😊Get to know your customers 🛒 – approaching data collection 💾

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As a marketeer you are always striving to get closer to your customers, understand better their behaviour so that you can better answer their needs and serve the right message at the right time. With the advent of digital it is now easier than ever to understand your customer’s behaviour and from there to start gathering data which will make your team smarter and take the right actions at the right time. This is where Discover offers so much opportunities. There are so many ways that a visitor can act while visiting your website that there is literally a trove of information just waiting for you to collect and make great use of.

That’s one of the important points, you could jump headfirst in the collection of data and start collecting everything that you can think of but it’s good to first take a step back and reflect on what it is that really matters collecting. Making that initial homework will structure how you approach your data collection, specifically what advanced collection rules you will define in SAS 360 Discover.

 💭Through our experience working with customers using SAS360 Discover we think you gather information on the following:

• Outline the major conversion points on your site. Think as well about key milestones in the customer journey that you would be looking to track.
• Define what are the most important pages on your website, what makes these pages so important and what you are trying to understand from customer interaction with these pages.
• List out any pain points 🤕 you suspect the visitor could face in the customer journey. Then think about what you would want to collect to investigate further that concern
• Is your Web or UX team planning a redesign and if so, what changes are expected to happen on the site? You could use this opportunity to collect data to add to other sources (such as user testing) to build a case for specific redesign needs
• Has the business come to you with specific challenges that they are facing or targets that they have for the year? This is an opportunity to translate those into specific data collection in Discover.
• You should be forward thinking and plan or even start collecting data which may become more valuable to your organisation in the future. This is a tricky one but, just like the above point, it requires you keep your ear to the ground and get a good sense of what other teams in your organization are working on and what goals matter to them.
• Seasonality 🎅: you know what specific events or moments in the year are important to your organization therefore you can have a think about what behaviour you are expecting from your customers at these times. On top of that you can outline how it differs from normal times and if so, what you need to ensure you are measuring that specific behaviour

So now you’ve considered the above points and have answered the ones that matter. The next step is to break these down into a list that you should prioritize, helping you focus on what’s important to your business. 💰📋 To help you create the data collection events in Discover, you could create a spreadsheet with all the information you will need such as domains and path levels to target, specific page elements or page forms to select and types of page events to capture (click, content change, field interaction, form submit or Javascript variable change. You don’t need to go overboard with what information you enter in your spreadsheet as you will generally be able to navigate to the web page and select page elements. It’s good to keep note of what you are capturing. As your library of events grows this will be a good way to keep track of your progress.

You can then go ahead and start setting up the collection of data in Discover. At the time of writing this post you will still be able to this via advanced collection rules, however this will change very soon.

As per a recent post on Communities from Jim Hazen, with the 20.03 release this month advanced collection rules will disappear from the UI and be replaced in the following way:

• Some events that were configured in the Advanced Collection Rules section of SAS 360 Discover are automatically migrated in Events. These previously configured events continue to work without any changes being required by the user, including Business Process, Goal, Internal Search, Promotion, and Custom Attribute.
• The remaining items in Advanced Collection Rules were automatically moved to the General Settings > Classification page and continue to work as previously configured, including Page Category, Form, Profile, and View.

Let us know how you are doing on your data collection journey! 🎤 Do you have tried and tested ways of approaching data collection that you would like to share with other members of the community?