Consumer Data You Should Be Tracking in Your Interactive Content
While we can all, for the most part, agree that interactive content isn’t anything “new,” advances in marketing technology have made interactive content all the more useful to one’s marketing efforts. Most types of interactive content allow brands to collect copious amounts of information on consumers — information that can be used to better cater to consumer needs and help with future marketing efforts. One thing a lot of marketers struggle with, however, is determining what type of information they want to collect with their interactive content. In the end, it’s a matter of answering this golden question: “What consumer data is going to be the most useful to the organization’s end goal?” Here are some suggestions for consumer data that are really ideal to start tracking during your next interactive content promotion:
Contact Information
Collecting names e-mails and phone numbers might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t do this. There are a number of brands out there that create stellar interactive content purely for the purpose of brand awareness; so data collection ends up getting swept under the rug.
Whether it’s a game or a fun customization app, your brand can still benefit from collecting that information. Down the line, your brand might hold a big promotion that you want brand advocates (like the ones who interacted with your app) to know about it. And not only do you want them to know about it, but you want them to actually make use of the promotion when they make a purchase at your store.
Now, I totally get that there are times when it really doesn’t “make sense” to ask for contact information. I get it. Before (or even after) playing a game, no one really wants to share their information. Although you know you’ll use consumer contact information in a fair, legal, respectful manner, there are still many consumers that fear you won’t. Fortunately, there’s one thing you can do that’s been particularly helpful for many of the brands I’ve worked with — and that’s providing some sort of incentive in return for basic contact information. After all, how can they redeem their gift or prize if we don’t know who they are?
Incentives can be as large or small as your brand deems fit. After playing a game or taking a brief survey (whatever your interactive content consists of, really), you can ask if they’d like to opt-in for a chance to win a big prize or opt-in to receive a coupon or gift. Naturally, the point of all this is that people like free stuff (or having the chance to win free stuff). Consumers will be more inclined to provide their information so that they be contacted about their incentives.
Event Tracking
Unique to Google Analytics, event tracking is the tracking of activity on interactive elements of your brand’s website. These activities (or “events”) can consist of any type of interaction — everything from hitting the play/pause button on a video, abandoning a form, submitting a form, refreshing a game, downloading a file, etc. The list goes on. Almost any and every interaction on your brand’s interactive media counts as “an event.”
What makes event tracking so helpful is that it provides great insight into how your consumers peruse your website as well as how interested they are in your content. If event tracking reveals that people are only hitting the play button on a game once, it could be an indicator that the game is boring or simply isn’t challenging enough. On the flip side, several “play” actions could indicate that people really enjoy the game that’s on your site. Likewise, not seeing enough “download” events/actions could be a good indicator that the downloadable content (an e-guide, a video, etc) isn’t interesting or useful enough to download. When brands possess this type of data, they can make significant improvements to their content, as well as their overall marketing strategy.
Integrating event tracking into your website can be a little tricky, but thankfully, there are a number of how-to guides out there (including the one on Google) that can help you implement GA event tracking pretty easily. There are also a number of excellent guides on how to access and read reports from GA on the events you’ve tracked.
Multiple Choice Answers
The last type of consumer information I highly recommend tracking are multiple-choice answers in quizzes, surveys and evaluators. Obviously, multiple-choice questions (and answers) will vary considerably, but there are 2 ways tracking multiple-choice answers can help your brand! For one, like event tracking, multiple choice questions and answers will give your brand a better idea of what the majority of consumers want or expect from you. By providing your consumers with a few limited options to choose from (within your quiz or survey), it allows you to segment each response with a percentage; so that you can group certain consumers by their particular response. For example: If you ask the question, “which one of these colors if your favorite?” and you supply 4 possible answers (Red, Blue, Green, Yellow), you can determine what color is most popular by how many people selected a certain response. This generally can’t be done with form-fill responses.
Another reason tracking multiple-choice answers can be useful is that brands can hone in further on specific users that gave a certain response (Ex: pulling up the list of users who responded with their favorite color as “red”). It allows brands to focus their marketing efforts on specific users in that category — whether it be through e-mail marketing, direct mail or phone calls. Additionally, you might discover that consumers that answered with a particular response have certain commonalities that should be acknowledged. Some great multiple-choice questions you can ask often regard: purchase timeframe, desired brand, current brand — anything that would help with any future discussions, really!
No matter what the ultimate goal of your interactive content is, collecting data on any aspect of a consumer’s interaction is worth the effort. With new competitors sprouting up every single day, you owe it to your brand to know who your consumers are and what they want. Advances in technology have not only made it possible to gather this data, but have made it extremely easy to do so. With all the resources available to marketers, there’s no excuse not to track everything!
