Understand your customers better with post-purchase surveys

Understanding where your customers are coming from can help refine your advertising strategy and beyond.

Traditional attribution models have always struggled with an inherent flaw: they often fail to capture the full consumer journey, generally focusing on the last touchpoint before a purchase is made. In today's multi-channel, multi-device world, this model is becoming increasingly inadequate. TikTok is the fastest-growing channel for brand discovery,¹ but many current measurement tools provide limited views on where customers are first learning about brands.

To provide a more complete view of where customers are coming from, TikTok has partnered with top post-purchase survey providers KnoCommerce, Fairing and Okendo. Working with these partners can empower marketers with an additional layer of data to level up their online advertising strategy.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg: through our partner providers' impressive list of data partnerships, post-purchase surveys can easily integrate with your existing analytics capabilities. Insights from surveys can complement your UTM data and enhance your multi-touch attribution (MTA) and media mix models (MMM) to create a clear picture of your customers' journeys, so that you can make informed decisions about ad spend and marketing strategy.

By asking customers directly "Where did you first hear about us?", you gain a more comprehensive understanding of what influenced their decision. This way, you don't just rely on click data, but you use actual user responses to understand your customers' journey better.

What are the benefits of post-purchase surveys?

Post-purchase surveys (PPS) are an attribution and insights tool that advertisers can integrate with their e-commerce platform (for example, Shopify) to poll customers immediately after a sales event, adding a valuable layer of insight into your customers' path to purchase.

By using the voice of the customer, post-purchase surveys act as a source of truth and challenge the common narratives around attribution. It isn't meant to be a replacement, but rather a complement to other modes of measurement, allowing advertisers to get a more complete view of attribution.

By using post-purchase surveys, advertisers can gain valuable insights including:

• Where customers are coming from: It's extremely common for customers to discover your brand on one platform and then do research across others. By having data on where your brand is being discovered, you can make informed decisions on budget allocation. Pura Vida found that 32% of net new customers came from TikTok and that, as an additional piece of customer insight, 40% of purchases were gifts for others.

• How long they took to convert: Have you ever wondered how long it takes a customer to convert from when they first hear about your brand? Post-purchase surveys provide more insights into the purchase consideration window. Asking customers “When did you first hear about us?” provides data that no other tool can. Knowing how long it takes a customer to convert gives you the opportunity to optimize the user journey by testing different variables.

• Which channels are most effective: With better attribution and customer understanding, you can more efficiently allocate your ad spend, increasing the return on your investment. German apparel brand Snocks used post-purchase surveys to optimize their cross-platform strategy for Black Friday. They saw that many customers discovered their brand on TikTok, indicating a higher effectiveness of TikTok than click-based attribution models suggested.

Our post-purchase survey ROAS for TikTok is more than four times higher than TikTok ROAS with click-based measurement.

Edvin Dizdaric, Performance Marketing Manager

Snocks

TikTok advertising offers endless opportunities for brands to connect with consumers, and post-purchase surveys can be an essential tool in making those connections more valuable. By incorporating post-purchase surveys into your advertising strategy, you can better understand your customers' journey, optimize your marketing efforts, and drive better business results. Visit the Help Center to learn more and get started today.