Bringing Insight to Experience
In Part 1 of this series, the role of digital analytics was examined – specifically how businesses can activate greater value through using their data, capturing more data and applying it more quickly throughout their teams.
Many businesses have struggled with the questions posed for years and not made significant progress. One significant reason that we’ve seen in our clients is that the digital analytics tools used are too effortful to use in a consistent, repeatable way to create insights and get to decisions.
The market gap for easy-to-use customer insight tools is being filled with digital experience analytics tools.
In Part 2 of this series on digital analytics we’ll example what digital experience analytics is, why the technology is allowing businesses to succeed, and how it can help teams improve speed of insight and action.
Over the next few minutes, we’ll cover what digital experience analytics is and how it fits into a digital analytics function.
This series also examines the role of digital analytics and a model-based approach to improving digital analytics across teams.
Digital Experience Analytics
Digital experience analytics tools already have significant market penetration, you might even have used them before in your business. The freemium player that has greatest adoption is Hotjar. Historically, features of digital experience analytics are focussed on mouse click heatmaps and session recording. Like many other areas of digital, innovation has been rapid, and now the industry is witnessing a steep trajectory of digital experience analytics tools becoming so much more than their legacy predecessors.
Modern digital experience platforms exist across websites, mobile apps and digital products, and they emphasise three key feature sets:
Referring back to our digital channels, digital experience analytics platforms occupy the core owned digital ecosystems, with a clear leader in capability (Contentsquare) and a fast-growing range of newer providers.
Contentsquare is a great example of the innovation in digital experience analytics, as it showcases the most advanced set of features of digital experience analytics platforms.?
Rich customer behavioural data
Contentsquare (and its ilk) grabs all user behaviour on a digital property (web, app, product) – and I mean all.
Implementation is usually simple: configure a tag (two for ecommerce websites for all of your checkout details), and immediately Contentsquare is capturing all mouse movements, hovers, clicks, journeys and entry sources. You don’t need to pre-configure events. Those are all done in the platform post-implementation using the historical data. This is a massive benefit to data teams who constantly get new measurement requests – because the data already exists!
When deciding to set a new goal or event, there is already rich historical data so there’s no need to ‘wait and see’ what we get, as with Google or Adobe. If a business is used to using Google or Adobe analytics and spending a lot on specialists to keep updating broken metrics and adding new ones – that’s not a thing with Contentsquare.
The richness of the data captured allows users to answer questions that other analytics tools struggle with, such as:
“What pieces of content are the highest revenue generating on each of my landing pages?”
“How do my customers travel through my site before they get into the purchase funnel?”
“How much revenue am I losing because of that JavaScript error on my product pages?”
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For businesses who are using ‘classical’ analytics tools, some of these questions are very hard to answer without a complex set of use cases developed in advance and designed by a specialist and implemented specifically to suit the need.
AI supported insight
It’s easy to fall into the hype and buzzwords flung around with ‘AI’. At its core, AI is just a series of decisions a computer makes on our behalf to short-cut a human having to use effortful thought or a specific skillset. This is useful in digital experience analytics, as many of the most common questions are repeatable and predictable based on immediate behaviours.
Questions like:
“Where in my product funnel are people finding challenges?”
“Are there any errors on my app that are causing friction for customers?”
“Are people able to navigate where they need to go, or do they keep getting frustrated?”
By automating insights around rage-clicking behaviours, buttons getting multiple clicks, errors and load times impacting behaviour, these tools (Contentsquare specifically) can make anyone an analyst with a few clicks of a button.
This scalability in who can work with the tool leads to probably the best part of digital experience analytics, ease of use.
Ease of use
Digital experience analytics are not made for data analysts. That’s not to say it’s no fun for people like me – getting to pull the raw data out means there’s a host of awesome stuff that can be done in customer profiling, merging with customer attributes for predictive modelling or even optimising performance media channels.
Instead, it’s made for product managers, marketers, ecomm specialists and UX teams. This means insights are faster since there isn’t the need to bring in a dedicated analyst or brief an analytics team. It means insights are owned by the team, and data can be close to the subject matter experts. It also means that insights are distributed, so that interpretation is through more eyes and provides a greater view of the problem that the customer or business might be facing.
I’ve heard the same marketing pitch from Google and Adobe about being marketer friendly – though in my experience nine out of ten marketing teams still rely on a specialist to query data and generate insights from those vendors.
Summary: Putting Experience in Digital Analytics
It’s not time to rip out Adobe and Google – they play a really important role still (and we’re not here to throw stones at anyone). The role of integrator and segment activation is an important job that’s hard to do without them!
Instead, if businesses are looking at digital analytics coverage and digital presence is a core driver of acquiring new customers, increasing customer value or retaining customers, then equipping teams with digital experience analytics tools is going to be a win.
In Part 2 of this series on digital analytics, we’ve covered:
In part 3 of this series, we’ll be examining a technology-agnostic model that Drumline uses to build digital analytics capability. We’ll provide a guide for businesses on how to use this model to craft a digital analytics practice that drives actions and impact, not just dashboards.
Evan Rollins is the co-founder of Drumline Digital, a digital partner committed to scaling personalisation for growth, activation and lifetime value. Evan loves data, and believes that what we do tells other people about us more than what we say. He's passionate about finding new ways of using data easier, faster and more effectively to make the lives of customers better, and help businesses make smarter decisions.
Executive Director, Student Experience
2 年Great series Evan, looking forward to the next instalment.
Fractional CMO | Digital Marketing Strategist | Co-Host of My2c.com.au
2 年You got me at data : ) Looking forward to catching up soon.