How Able CDP Works

Able is a next generation customer data platform, designed to help to implement first-party customer journey tracking by automatically connecting siloed customer data across services and APIs.

It combines:

1. A database and a customer data platform that accumulates knowledge about each customer activity, regardless whether it happens online on the website or offline and in CRMs.
2. First-party tracking and attribution. Able CDP tracks website page views and form submissions to attribute each customer to the original source. It records attribution details such as UTM parameters, referrer URL and landing page, as well as ad click ids and Google Analytics Client Id and attributes all future interactions to them.
3. ‍Marketing integrations. Able CDP offers self-configuring marketing data integrations that automatically map lead fields between services, extend leads with campaign and other attribution details, receives conversion events from services such as CRMs and payment systems, attributes them to the original ad click and visit and sends them to Google Analytics and ad platforms' APIs.

Able CDP doesn't require coding or complex configuration of the integrations.

It can be integrated with custom back-end applications using REST API for sending custom events and mappings and a front-end Javascript API and allows users to implement custom lambda functions to pre-process or transform funnel events (beta). All collected data are accessible to external reporting tools such as Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) via BigQuery Connector and Google Analytics integration.

Usage Example

Let's say there is a funnel that consists of:

• a marketing website with a lead form
• a CRM / mailliist software to warm up leads
• online purchase cart that captures payment details and processes customer payment in Stripe

Standard tracking of such funnels produces inconsistent data with multiple problems:

1. 30-40% of conversions in Google Analytics would have direct or incorrect source, as well as not being attributed to the actual landing page that the customer first saw or found in an organic search engine. This happens because Google Analytics would create a separate session for the returning customer when a different device is used or if browser privacy features deleted Google Analytics cookies.
2. Only 20-30% of purchases would be displayed in the ad platforms' conversion reports. This happens because browser tracking pixels have hard time identifying cross-device purchases, or same device purchase when conversion happens weeks after the initial website visit. While this can be slightly improved by using integration services that send personal customer information to Facebook Conversions API, this additional data usually only produces 20-30% match rate as well. As a result, 30-70% of conversions aren't attributed correctly. In addition to misleading conversion cost in reports, this results to machine learning algorithms in ad platforms not being able to understand what customers actually convert, which may make algorithms to stop displaying ads to the segments that convert well.
3. CRM and mail list software missing details about customer source and landing page, resulting in substandard targeting of follow-up marketing communications.

These issues become even more pronounced when a deal is closed offline, in a CRM or when a subscription payment is taken after a trial period, as well as in apps where subscription happens on a separate app domain not connected with the marketing website.

Able Customer Data Platform resolves this by tracking each customer communication with each system and building a first-party customer profile:

In this example, Able Customer Data Platform tracks each step in the customer journey, attributes conversion that happens on the back-end outside of browser user session to the original website visit and sends conversions back to Google Analytics and ad platform APIs.

It's important to note that Able Customer Data Platform attributes back-end conversion to the original visitor using it's own database. It attributes the purchase conversion to the original visit using first-touch attribution and sends conversion directly to analytics' and ad platforms' APIs not depending on browsers. This allows Able CDP to track, attribute and integrate purchase conversions that happen long time after the original visit that produced a lead has happened.

While the diagram above uses subscription with a trial period as an example, the same principle applies to other type of funnels. For example:

• high-touch B2B sales where conversions happen in a CRM weeks after the lead was captured;
• e-commerce sales where back-end tracking is used to improve quality of conversion data and also to capture LTV of follow-on upsell purchases.

See our solutions page for more examples of typical tracking, attribution and integration tasks that Able CDP performs, as well as industry-specific cases with ready-to-use funnel blueprints.

Customer Database

Able Customer Data Platform analyses entire history of interactions with each customer, linking activities into a first-party customer profile.

It does it by extracting customer identifiers (Visitor Keys) such as ad click id, Google Analytics Client Id, phone or email, from each event during the customer journey: web page view, lead form submission, purchase in CRM or Stripe etc.

This allows Able to attribute events that happen late in the conversion funnel or in a separate session than the original activity — an ad click or an organic landing page view — and send conversion back to Google Analytics and ad platforms such as Facebook Conversions API and Google Ads.

Customers can be looked up in the Able CDP UI by any of the identifiers. Able CDP presents quick overview of all customer identifiers it's aware of, information submitted in lead forms, attribution details calculated using first-touch attribution algorithm and historical customer journey.

Read more about Able CDP customer journey mapping in our documentations.

By collecting all events related to customer and utilizing all of the available data for attribution, Able Customer Data Platform achieves attribution rate that is superior to browser pixels of integration services, allowing you to understand where 99% of paying customers come from.