Cracking Cross-device analytics for e-commerce

The essence of Digital Marketing in e-commerce is the ability to derive the online consumer behavior and being able to position the best offering that pertains to a specific buyer persona, precisely called in management terms as “analytics-led digital marketing”. The true potential of analytics-led digital marketing lies in the data and the quality of data lies in the data gathering strategy. This data gathering strategy for online retail analytics was going great till the time they saw a drastic change in the way consumers shop online – the advent of connected consumers. Here are some statistics –Connected consumers by definition are – Consumers who are perpetually connected to each other, to the internet and to the brands through the adoption of one or more internet-connected devices. A significant behavior of these connected consumers is traversing through multiple devices in their path to purchase a product specifically called the omnichannel buyer’s journey. The omni-channel buyer’s journey can be portrayed most likely in the following manner –So, what’s different with marketing to connected consumers? Things get complicated when the consumers start their search for products on their mobile devices and end up buying stuff on their laptops or other devices, have a look at these numbers –

This is where marketers face a challenge to track the actual phase of the buyer’s journey the consumer is in and what should be the right communication? Now, the instant solution to this problem could be trackable cookies but, the story is a bit different when we talk about cookies:

1. In the WAP (or mobile browser) environment, cookies are reset every time the user closes the browser. So, your responsive site will not give you information on what the consumer did on various devices he accessed the site from.
2. In-app cookies are not shareable in between apps or across devices, which makes it a localized information relevant to activities of the consumer on that device. So, an app-first approach will also be more of an app-only approach in this case.

We can agree that this is a challenge that needs an instant solution with the exponential increase in the range of devices ownership. So do the giants like Facebook and Google who have provided some solutions without compromising on the user privacy. Considering these solutions and the state of the e-commerce market today, marketers can zero down on either of these 2 analytics approaches –

These approaches have their own pros and cons, which can be mapped to the business perspective and applied to crack the data gathering game of omnichannel analytics in e-commerce. Now, when the marketers are ready with the data, they can gather actionable insights and resume analytics-led digital marketing even in an omnichannel e-commerce world.