Getting the Most Out of Digital Experience Analytics
While online shopping has been on the rise for some time, ecommerce is expected to have its first trillion-dollar year of sales in 2022 as people continue to shift their spending habits online. According to the 2022 Digital Experience Benchmark report Contentsquare recently published, online user sessions peaked at 4.8 billion in November 2021.
With a staggering amount of high street stores closing on a daily basis, it’s no wonder consumers are increasingly turning to online to purchase goods and services.
But with digital here to stay, brands are now under an increasing amount of pressure to provide stellar online customer experiences.
Personalisation and tapping into human digital experience will be key to delivering on these heightened expectations, with research highlighting that over half of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide online experiences tailored to their specific needs and preferences.
However, the path to delivering a high-quality customer experience won’t get you very far if there’s no personal touch and if the experience isn’t intuitive or rewarding in other ways.
With a growing number of touchpoints and constantly changing customer behaviours, brands need a better understanding of their customers’ entire journeys — from start to finish.
If you can visualise how consumers are interacting with your site and apps, you’re empowered with the right knowledge to make quick, impactful changes and updates. The Digital Experience Benchmark helps provide the “why” behind the visitor behaviour so that you can address the root cause.
The report revealed that, when customers committed to making a purchase, page views per session went up by +328% on average across all industries. This suggests that customers like to conduct more research before making a purchase, so brands should ensure that they are giving them all the information they need to convert.
On the other hand, are customer journeys stalling because you need to update content such as opening hours or product stock figures? Or because a form is confusing them or a link is broken? How are users feeling (frustrated, etc.) when trying to navigate your website?
According to the same research, across all industries, half of all customers leave a web or mobile site after viewing just one page — a figure that’s up +6% from the previous year. Additionally, a 54% average scroll rate across industries shows many customers don’t make it past the halfway point on any given web page.
Being able to get a quick diagnosis of the specific issues that can help explain the above statistics, and quantifying it, gives brands the power to be agile and meet customer needs when they will most appreciate and reward you for it.
So how can brands access these insights to gain a complete view of the entire customer journey? Enter digital experience analytics.
AI-powered experience analytics can be an extremely insightful tool in enabling brands to surface the precise points of friction along the customer journey, guiding them towards an intent-based personalisation approach for enhanced digital journeys.
But with so many digital experience analytics providers out there, how do brands know which solution is best for them?
Let’s look at some key considerations for marketers on the lookout for their next digital experience analytics solution.
Integration Ready
Analytics solutions can help to break through company silos and engage with every part of an organisation, from the marketing team right down to the IT team.
But this requires analytics tools that can integrate with all of your other existing systems within the business, for example, back-office systems, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, and websites, among others.
Before choosing a provider, ask other teams across the business which systems they use. This way you can ensure the provider you choose is able to successfully facilitate these integration processes without any hassle.
Embracing Cookieless
The examination and processing of information extracted from common data sources, including websites, social media and apps, can raise significant privacy and data management concerns.
In fact, according to a survey on current attitudes towards online personal data use and privacy, over half of the respondents said they were more concerned about their online privacy compared to a year ago.
Consumers expect brands to have products, people and processes that will keep their data safe and their privacy protected, and third-party cookies no longer fits this paradigm shift.
Companies, particularly marketers, are seeking to adjust their strategies now and are looking to vendors to support a cookieless world, and the effort to build digital trust with consumers.
Many organisations are already developing and launching their own systems which allow businesses to create the perfect customer journey without the use of cookies. The key to achieving a privacy-first future is about placing a focus on first party data.
Analytics need to be based on real-time information rather than demographic and cookie data. By aggregating and analysing consumer interactions that demonstrate intent, brands are able to deliver the best possible experiences to their customers without breaching their privacy.
It’s crucial, however, to check that your vendor of choice can not only help brands to thrive in a cookieless world, but that they have robust compliance and privacy management frameworks and policies in place.
Real-Time Insights
Despite the extensive offering of analytics tools in the market, only few vendors provide advanced decision systems. Optimal visualisation and discovery capabilities are essential to understanding your customers and giving you insights into what content attracts your customers, what points of friction cause them to abandon and which journeys are your most profitable.
For example, small site errors — like failed discount codes, unclear CTAs or lengthy forms — could be keeping your customers from converting. Tapping into emotions and digital humanism will help you achieve these real-time insights.
Contentsquare 2022 Benchmark data shows that mobile accounted for 58% of online traffic in 2021; a large chunk of traffic coming from desktops (42%), in a mostly mobile-only world (with algorithm updates from Google and huge advancements in smartphone technology helping to bolster this claim).
Yet, here we are in 2022 with just under half of online traffic still taking place on desktop. Today’s consumer is device-agnostic; we’re happy to shop on both desktop and mobile and we expect seamless experiences on both.
Being able to respond and react to these insights as quickly as possible is key, so it is important to ensure your provider offers automated workflows that can give your teams real-time insights for better decision-making.
With so many different analytics solutions available on the market, choosing the right one can often feel like navigating a maze.
But having the above considerations in mind when looking for a provider will help you get the best out of your analytics so that you gain the visibility needed to delight your customers, reach them where they are, and stay ahead of the competition.