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 it even more useful for marketing efforts. Most types of interactive content allow brands to collect copious amounts of consumer information — information that can be used to better cater to consumer needs and support future marketing efforts. One thing many marketers struggle with, however, is determining what type of information they want to collect through 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. Several brands create stellar interactive content purely for brand awareness, so data collection gets 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 run a big promotion that you want brand advocates (like those who interacted with your app) to know about. And not only do you want them to know about it, but you also want them actually to use the promotion when they 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, and respectful manner, many consumers still 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 — providing an 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 can be contacted about their incentives.

Event Tracking

Unique to Google Analytics, event tracking tracks activity on interactive elements of your brand’s website. These activities (or events) can consist of any interaction — from hitting the play/pause button on a video to abandoning or submitting a form, refreshing a game, or downloading a file. 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 excellent insight into how your consumers navigate your website and how interested they are in your content. If event tracking shows that people only hit the play button once, it could indicate the game is tedious or not challenging enough. On the flip side, several play actions could suggest 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 valuable enough to download. When brands possess this type of data, they can make significant improvements to their content and overall marketing strategy.

Integrating event tracking into your website can be a little tricky. Still, thankfully, there are several how-to guides out there, including here on Martech Zone.

Multiple Choice Answers

The last type of consumer information I highly recommend tracking is multiple-choice answers in quizzes, surveys, and evaluations. Obviously, multiple-choice questions (and answers) will vary considerably, but there are two ways that 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), you can segment responses by percentage, grouping consumers by their responses. 1 you can determine which color is most popular by how many people selected each 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 who gave a certain response (Eg, 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 who gave a particular response share 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 the ultimate goal of your interactive content, 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 also made it extremely easy to do so. With all the resources available to marketers, there’s no excuse not to track everything!