Behavioral Event Tracking, Targeting & Engagement Analysis with SAS Customer Intelligence 360

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There is little to no debate that human beings are increasingly — often exclusively — interacting with brands digitally. Consumers are now online through countless mechanisms – from laptops and mobile apps to AI-enabled voice assistants and sensor-based wearables. Engagement is diversifying in fascinating new ways, and when organizations cannot see their customers interacting in the physical world, that’s where digital event tracking can help. For data-driven brands, this is opportunistic for AI-enabled marketing across existing and emerging touchpoints.

In SAS Customer Intelligence 360, events enable users to enhance their ability to understand, target, and interact with customers (and prospects) in a meaningful way. Events are used to track user behavior, as well as provide input conditions for other items such as spots, segments, tasks, data views, and activities. Events are available for web, mobile, email, direct and third party external applications. Events are triggered when a customer or prospect completes the conditions for an event, and metrics such as impressions, impressions viewable, and click through are captured.

Figure 1: Event Tracking in SAS Customer Intelligence 360

For example, events can be used in these ways:

• Record when customers click a spot on a web page or in a mobile app
• Collect data that is entered in a form
• Trigger the start of an activity (i.e. journey targeting across multiple touchpoints)
• Capture incremental data to enrich 1st party data assets for analytics and machine learning

Tracking user interactions is one of the core features that enables your brand to respond in real time to customers based on their profile, origin, browsing behavior, etc.. For example, when a customer interacts with your website through a click event, that specific behavior is processed by the run-time environment and can be used to control many of your site's features. The interactions that you monitor are the driving force behind many of the capabilities that SAS Customer Intelligence 360 offers.

Figure 2: The Customer is the Center of the Universe

To help businesses better understand their customer's path to purchase and market accordingly, events are part of the data recipe for machine learning models to understand and unlock powerful ad targeting, optimization, measurement and insights. For example, if a brand doesn’t have event tracking set up, it won’t know much about what users are doing on their website or mobile app. That means it will struggle to make the kinds of decisions that can grow the business. Subsequently, if the brand's analysts can’t trust the data tracking implementation, they won't trust the data. When data loses it's integrity, poor or wrong decisions increase.

To put it simply, analytics is a driver of customer engagement. Here are two assets for readers who want to go deeper:

• MIT Sloan Management Review Whitepaper: Using Analytics to Improve Customer Engagement
• The Forrester Wave™: Customer Analytics Technologies, Q3 2020 Research Report

The term "marketing data management" describes how SAS Customer Intelligence 360 can enhance and extend customer data activation, while allowing users to move beyond a traditional customer data platform with our hybrid architecture. With that said, I invite you to view a video that will address the following topics on how SAS:

1. Enables users to define, track and analyze engagement micro-goals (non-revenue behaviors) & macro-goals (revenue driving conversions) via data tracking configurations called dataviews
2. Delivers customer engagement analysis through descriptive, predictive or text analysis of structured tables that encompass dataviews accessible via a relational data model

Learn more about how the SAS platform can be applied for marketing data management here.