What is transactional data and how can you leverage it?

There are many sources of information available online that are useful for analyzing customers and their behaviors. Whether they’ve made a purchase or not, online customers and site visitors can provide data and insights to your brand that can help make your marketing more effective and allow your advertising and digital marketing dollars to go further.

One example of readily available data is transactional data. Let’s explore what transactional data is and how it can be used to spur growth.

What is transactional data?

Transactional data is any information that’s gathered as the result of a transaction. While it is easy to assume that the transaction must involve a purchase, the fact is that online, a transaction is merely defined as an “event.” These events simply mean that information is being shared between the site visitor’s web browser and your site or organization.

The key feature that sets transactional data apart from other types of collected data is that it provides a date and time. This temporal detail helps to provide context and gives it an objective piece of data to use as a pivot point when analyzing customer behaviors.

How to leverage transactional data

When analyzed properly, transactional data becomes hugely important. It provides context to everyday transactions and helps organizations better understand what their customers are actually doing online. Transactional data allows you to follow the clicks and trace how your customers behave before and after a purchase. It can even help identify reasons that customers are dropping off the site before making a purchase or abandoning their shopping carts.

Transactional data examples

There are many different ways that transactional data can be used to help grow your business. Here are two specific use cases that might seem familiar:

1. Gaining insight from pre- and post-purchase customer data

One primary example of transactional data involves recording the time, date, and type of purchase a customer makes on your site. While the type of product the customer purchased, as well as how much they spent, will be captured by your organization’s point-of-sale program, there is other related data that’s considered transactional.

Information regarding the customer’s pre-purchase behavior is also gathered. Whether or not they compared products before making a final selection or if they chose to use a promo code is all information that is gathered as part of the transaction.

With this information, you can answer questions such as:

• How many times did they browse the product that they ended up purchasing?
• Did they look at any similar products or read reviews before purchasing?
• If a customer browsed the product previously but chose to purchase it today, why is that? (The assumption could be made that it’s a result of the promo code offer that was sent.)

Each of these questions and answers leads to a better understanding of your customers and their habits. While it may not be feasible to run a promotion every day, you can aggregate the data regarding promo code usage, for example, and draw additional conclusions. Perhaps only promo codes that offer a savings of 15% or more spur an actual purchase. This information can further inform your marketing team of what types of offers are the most effective.

2. Removing sales obstacles

In a very real way, transactional data can remove impediments from customers making their final purchase. With the data that’s gathered, you’ll be able to note if certain payment types failed or if a customer got all the way to the checkout screen and then stopped the transaction because they couldn’t find the payment method they wanted.

This information makes it easier for you to troubleshoot technical issues with any of your financial partners and can help you determine if additional payment options are needed. It can also help streamline your website. The goal should be for a seamless experience from the moment a guest hits checkout to when they hit place order. The more clicks, forms, fields, and error messages they get along the way, the more opportunities they have to walk away. That means you lose a sale and they get frustrated. With transactional data, you can proactively address many of these issues.

Transactional data is too big to go alone

As with a lot of collected data, the biggest obstacle most businesses face is figuring out how to make sense of it. So much data is collected every second of every day, that finding a path through the chaos can be nearly impossible.

This is true 10 times over in regards to transactional data. With so many different types of transactional data and just as many ways to apply it, most brands don’t have the bandwidth to do the hard work of analyzing the data and identifying behaviors. That’s why firms like Lytics are so important. With their experience in data modeling, Lytics can easily break down your data, identify your most important target audiences, segment them accordingly, and reach more of the customers you want faster.