BlueConic empowers you to know your customers and visitors better. A key marketing metric is your customer recognition ratio, which BlueConic defines as the percentage of your engaged audience that is known by one or more unique identifiers. Calculate your customer recognition ratio to gather benchmark metrics and spot trends over time as your first-party data grows in BlueConic.
How to measure your customer recognition ratio
BlueConic offers tools to help improve the strength of your first-party data by recognizing customers and visitors on your site. You can identify individual customers or visitors using numerous sources including URL parameters, third-party cookies, globally unique identifiers (GUIDs), Google Tag Manager, and BlueConic connections that exchange data with your email service provider (ESP) or through the data layer.
Start with your BlueConic Profile Recognition Dashboard
To help you determine how many of your profiles have unique identifiers (think of these as ways you can spot a customer online, such as email address, profile ID, customer ID, or other unique identifier). Choose Insights from the BlueConic navigation bar, and select the Profile Recognition Dashboard to see a range of metrics that measure your customer recognition ratio. BlueConic creates this dashboard for you, and you can further customize the insights, time frame, and details of what the insights measure and visualize.
How to increase your customer recognition ratio with BlueConic
Consider the following questions when planning how to use BlueConic to improve your customer recognition ratio:
- What unique identifiers are already available from your connections to other systems?
- What contact ID will you expose in the parameter of an email click-through? Is this possible to implement with your current ESP?
- What unique identifiers are stored as a cookie and how is this data captured?
- Is there any identifying information stored in the data layer?
- If you have multiple brands or channels, which unique identifiers are available that can be reused for your other brands, and which unique identifiers apply only to one brand? Does the unique identifier have the same name or a different name?
Set a profile merging strategy
After you’ve determined what your unique identifiers are across channels and connections, the next step is to set up your corresponding profile properties as unique identifiers and be sure that they are added to your profile merging rules in BlueConic. For any unique identifier used in the parameter of an email click through, you will want to ensure that the ‘IP Check’ rule is engaged for this value in the Profile merging settings page (select Settings > Profile merging from the BlueConic menu bar). Select this option for improved privacy and security. If this option is selected, the visitor will switch to a new profile when a new value for this property is set. This will prevent potential profile hijacking when links are forwarded, for instance.
Collect data that feeds your customer recognition ratio
Once you determine specific ways you can find unique identifiers, the next step is to gather known users from your connections, and then add BlueConic Listeners to monitor these unique identifiers as your customers visit the site. Depending on the answers to the questions above, you may need to update an existing Listener or create a new one.
If you do not have a customer ID available from another system or connection, chat with your BlueConic Customer Success Manager about the possibility of exposing the BlueConic ID.
Data collection strategies to increase your ability recognize customers online
Some BlueConic features that help to increase your recognition ratio include:
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Behavioral listeners are used to store cookie values and to grab custom parameters, such as a unique identifier loaded from an email click-through.
Example: Storing the value from a cookie:Example: Storing a value from a parameter:
- Additional rule-based form listeners are used in BlueConic to collect data from checkout forms and in cart or funnel abandonment use cases.
- BlueConic Connections have at least one unique identifier (and potentially more than one) associated with each import goal in the connection.
- External Trackers, specifically pixels, can be a simple solution to implement, which will allow you to tell which customers have opened emails. These are not a substitute for a UUID loaded in the email parameter, however.
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BlueConic uses cookies in addition to the ones you are setting. The BCSessionID cookie can be the same between two sessions for anonymous profiles. BlueConic profiles are stored server-side. With each page view, BlueConic automatically retrieves the correct profile for the visitor by checking the first-party and third-party BCSessionID cookie. This means that for each new session the same profile is used.
- Note: The BCSessionID cookie is flagged as Secure on HTTPS websites. As a fallback, it is unsecure on HTTP sites.
- Profile merging is the process of combining the profile property values of two individual profiles into a single profile. Both profiles need to share at least one identifier value (e.g. email address or customer ID) in order for to a profile merge to take place.
Activate data based on your customer recognition ratio
Now that you’re identifying known users as they browse your site or visit your channels, it’s time to build audience segments that reflect known vs. anonymous visitors!
Building customer segments
It's easy to create segments in BlueConic based on profile properties. To create a segment that targets known or anonymous users, you can use a specific profile property name for a particular identifier (e.g., "Email Address (hashed)," "Cookie ID") for building a segment of visitors, indicating that the property has a value; or you can use the "Profile Property Has Value" option for any unique identifier, as in this example:
In BlueConic, you can create simple yes or no segments for customers for whom you either have a certain piece of data, or you do not have this data. For example, you can use this strategy to target customers for whom you do not yet have an email address.
Consider building a segment of customers or visitors who have been active recently, with high behavioral scores for momentum and intensity, but who are still anonymous, meaning you don't yet have an email address or another unique identifier you can use for retargeting. Using dialogues in BlueConic, you can offer a special promotion to obtain their email address or use other progressive profiling efforts to improve your segmentation. Optimize your efforts to continue driving onsite identification.
Measure your success
BlueConic makes it easy to visualize the key aspects of your customer segments. You can create dashboards with insights showing profile origins and the number of identifiable profiles. For example, you can zero in on a selected segment of profiles and use the Profile Identifiers insight to show which unique identifiers are known, for example, the login name, email address, customer ID, or phone number.
Visualize your customer recognition ratio
Using the Profile Identifiers insight, you can see the percentage of profiles in the selected segment that have an email address, for example. This is a great way to measure your customer recognition ratio.
The Profile Origin Insight complements this overview. When profiles are being created or imported, BlueConic stores details about customer’s origins in three Origin of profile properties. Use this insight to view customer segments by origin. This would let you examine and learn more about the segment of users who have a value for the "email address" profile property.
The Segment Profile Count insight shows the total number of profiles in a segment, and the percentage of profiles in this segment relative to all visitor profiles.
The Profile Filling Level insight also demonstrates the number of profiles that have a value versus those that don't for a selected profile property, such as the "Is customer" profile property.
Using the Segmentation Percentage KPI insight, you can compare a segment containing all identified users against a segment that includes all customers and visitors who have visited your channels.
Another strategy to calculate your recognition ratio is to use the statistics in the General Settings tab in BlueConic. To calculate your BlueConic recognition ratio, divide the number of engaged profiles by the number of identified profiles.
Next steps
As your proximity to the customer grows by building your first-party data in BlueConic, the benefit of understanding your customer audiences is converging with your opportunity to sell. The value for customers will coincide with your conversion goals if you can strategically build a cohesive onsite experience for these users. As your recognition ratio grows, consider creating personas for your customers. Get comfortable with moving the needle on recognition ratio as part of a larger, sustained and choreographed effort across all of your coordinated marketing efforts. If you're starting at 18% recognition ratio in BlueConic, you'll be excited to watch this number grow over time with these suggestions.
Learn more
- Profile Identifiers insight
- Using segments in BlueConic
- Profile merging
- Using listeners to collect data in BlueConic
- Customer recognition insights: A crucial component of your marketing