in your marketing automation/content software. 

How do you aggregate tracked activity from multiple domains outside of your marketing tools to create a composite view of engagement? 

The mentioned tracking tools will still work since they can be inserted in any website but this is where marketing automation tools start hitting a wall. If you use the tracking scripts that marketing automation software provides, you can only report and analyze this data inside these tools, often being limited by their internal report tools. It is like looking through binoculars - what you are focused on is closer but you have no idea of what’s going on around you.

Figure 2: Zoomed in on subject with loss of context.

The PIF Sensor

Some months ago we started to think about these problems that we faced over and over with different companies. The challenges:

• Keep track of all anonymous and non-anonymous activities across platforms
• Centralize the event data for analytics and insights in a single place

This allows tracking on multiple web properties making this data available for some other system that needs to consume it.

Think about your High-Value clicks, CTAs, navigation links, form submissions and heat map data - all of which can be captured into a single platform to so it can be distributed to your marketing software, CRM, CMS, reporting & analytics tools and then make this data pool available ready to be sent to 300+ systems.

Data Enrichment - Marketing Gold

This is the secret power to getting the information shaped into something meaningful before it gets to the final destination. For example, can you create a seamless workflow where your clicks can be analyzed, compared and calculated, enriching them with more meaningful data, then sending all this data to your marketing software and automatically flow your leads to different campaigns depending on this data. This is golden for the marketing department. More meaningful data means more creativity for the marketer ending in better segmentation and messaging. All this in real-time!

Analytics Tools

Oftentimes, customers come to Put It Forward looking for a solution to integrate the marketing automation tools with analytics software, so they can analyze websites and marketing landing pages in a single place. It is very common and powerful for the analytics team, to bring all marketing activities data (email opens, email clicks, unsubscribes, etc) to the analytics software, most of the time including web activities from different landing pages / websites sources.  Adding the sensor data to the analytics environments enables a view over time that allows the user to see through the click into the behavior of the person consuming the content.

PIF Sensor, Some Benefits in Review

• Highly customizable sensor that can be adapted to capture the most unique web activity
• Centralization of all marketing data and make it integration ready
• Data enrichment prior to destination. Capture data, enrich it and then integrate it!
• Leverage Put It Forward capabilities to integrate data with hundreds of systems

We have a lot more to say about sensor networks and intelligent systems.  I’d be happy to share at any time.

Sebastian Ospina