Alibaba’s marketing technology platform, Alimama, has launched an index capable of tracking and measuring the effect of integrated marketing on consumers’ purchase intent, but only within the Alibaba ecosystem.

At a press conference last week, Alimama’s chief president Zhao Min said how to justify the huge investment of a campaign and measure marketing’s effect on business are important priorities for a CMO.

“We hope to help CMOs and turn them from ‘Chief Money Officers’ into Chief Growth Officers through Alimama's new index,” Zhao said.

In China today, the process leading to a consumer’s buying decision has changed a lot, characterised by randomness and a non-sequential user journey.

The Alimama Purchase Intent Index has already been in beta for some time, and contains eight major sub-indexes, including viewing time, favoured content and searches for information recorded over a period of time.

Even though the index is dynamic and presents instant evaluations of intent, it is not just for measuring the outcome of one marketing activity or one campaign, but serves a long-term CRM purpose, stated Zhao.

Alibaba presented cases at its launch event proving that measurements of purchase intent on all its platforms has had a correlation with a brand’s long-term growth.

In general, there are several ways that marketers can use data to predict purchase intent. These include placing themselves in the shoes of the consumer, not relying on the likes of programmatic advertising, collecting the right data and knowing when not to target people.

Brands can serve digital advertising to the right audience, but if the individuals targeted aren’t in the right frame of mind or at the right stage of the path to purchase, they are wasting their time. (For more on path to purchase models, read WARC’s article: How to use data to predict purchase intent.)

Sourced from Alibaba, additional content by WARC Staff