How to understand and optimize the customer journey with event tracking

Digital consumers are now connected to the internet through a variety of devices and interfaces – from “old-world” PCs and handheld devices to modern-era voice assistants, wearables and AR/VR interfaces. This has opened up not only new ways but many ways for consumers to engage with their favorite brands. Chatbots and social media platforms have started to eat away at the traditional channels, such as web and e-mail.

For data-savvy – and data-hungry – companies this presents more opportunities to target customers across a wide range of channels and devices. However, the abundance of ways consumers now interact with a brand means companies have to use a variety of tools to understand customer experience across an increasingly complicated web of touchpoints.

Figure 1: Companies use many systems to understand and optimize the customer journey

Introducing an easier way of tracking visitor behavior across any touchpoint.

Capturing and analyzing data from these touchpoints has proved challenging, requiring companies to engineer complex implementations to join data across different systems. Our mission has always been to give customers an easy way to make data-informed decisions, which is why we are excited to introduce a major development to our platform.

We enhanced our event attribution logic to help you easily capture data from other systems into your Optimizely Results. This new capability enables you to understand customer behavior and optimize the customer journey on an even larger collection of metrics that are important to you.

How does it work?

When your users are assigned to an Optimizely experiment or personalization campaign, our platform remembers these assignments. From then on, as your users interact with your experiences across different touchpoints – online or offline – any events sent to Optimizely are automatically matched to the experiments and campaigns the users were assigned to.

Figure 2: Easy Event Tracking seamlessly matches events from other systems to the right experiments

This new capability introduces many benefits for Optimizely customers and partners:

• Optimize metrics across the customer journey

Whether your teams care about customer acquisition, lifetime value, user satisfaction or any other metric that relies on external events, they can now see which variations performed well on these metrics in the Optimizely Results.

• Eliminate tedious development to capture events from any source

Easy event tracking eliminates cumbersome custom coding and technical setup to connect data from external sources into Optimizely.

• Simplify event integrations with 3rd party applications

Easy event tracking opens up new opportunities for solution providers to integrate with Optimizely. It greatly simplifies integrating event data from their applications into Optimizely Results.

Why and how are developers using Easy Event Tracking today?

Our customers are already using this feature today and finding incredible use cases to apply to their entire customer lifecycle to improve the experience and better track the metrics that matter most. Here are some examples:

Track offline conversions: It’s a lot simpler to track visitor actions that happen outside of your primary online channels, such as tracking order returns, collecting data from phone conversations with third-party software, or seeing if an in-store purchase was influenced by an ad. For example, if a retailer shows you a pair of jeans in an online advert and you then go into one of their stores to try on the jeans and purchase them in-store using a credit card processing technology like Square, we can automatically attribute that sale to the original experiment from the online ad.

Capture data from other systems: It’s easy to capture data from third-party systems into your Optimizely results to understand the performance of your experiments on a wider array of metrics. For example, you can measure the impact of your experiment hypotheses on your users’ lifetime value or retention metrics as calculated by another system in your technology stack.

Measure engagement in any digital touchpoint: If you’re looking to track conversions or any other visitor action that take place outside of your core application or service, such as SMS, push notification, and instant messaging (chatbots) conversions, this has now become a lot easier with Easy Event Tracking.

Get started today

Easy Event Tracking is generally available for all Optimizely customers using our updated Full Stack 3.0 SDKs. Currently, most SDKs are supported with additional languages to follow. If you currently use the Event API, follow the instructions in our updated developer documentation to enable easier attribution.

You can also find more information in our knowledge base article.