Did you know that many multinational companies have over 20 distinct conversion tracking technologies involved in their online marketing activity? It's astounding when you think about it. Every conversion tracking tag from each adtech platform is striving to do the same thing: determine when someone converts on the site.
But there's an innate problem with this. The technology involved (cookies, Javascript, HTTP(S)) is inherently unreliable, especially when distributed across all of the different networks, mobile devices, computers and operating systems out in the public. Add on the multitude of ad blocking applications out there with varying coverage and you get what we have today: a world where it is virtually improbable for each platform to record the same number of conversions.
Make this even more fun by considering that each platform has their own idea of what constitutes a conversion, whether set by the administrator or baked into the platform itself. Once your company is developed to the point of spending tons of money on digital advertising, this effect becomes very problematic. Google doesn't match Facebook, or Adform, or Brightroll, and on and on. It begs the question:
Which conversion number is right?
The answer is simple. It's the number of actual, real lead records you've received. Problem solved, right? Well... sort of. Knowing the right number is one thing -- sharing that data with all of the different systems that need it is another issue altogether. You see, the reason there was a proliferation of tracking tags in the first place is because lead tracking data has historically been very difficult to distribute in real time. Lead data is typically collected into backend SQL databases with no architecture to share that data back out of the network without extensive planning and development. It's a major and expensive undertaking when you talk to your average IT team to build the systems to do it.
It's much easier for a marketer to just set a Javascript tag or image pixel on the confirmation page and let the (unreliable but available) web technologies do the work than it is to convince IT that accurate, real-time conversion telemetry would pay at least one of their salaries in cost savings. So marketing makes the compromise to go with the weaker solution, despite the drawbacks, i.e. misfires and multiple fires of tracking events.
A poor signal in real time is better than a strong signal in batch. Both are sub-optimal. Accurate, real-time conversion telemetry is the key.
Solving the conversion tracking problem
New technologies have evolved in the marketing technology space which solve this advertising problem quite well. Marketers have been working to personalize their messaging to customers, which mean they need to know more and more about us on the fly, in real time.
The first evolution beyond cookies is the web data layer. It's a unified data object on the page which can be accessed by many different integrated web technologies. A data layer only solves one problem. It establishes a single point for data collection on a web page. But it doesn't store anything long term, and it doesn't do anything to ensure accurate distribution of the data. It's like a buffet -- every system still has to get the data themselves, and sometimes the stuff you want isn't there when you want it.
What would be better is to have someone serving up the data, coordinating portion sizes and timing so it's all fair and tasty. Enter the buzzworthy concept of orchestration. A single source isn't enough. It has to store and distribute the data in a way that makes it consistent and actionable. Data platforms do just this.
What data platforms do
The benefit of a customer data platform is threefold:
Conversion tracking
Remember I said the definitive measure of conversions is the actual number of lead records obtained, right? Historically only the lead database would have this information. But now we have these platforms which are cloud-based, owned by marketing (not IT), and collecting the actual personal data of prospects. A trustworthy signal can be sent back to the adtech platforms directly from the data platform. This is done "server-to-server", not like the tags on the pages which can be unreliable transmitters. A single, accurate version of truth sent in a reliable way. This is good data practice, and it makes the conversion tag obsolete.
And what a good thing that is! Too many tags on a site can really make a mess of network traffic for visitors.
Audience segmentation
With all of the useful personal data in a system designed to communicate with other platforms, it's only logical to use that data to segment prospects into groups for certain marketing actions. Now not only conversion signals but segment data can be shared from a single source to the channels for appropriate action. This is what we mean by data activation -- use what you know of people in a way that triggers marketing actions.
Data unification
We finally have a marketing-managed data repository that can communicate important profile and event information to the other systems we've invested in to perform marketing tasks. It can collect web form data and many other sources of data and synchronize marketing CRMs and sales CRMs with little configuration effort. So, do we need a "lead database" and complicated web forms built by CMS platforms or IT? No. No we don't. If you still have those, it's time to evaluate.
This may sound like nothing new, after all, Salesforce's Web2Lead form capture has been around for a long time. The distinction here is what people are included. Consider that there's a proper path for elevation of a person:
Prospect -> MQL -> SQL -> Customer
These categories or classes of engagement directly map to the data repositories for those classes.
CDP -> Marketing CRM -> Sales CRM -> Internal System
As you go farther along the "funnel" fewer and fewer individuals qualify to be included. People engaged with sales should still be getting banner ads and emails from Marketing to support, and marketing leads should be observed and personalized for via the CDP on the website. If your business model involves marketing to customers, then they should be in all four systems. The CDP is the only one of these repositories which should have everyone in it, regardless of their engagement phase, anonymous or otherwise. That's truly powerful stuff.
Unify, simplify, orchestrate
Using a CDP as a single version of the conversion story and distributing that data server-to-server instead of via tags will eliminate confusion in reporting, improve accuracy, reduce costs and improve website performance by removing all those different conversion tags. It is a great answer to the original question we've asked here. And there are so many more benefits to consider. We'll do that individually in more posts soon.