How to leverage The anonymous people on your website
As technology evolves, so do the people who use the technology. Website users consistently change their behaviors based on experiences with a product or technology, and businesses must work in an endless cycle of innovation, agility and intelligence to keep up with evolution.
Digital transformation is not a one-and-done solution; it requires a sustained commitment to meet customers at every stage of their buyer or user journey. This includes the physical journey. Each web user who navigates through a business's online presence leaves behind a data footprint. Businesses use this data to make strategic decisions, ranging from targeted marketing initiatives to personalized advertising.
First-party data, which is collected through sign-ups and campaigns, is essential for optimal marketing. Businesses collect personally identifiable information (PII) across platforms, tying all behaviors together to hyper-personalize the customer experience.
But what about those who stumble onto a website, browse anonymously and then leave without signing up or making a purchase?
Getting to know the unknown customer
Known customers are individuals who have interacted with a business, shared their contact information or made a purchase. These customers have a high level of engagement with the brand and are more likely to make repeat purchases.
Unknown customers are individuals who interact with a business or visit a website without providing any PII or establishing a direct relationship with the company.
Unknown customers represent a significant portion of website visitors, typically ranging from 85% to 98% of the total traffic. They are often identified by their IP addresses or other tracking methods, but their personal information remains undisclosed. As a result, businesses have limited knowledge about their preferences, behaviors and purchase history.
Engaging with unknown customers poses a challenge for marketers, especially as research shows that:
Without PII, companies can’t personalize marketing efforts or tailor messaging based on individual characteristics. Engaging users when they’re just another number on your analytics dashboard requires broader thinking.
Building personas
When the information left behind by a user doesn’t make them “known,” it’s time to tie their behavior to a persona or a user segment. Machine learning classification models can classify people into groups based on their behaviors.
Using personas, you can develop predictions for where a new person might fall within the classification segments you’ve developed. The goal is to gather enough data about these unknown people in your personas to better understand how to make your targeting strategies more effective.
A high-level approach to creating your personas
- Obtain internal stakeholder approval. Creating personas comes with a nominal operating cost. Operating and implementation is easy.
- Find tools that meet your needs. Some analytics platforms allow you to create up to 100 personas. Others, such as Google Analytics 360, allow for more, will integrate with ads and can be streamed to BigQuery, Google’s cloud platform suite of products.
- Identify prime users and create an audience as a look-alike.
- Make your personas broad — broader personas will target more users in a single visit.
- Determine your goals using features on your website. Dynamic content on the web will engage users, and their engagement becomes the data by which your personas are designed.
- Once the unknown customer becomes known, reengage with them quickly.
