E-commerce teams often invest heavily in customer data platforms and retention campaigns while under-testing the experience for anonymous shoppers. Here’s how to check whether your budget matches your opportunity.
You may be spending $300,000 a year to improve email targeting for customers you can identify–while most visitors browse your site without logging in.
That doesn’t mean your customer data platform (CDP) is a waste. It does raise a more useful question: Are you investing in the audience most likely to generate incremental profit or the audience that’s easiest to measure?
The distinction matters. Identifiable customers leave behind familiar signals: email addresses, purchase histories, and campaign responses. Anonymous shoppers are harder to track across visits, so their behavior can be less visible in the dashboards that guide budget decisions. But a lack of visibility isn’t evidence that they have little potential.
A mismatch worth investigating
A frequently repeated claim says retailers devote 50-70% of marketing budgets to just 0.5-1% of customers, leaving nearly everyone else with basic recommendations. Those figures shouldn’t be treated as established industry-wide benchmarks. Still, they point to a question retailers can answer with their own data: How much of your investment reaches known customers, and how much improves the experience for everyone else?
One study of popular retail apps found that 92% of web users were anonymous, while 12% of users who made purchases were unknown to the retailer (Braze). That suggests anonymity can be widespread. It does not mean that 92% of revenue comes from anonymous visitors, or that those percentages apply to every retailer.
That distinction is crucial. A large anonymous audience is an opportunity to investigate, not a business case by itself.
What are you actually optimizing?
Retention programs and CDPs can be valuable. They may help retailers recognize customers, tailor communications, and encourage repeat purchases. The question isn’t whether those capabilities matter. It’s whether the budget assigned to them is producing more value than the alternatives.
For a retailer with substantial high-intent anonymous traffic, other investments might include improving:
- On-site search: Can shoppers find products using the words they actually use?
- Product discovery: Are relevant items easy to browse, compare, and understand?
- Recommendations: Do suggestions help shoppers make a decision, or simply fill space?
- Checkout: Are avoidable steps or surprises causing people to abandon a purchase?
These improvements may benefit known and anonymous shoppers alike. A redesign that feels more modern isn’t automatically more profitable, just as a better-targeted email isn’t automatically incremental revenue.
Turn the budget question into a test
Before planning your marketing budget for the next year 2027 you should ask specific set of questions:
- Who does each investment reach? Separate known and anonymous visitors where your data allows, and be clear about what you can and can’t observe.
- What behavior changes? Measure outcomes such as completed purchases or other meaningful business goals, not just clicks, opens, or engagement.
- What is incremental? Compare against a suitable control or baseline. Take into account that many on-site tools tend to hijack attribution. A purchase that would have happened anyway is different from one your intervention caused.
- What else could the same money improve? Estimate the opportunity cost of leaving search, discovery, recommendations, or checkout under-tested.
A practical next step is to select one high-traffic journey and run a controlled experiment aimed at making it easier for anonymous shoppers to find or buy a product. Compare the result with the current experience, and assess the impact alongside the returns from your existing retention work.
Don’t confuse “measurable” with “most valuable”
Known customers are easier to recognize, and their responses are often easier to attribute. That can make retention work look especially clear in reporting. Anonymous traffic is harder to understand, but difficulty measuring an audience doesn’t make that audience unimportant.
The goal isn’t to choose between customer data and better on-site experiences. It’s to find out which investments change outcomes, for whom, and at what cost.
As most of your visitors shop without logging in, the experience they encounter deserves more than an assumption.
Learn more how you can reach tour anonymous traffic with better product discovery, recommendations and product search.
