Clearly market research is an essential tool for meeting the consumer where he, she or they live. However consumers are fickle creatures. And no matter how much you think you know about them, there often seems to be a sizable gap between what they tell you in research and how they actually act in everyday life.
Take focus groups, for instance. They’re great tools for getting a read on general sentiment in a particular market. However, they also can offer skewed opinions due to group-think or personality clashes within the group.
Or consider surveys. They avoid group-think, but on their own they only offer minimal baselines for determining any gaps between stated opinions and actual actions in-market.
Balancing sentiment with real-world activity
It would be easy to just blame the tools. But that would be taking the easy way out. After all, the tools are doing exactly what they are supposed to do — they’re evaluating what people believe.
The problem is that belief in something doesn’t mean that you’re willing to follow-through with an action on it. So in the end, when we rely on only one type of data, we wind up expecting it to give us greater perspective than it’s capable of achieving alone.
This is why we need to look for new data sources that can work with our existing data, to expose gaps between expressed sentiment and actual in-market activity. And the only way we can find that is by using anonymized data sources to contrast against your primary data.
How the clickstream helps find truth in primary data
Identity is both a blessing and a curse in market research.
On one side we look at identity as the pathway toward targeted outreach and personalized messaging. But in a very real way, identity also bears the burdens of self-consciousness, moralization and ego.
In other words, consumers often fear exposing their true selves in research, choosing instead to express an idealized version of their intentions, needs and desires.
Which is where clickstream data — along with other generalized audience data — can become an essential comparative tool.
First, clickstream data is fully anonymized. Its entire job is to look at the online pathways of a large group of consumers, from search through page visits. It has no need for identity.
Second, it provides a reliable gauge for testing expressed sentiment found in your primary research against the actual online activity of a global panel of millions. Essentially it acts as a much-needed baseline for your theories and predictions.
And third, it provides you with additional insights into market behavior that more personalized data sources may be blind to. Which in turn can inspire different research vectors to pursue within your primary data sources.
Predicting trends with more authority
It doesn’t end there, though. The benefits of anonymized clickstream data go even further when it comes to identifying and establishing trends.
Multi-year surveys or ongoing research projects do a good job at allowing us to accurately show developing audience movements. But the findings are often restricted to the subject of the study and the foresight of the people who set up the project in the first place.
Or, to put it another way, you still can’t see what you’re not looking at.
Clickstream data, on the other hand, is persistent over time. It’s constantly recording the online ebb and flow of web traffic. So it can offer a quick read of audience intent on any subject, evaluating both current traffic and historical traffic over the past few years.
These valuable insights can help shape future research projects to focus on relevant market movements. Or when combined with existing research, it can help lend additional authority to trend predictions.
It’s exactly the kind of perspective needed to make market research more nimble and intuitive when it comes to determining what the future holds.
Building more effective and privacy conscious research tools
Enhancement of proprietary research tools is another area where clickstream data can help market researchers improve insight and guidance.
By balancing applications of user behavior data with more generalized and anonymous behavioral data derived from the clickstream, market research firms are giving themselves a competitive edge with more actionable outcomes.
What’s more, they avoid some of the thornier issues inherent with working with personal information. By increasing the focus on anonymized data, they create fewer privacy liabilities in their final output, which is better for both the firm and their clients.
Our client, SparkToro, offers a great example of how all this can be put into action. Their market research platform provides deep and meaningful insights across a range of categories, while only using minimal personal data. Simply having the clear view of larger market trends that the clickstream provides is enough to make their tool an invaluable resource.
Let’s also not forget about the questions surrounding artificial intelligence as well.
AI tools are already proving to be a huge boon to market research. The tech allows us to crunch innumerable variables in minutes to arrive at deeper insights more efficiently.
But even with all that processing power at your fingertips, the insights you derive will only be as good as the data you put in. Which is why you still need a solid baseline of generalized audience actions to allow your AI to better distinguish between empty aspirations and actual trends.
A perfect combination
Despite the tremendous opportunities that lie in using clickstream data, we’d be remiss not to emphasize that we don’t believe clickstream, or any other form of alternative anonymized data, is some sort of panacea. Nor do we believe that existing tools are inadequate.
But when a new tool comes along that increases a researcher’s perspective and helps to further the cause of primary research, it only makes sense to add it to the toolbox.
So consider expanding your outlook about alternative data sources that prioritize anonymity to give your research added depth and increased privacy consciousness. It’s a winning combination.
If you need some more advice, we’d love to answer your questions.
