The Reality of CDP/MA – So Much Effort (Budget) for 5% of Traffic 😨

If a CDP/MA salesperson told you during a conversation: ‘We will track and organize every event from identified customers who voluntarily share their identity, usually 2–5% of your traffic‘, would you decide to spend several, or even tens of thousands of dollars a month on such a tool?

I suspect not. The sales trick is to present this as ‘Your customers’, while most visitor events belong to anonymous, unidentifiable individuals.

On average, 5% of traffic is recognized on the site, while 95% remains anonymous. The entire investment in CDP/MA goes into optimizing these 5%. We want to tell you how to optimize 100% at a lower cost (sic!).

Or schedule a demo right away – we’ll talk about it at the meeting.

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The Problem with CDP/MA Reality – We Optimize Only 5% of Traffic

The 5% Reality is a truth and significant discrepancy between the marketing promises of CDP/MA system providers and everyday reality. About 5% of your website traffic is ‘known’ – this is how it looks for most sites and exposes the basic marketing claim (we will address all your customers), which is technically true but practically misleading.

The CDP/MA industry presents customers (as the name suggests – Customer Data Platform) as a resource for personalization. In reality, these are customers who have already converted: logged in after purchase, created an account for convenience, are already in your retention funnel.

CDP does not create these customers but takes them over after the transaction is completed. Meanwhile, unknown visitors make up 95% of traffic. CDP records events: clicks, page views, form interactions, but they are orphaned and anonymous. Known customers are only 5% of traffic, and here you can link events to real identities and use them for personalization.

The trick is to present this as ‘Your customers’, while most visitor events belong to anonymous, unidentifiable individuals.

CDP Does Not Utilize 95% of Traffic

In reality, your addressable audience is small. Even if you perfectly track every event of these 5%, you invest in technology, pore over reports, and optimize for a fraction of the traffic. The remaining 95% remains a black box, unused.

A significant problem is also re-identification. Providers suggest that you can ‘connect the dots’ and determine that anonymous visitor X is actually customer Y. In practice, this only works when someone voluntarily identifies themselves (logging in, filling out a form, clicking a link from an email), which happens rarely. So rarely that it accounts for only 5% of site traffic. Mostly, the majority of site traffic is new customers, whom you are targeting in acquisition activities.

You receive a beautiful CDP UI showing rich customer profiles and event history, beautiful reports, but mainly for people you already know well, which limits practical insights.

CDPs are limited by the lack of a persistent identifier: without logging in or consent to tracking, you cannot link Session A with Session B, even if it’s the same unknown person. Additionally, privacy regulations like GDPR/e-Privacy have tightened tracking and user identification, making it difficult to fulfill the promise of ‘recognizing every user’, although this was and is unrealistic.

CDPs are effective in other tasks than their marketing message suggests. For known customers, they enable creating detailed profiles, behavioral triggers, and lifecycle automation. So if in your system >60% are known users (because you have, for example, an app that accounts for 60% of total traffic volume), or you are Amazon, Allegro, Facebook, or Netflix – CDP is for you.

In other cases, a more truthful positioning would be: ‘We will track and organize every event from identified customers and prospects who voluntarily share their identity, usually 2–5% of your traffic. For the rest, we will capture behavioral signals that may help if and when they later identify themselves‘. This is rather less exciting as a sales slogan and therefore rarely heard.

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How to Address These 95% of Anonymous Traffic

Many companies, for whom anonymous traffic is a daily occurrence, first choose a decision engine based on anonymous data, such as of course Quarticon, but also systems like Prefixbox, Nosto, Algolia, or Bloomreach. The return on investment is clear in this case.

These are essentially different categories of tools, although they sometimes overlap.

The CDP system responds to the request ‘create a target group of women who bought sportswear in the last 90 days so I can send them an email’ (although using ‘women’ is already an exaggeration – in most cases, there will be no such information and it will only be ‘create a group of people who bought sportswear in the last 90 days so I can send them an email’).

The decision/recommendation engine responds to ‘show this person specific products based on what they are currently browsing or browsed today and last week, and if you recognize this person, also based on what they have purchased so far’.

If you feel you are wasting your budget on expensive CDP/MA – don’t delay. Schedule a demo of the Quarticon decision engine for e-commerce and save tens of thousands of dollars!

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How to Start Using Quarticon?

See how to start using Quarticon tools. Integration depends on the type of store platform. Quarticon works with all store platforms. The following instruction is universal for everyone, although in many cases the integration will be even simpler.