Do you know what your best performing piece of content is? The one that drives customers to conversion?

If you answered the first or last touch…well, you’re probably wrong.

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Why traditional optimization is wrong

Many, if not most, marketing teams optimize content based on first- or last-touch attribution — that is, driving more traffic and putting more budget behind the first piece of content a customer touches and the last piece before they convert.

Why is this?

1. The beginning and the end of a customer journey are some of the better data points web or analytics programs can offer.
2. These two endpoints (specifically, what gets a customer to enter a buying journey and what gets them to ultimately convert) are good indicators of what’s working.

Optimizing on these bookends is optimizing with partial data. You’re missing out on all the information in the middle of the journey.

So how do you know what content and webpages are actually driving impact in the missing middle?

What is the missing middle?

The missing middle is the data in the middle of the customer journey that helps you understand how all of your digital touchpoints are impacting and influencing your audience beyond traffic, first- and last-touch attribution, and other surface metrics. With this information, you can then make the right decisions to drive toward high value actions more quickly and efficiently.

Why should you care about the missing middle?

…because modern marketing is changing

As we look at how marketing is changing in today’s landscape, we’re increasingly seeing organizations move toward a full-funnel marketing strategy, which looks at marketing as an overall practice to better understand what’s working and what’s not.

It’s not just about brand. It’s not just about performance marketing. Full-funnel marketing looks at all of the pieces, how they impact one another, and how that applies to the total customer experience. For more on full-funnel marketing, McKinsey has a good article here.

“As organizations make that shift and consider the full customer journey, there’s a lack of understanding about how their content is impacting people in the middle of their journey,” says Andrew Bolton, Chief Customer Officer at Knotch. “They understand how to get more traffic to their site or how to get conversions through AB testing, calls to action, and things like that. But most are flying blind to the way that content is impacting people in between.”

…because there’s a lot you’re missing, literally

If you’re just optimizing on driving traffic or on a lead generating conversion, there’s a big opportunity to leverage the data you’re not prioritizing in the middle.

For example, we discovered through our data at Knotch that for FinTech brands, the journey from site entrance to conversion can take up to nine content assets and multiple sessions over 15 days. A piece of content could have low first- or last-touch attribution, but it appears in a lot of customer journeys as a critical catalyst to conversion. If you’re only looking at surface level web metrics (like bookend attribution or pageviews), you might consider that piece of content a flop when you should be doubling down on it instead.

…because you’re in an industry with a complex buying process

Industries or markets that require longer decision making processes or complex buying cycles can especially benefit from digging into the missing middle. Some examples of these are: B2B tech, B2B professional services, automotive, brands with higher ticket products, and brands that particularly value first party data.

With more touchpoints needed to get to conversion, it’s even more important to understand how to use the data from the middle of the journey to influence and optimize on those assets and channels to drive toward your desired high value actions.

…because you want to lower customer acquisition costs

Unless your sales cycle is extremely efficient, chances are, you want to lower customer acquisition costs (CAC).

Understanding the middle of the journey will:

• Help you clearly identify where to spend your budget to get the best return (paid social, anyone?)
• Drive efficiencies in process and production (waste less time throwing spaghetti at the wall or creating content that doesn’t matter)
• Free your team up to promote content and landing pages that contribute to higher rates of conversion (e.g. more prominent on your website or recycling in your newsletter)

“All too often marketers revert to easy to measure metrics like pageviews and number of leads generated because understanding the middle of the audience journey can be a time consuming task,” says Bolton. The fact that most people are not optimizing the full audience journey means there’s a massive competitive advantage to the teams that focus on it.”

Less wasted budget, quicker conversion, and more efficiencies = lower CAC = happier leadership

How do you uncover the missing middle?

There is more than one way to gather the data in the missing middle. However you approach it, you’ll want to use it to answer questions such as:

• Which content pieces show up most frequently in the journey to conversion and where
• Which channels are most impactful to the journey
• How long does a journey take, on average
• What are the conversion points and high value actions you want the journey to end on

Audience journey intelligence

Audience journey intelligence platforms (e.g. Knotch) collect, aggregate, and display the data from your website to answer these questions with more efficiency and less manpower.

Benefits to using audience journey intelligence software include:

• Tracking content’s impact on audience journey across first, last, and middle touch
• Automatically capturing site-wide content, high-value actions, and conversions
• Easy-to-understand reporting and insights
• Viewing real time data, not just a snapshot in time
• Simplifying the analysis process

These platforms enable you to optimize the entire audience journey more effectively while driving down costs and increasing ROI.  

Web or marketing analytics

The missing middle data exists in web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) or digital marketing analytics (e.g. Adobe Analytics) applications.

Examples of data you’ll want to look for:

• Paths to conversion
• Average time with content
• Referrer categories
• Pageviews

Your data analyst will then want to pull this data into a spreadsheet and apply pivot tables to compare the various data.

The one caveat is that as you download your data, you will be looking at a specific date range or single point in time.

However you source or analyze the data, knowing what’s happening in the middle of the journey is imperative.

Do you care about…

…Making the correct data-driven decisions?

…Lowering CAC?

…Understanding how your content impacts the business?

…Proving content’s worth?

Then start figuring out your missing middle today.