The new buyer journey with AI: What happens between the AI answer and customer inquiry?

Follow one potential buyer’s journey.

Imagine a marketing leader is looking for a better CRM for their team. They ask ChatGPT which platforms are available, see your company mentioned, and send the name to someone else on their team.

Later, that person searches for the brand, visits your website, looks at pricing and watches a demo. A few days later, someone from the company books a call.

That kind of journey is important to note because the first interaction, the first website visit and the first call all took place separately and may not involve the same people.

If you only look at the final website visit, you may miss the role AI played earlier in the buying process.

Triangulate your data to get attribution

There are several things you’ll need to combine to do proper attribution. Multi-touch attribution has always been difficult, but adding in the AI engines for discovery has added another layer.

AI prompt tracking shows when and how your brand appears for important questions.

Web analytics shows the visits and actions of your customers from how they were referred to your site to the actions they take on it.

Lead and CRM data show when someone fills out a form, books a demo or becomes a customer.

Customer feedback can reveal how people first heard about you and what impacted their decision.

None of these closes the loop on the full buyer journey on its own.

Attribution is often incomplete

Attribution tries to assign credit to the interactions that happen before a conversion occurs. Different attribution models operate in different ways.

The problem is that there is not always a clean trail if your customer first discovered you through AI. According to our earlier example, the first discovery in AI would likely not be recorded. This does not necessarily mean that AI ‘got’ you the sale, but it would have influenced the decision, and it led the process, so it should get some credit.

So how do you give AI credit when the tools don’t connect the attribution?

This is a challenge for every marketer. You’ll want to work closely with your sales team to figure out the buying prompts that can impact growth the most and show marked improvement in your visibility in those prompt sets. Then, you can attribute sales growth to the visibility growth in AI.

Ask customers for feedback

One of the simplest ways to get attribution is through the simple question: “How did you hear about us?” Or, you can explicitly ask if an answer engine had any role in their research.

Keep these answers alongside your traditional attribution data. Neither one is a complete picture, but together they give you a better picture of how you are being discovered.

Look for common patterns

Individual customer journeys are messy and often look like a squiggle on attribution charts. Going off the questions from a few customers won’t open you up for enough growth.

Instead, look for patterns:

• Which questions repeatedly show your brand as the response?
• Which pages do prospects visit before converting?
• What do buyers say influenced them?
• What buyer journeys keep appearing in sales conversations?

Then, you’ll have a clearer picture of how to get credit for AI growth with this new layer in your customer journey.

You may not (yet) be able to assign a clear dollar amount to AI mentions or AI visibility, but you can still learn if AI search is a part of how your customers search for, learn about, and interact with your brand.