Journeys and funnels as metaphors for a customer’s decision-making process on the path to purchase have preoccupied marketers and the marketing research community for over a century. The metaphors were intended to help model, measure, and validate the consumer behaviors to achieve predictable business results through media investments.
Unfortunately, a combination of channel fragmentation, data chasm between brands and channel intermediaries, and functional silos across the marketing and advertising organizations have traditionally prevented the level of journey transparency needed to accurately measure the impact of media investments.
With media becoming more digital, addressable, and readily optimizable (at least across the Open Web), we believe there exists a clear opportunity for advertisers to achieve end-to-end journey transparency. It is conceptually feasible to measure the incremental impact of media investments at any point along the journey from awareness, attention, and engagement to purchase, repurchase, and advocacy. For marketers who offer consumers the option to purchase directly from their captive online channels (e.g. e-Stores, social commerce, and in-stream transactions), it is theoretically possible to know which combination of media channels, creatives, and audiences can deliver the best sales growth and ROAS/ROI targets.
The fundamental requirement for achieving journey transparency is having the ability to create a connected journey on a common canvas, a single screen capturing consumer interactions across channels. Advertisers want the option to adapt their creative messages and media weight dynamically to guide a consumer’s evolving decision-making process as they go through the exploration and evaluation of choices available to them before making a purchase.
A dynamically adaptable journey canvas offers intuitive visualization of real-time results, A/B testing, measurement, and media accountability. In particular, advertisers can:
- Visualize the journey and make informed decisions with assistance from AI & Machine Learning algorithms when appropriate
- Engage multi-touch attribution (MTA) capabilities to understand sales contribution at a granular level from individual channels along the journey
- Correlate the impact of upstream branding and awareness investments with downstream performance on conversions and sales
Putting the journey into action
The emergence of the Journey Canvas as part of illumin, our latest innovation in omnichannel, journey automation, has brought forth a new level of journey transparency and media accountability not seen elsewhere in the industry.
The Journey Canvas is intended to help advertisers in their effort to appropriately guide the consumers as they learn, explore, and evaluate the options before making a purchase. The canvas is hotwired for real-time optimization using AI/ML algorithms with programmatic media activation on the Open Web. Advertisers can use third-party, objective MTA partners to independently measure and verify the business results and conduct randomized tests for incremental impact.
Learn more about how you can measure the business impact of omnichannel consumer journeys as we explore real case studies in our latest webinar with IAB. Watch it on demand here.
See it for yourself
Click here to schedule a demo and see how illumin’s Journey Canvas is bridging the gap between how marketers think and execute digital marketing.
