People-based view refers to looking at marketing data, not as a series of unrelated marketing touchpoints and events, but as a stream of inter-related events tied to a particular person. This means, the marketing intelligence solution needs to normalize and stitch all marketing events and related data points into a unified customer journey, rather than just flat and unreconciled exposure, engagement and financial data. It needs to be able to recognize that disparate events that appear to be happening in different devices owned by the same user (on the user’s desktop, tablet and mobile), even events that appear to be happening in different parts of the same device (mobile web versus in-app) and recognize that these are all the same person.
When marketing intelligence solutions provide a people-based view, it represents a far more accurate picture about how their marketing initiatives are truly driving prospects into customers, and leads to better optimization decisions versus non people-based views.
People-based views require that the customer journey:
1) Represents de-duplicated events. Without a people-based view, different channel systems may lay claim to their own conversion events, leading to significantly over-estimating how many conversions your marketing is actually doing
2) Represents a cross-device view. Media has long worked in conjunction with each other across a users’ different screens. An old adage says that users don’t think in screens or devices, but marketers, due to the difficulty of managing the proprietary complexities of each device, sometimes have to look at their data device-by-device, instead of recognizing the user behind multiple devices.
3) Represents an intra-device view. Just because it’s not easy to stitch together the probabilistic world of cookies for mobile web with the deterministic world of IFAs in mobile app, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Though mobile web only represents 15% of the mobile minute, it is still a significant presence in the mobile channel, the fastest growing channel. Being able to recognize the same user across mobile web and in-app within the same device is paramount for a people- based view
