By Anthony Costanzo, Chief Analytics Officer, Mile Marker
For growth marketers, connecting the dots between awareness and decision-making has never been more challenging or more critical. At Mile Marker, our approach to measuring the customer journey combines deep expertise, innovative technology, and an unwavering focus on generating measurable business outcomes.
Seeing the Bigger Picture: Navigating the Customer Journey
The customer journey isn’t a straight path—it’s a dynamic, interconnected flow of signals, touchpoints, and decisions. Brands compete for attention in a crowded market. Whether they’re emerging brands or established enterprises, our clients face a common challenge: understanding how their media impacts consumers throughout the customer journey. Too often, businesses focus on isolated “soft” metrics, like clicks, engagements, or impressions as a proxy for awareness or impact which only tell part of the story. At Mile Marker, we bridge this gap by measuring not just the immediate effects of brand-building campaigns, but also their long-term impact on revenue, loyalty, and growth. By aligning media investments with business outcomes, we optimize every touchpoint to create a cohesive, holistic customer journey that drives meaningful results.
Overcoming the Gaps in the Customer Journey
Fragmentation is one of the biggest challenges in providing a unified view of the consumer journey. Data is often siloed across teams & walled garden platforms, making it difficult to track how awareness efforts influence conversion. More importantly – no two businesses are alike: A direct-to-consumer brand has a vastly different set of needs and challenges compared to a brand with products sold on the shelves of a brick-and-mortar retailer.
This difference in approach is where traditional measurement tools often fall short. They tend to apply rigid structures to a process that requires flexibility and nuance. Just as every business is different, each media plan – and every measurement plan – must be too. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work when it comes to media strategies, which is why we begin by understanding each client’s specific needs, goals, and challenges. Our Waypoint process helps identify the KPIs that matter most for each business, and from there, we choose the right mix of measurement tools, such as Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM), Incrementality, and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), to inform smarter, more effective media decisions. By integrating data across the customer journey and adapting to the evolving media landscape, we help brands stay flexible, informed, and positioned for success. This is where Mile Marker’s flexibility and customizability shine.
Meet Relay: Actionable Analytics for Real Business Outcomes
At the heart of our measurement strategy is Relay, a key component of the Mile Marker Operating System (MMoS). The name “Relay” comes from the essential role relays play in complex systems—receiving, processing, and transmitting critical information. Relay isn’t just a reporting dashboard or a simple tool. It’s a flexible, configurable analytics platform designed to gather data from multiple sources, turn it into meaningful insights, and deliver those insights to the teams & platforms that drive real business action.
Here’s how Relay works:
- Input: Relay gathers data from hundreds of sources, including directly from media channels, client business analytics systems (e.g., Shopify, Salesforce), and macro-level trends (e.g., weather, consumer sentiment indexes,, and any outside factor that may impact a client’s business).
- Unification & Processing: It normalizes and merges this data, translating disparate signals into meaningful insights.
- Output: Relay connects these insights to actionable platforms, from media channels like Meta and Google Ads to analytics tools like Tableau or Power BI to allow for smarter media decisions and better business outcomes
Relay isn’t a standalone piece of software, and that’s intentional. Every client has unique needs, and we’ve built Relay to integrate with any existing system or data source. This flexibility ensures our clients can access enterprise-level analytics tailored to their specific business goals.
From Awareness to Action: Strategies That Work
To effectively navigate the customer journey, Mile Marker employs a combination of technology, strategy, and expertise:
- Customization at Scale: We adapt our analytics and media strategies to fit each client’s unique business model, whether they operate in D2C, retail, or lead generation.
- Unified Data: By consolidating data from all touchpoints—both online and offline—we provide a holistic view of the consumer journey.
- Actionable Insights: Relay allows us to move beyond passive reporting to deliver insights that drive decisions and outcomes.
For example, for one of our clients in the healthcare space Mile Marker leveraged weekly CDC data on cold and flu trends by market as a key signal in optimizing their media investments. By feeding this data into Relay, we were able to seamlessly integrate external inputs with their existing systems, enabling smarter targeting decisions. Relay processes and analyzes this information in real time, allowing us to identify regions with rising flu rates and adjust their media spend instantly. This data-driven approach helped our team maximize the effectiveness of the campaigns, targeting the right areas while minimizing waste and ensuring that every dollar spent was contributing to their desired outcome.
We fundamentally believe that all media is measurable. And all media investments should be held accountable to drive meaningful results. We apply that discipline across the full spectrum of media touchpoints – including Offline and Digital Channels. This requires a significant investment in the proper research, tools, and talent for each campaign – but it’s what our clients deserve.
This omnichannel approach, combined with deep industry knowledge, allows us to deliver insights and strategies that other independent agencies simply can’t match.
Shaping the Future of the Customer Journey
The concept of the customer journey isn’t fixed; it’s an ever-changing system shaped by shifts in consumer behavior and market trends. Staying ahead of these changes requires continual investment in innovative tools and adaptive strategies that lead to impactful outcomes for our clients.
Every brand’s journey is unique, and so is our approach. We reject one-size-fits-all solutions, focusing instead on understanding the nuances of each client’s goals and challenges. By seamlessly integrating data and insights across the customer journey, we empower brands to remain agile, informed, and positioned for success in an increasingly dynamic marketplace.
