Are traditional consumer metrics now obsolete? Perhaps not, but there’s something to be said for the speed at which modern digital promotional incentive models are shifting – and the more these models shift, the harder it is to accurately measure what actually drives consumer engagement and conversion.
These are what consumer metrics are for, after all: measuring how people respond to a product or brand, and what actions they take to engage. Metrics such as click-through rates and conversion rates are important here, giving organizations a way to quantify audience behavior and assess which strategies are actually delivering results. But as incentive models get more complicated, so too do the metrics needed to track consumers.
Modern Digital Promotional Incentive Models
So what do we mean when we refer to digital promotional incentive models? Put simply, we’re talking about the different ways digital businesses and platforms use incentives to encourage consumers to take a particular action.
That might mean signing up, making a purchase, returning to a platform, completing a challenge, or simply spending more time within a particular digital environment. These incentives have traditionally been relatively straightforward, but over time, the number of ways incentives can be delivered – and personalised, for that matter – has changed.
Unique Incentive Models: An Example
Let’s look at the online gaming scene, for instance. Across numerous platforms, the strategy has typically been to offer welcome bonuses or free spins, but according to TheLines’ latest promotional bonus audit, many platforms are offering a completely different route to engagement – in this case, no deposit bonuses.
Rather than requiring a consumer to commit financially before engaging, an operator uses an introductory incentive to reduce that initial barrier and engage immediately. The resulting consumer journey may then involve several further interactions before any traditional conversion metric, such as a deposit, takes place.
The Full Picture
The reason this is relevant is because it highlights how consumer engagement can no longer always be understood through a single, straightforward conversion point.
A traditional promotional model might measure success by whether an incentive leads directly to a purchase, but newer approaches can introduce several stages between initial engagement and eventual conversion, and ultimately create a consumer journey that is more complex than ever before.
This is something numerous digital platforms need to figure out, not just in the iGaming scene, but in other industries as well. Take the mobile gaming space, and games like Clash of Clans that have a range of challenges, rewards, timed events, and progression mechanics that impact how and when players engage.
More and more platforms are replicating elements like this, but understanding the full journey remains important. It’s not enough to simply measure immediate results, organizations need to know how their incentives are influencing behavior, and which interactions are contributing to the full picture of conversion and retention.
Building Nuanced Metrics
So how do they do this? Really, the answer comes in event-level tracking. Instead of recording only the final conversion, organizations need to assign measurable events to each stage of the customer journey – from seeing or clicking an incentive, to registering, to claiming an offer, returning to the platform, and becoming a repeat customer.
These events can then be connected to the same user or cohort, creating a record of what happened between the initial promotion and the eventual outcome. Something that can be especially useful here is multi-touch attribution, as it examines the sequence of promotional touchpoints and determines how different interactions actually contributed to the end goal.
In more advanced setups, organizations can even go further by using controlled experiments – for example, exposing otherwise similar audiences to different incentives in order to establish whether a particular promotion actually caused a change in behavior rather than merely coinciding with it.
Essentially, it’s all about nuanced insight. Just as promotional incentive models have evolved, consumer metrics need to evolve along with them, capturing data in a way that accounts for more complicated digital journeys and interactions.