It’s 2019 and mobile use, especially mobile eCommerce, is on the rise. According to ContentSquare data, on average 63% of traffic to apparel, luxury and cosmetics sites comes from mobile devices – indicating that consumers are no longer shopping like it’s the 90s. However, many digital teams, are guilty of treating eCommerce like it’s the 90s. So, are you one of them?
Because many eCommerce teams are stuck in the past when it comes to acquiring and analyzing data; they’re suffering from being Data Rich, Insight Poor (DRIP). With a vast range of analytics tools now available, there’s no question that digital teams have access to a bucket load of data. But despite the wealth of information, these teams often can’t get the relevant, actionable data they need to optimise their online retail space.
As an online retailer, your time is far too important to be spent manually tagging your website. It’s too important to be relying on tools and systems that only provide half of the information you need to make critical decisions about your website. And it’s certainly far too important for you to sit around waiting on analysts to decode the answers to questions that you need answering now.
Houston, We Have a Data Problem
The stakes are now much higher than they were before the rise of the always-on, always-available online storefront. Your competition now has access to a bounty of detailed insights about a customer’s journey and engagement that can revitalise a customer’s experience to enhance conversions and retention.
Extracting actionable insights that can inform your optimisation efforts at speed is the first hurdle for UX and optimisation teams. Traditional analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, used in isolation to inform optimisation decisions, can only provide
Often, it’s easy to be drawn to surface-level metrics, like click and bounce rate, that don’t answer the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’. This can lead optimisation teams to run tests based on best practice or ‘gut instinct’ – neither of which are much better than guesswork compared to data-driven insight.
Some organisations are relying on other tools like session replays or heatmaps to try and drill down into visitor behavior to understand why users behave as they do on their sites. While session replay tools and heatmaps can be used by teams across the organisation, they rarely aggregate data that is both easy to understand and representative of the entire visitor population.While these tools provide plenty of data, they don’t provide enough insight. Further, these tools don’t provide insights in real time.
It’s time for digital teams to work smarter, not harder, to get the actionable insights they need.
Thankfully, there is a solution to DRIP and a way to work smarter. Rather than relying on resource- and time-consuming traditional tools and methods, like manual tagging, teams can now access a new breed of behavioural analytics to better understand not just the “what” of user behaviour, but the “why” as well.
Using UX analytics platforms to review real-time behavioral insights like click recurrence (how many times on average a visitor clicks on a particular page elements like a CTA or banner), brands can easily identify user frustration and friction in the buyer journey.
Another example is using revenue metrics (measuring revenue generated by a specific web element or block of content), which can help teams discover how much revenue their product-specific landing pages or a new home page banner has generated week to week.
Of course, with any data collection, if you rely on a few individuals to collect, process and interpret it for you, you’ll inevitably hit a bottleneck, and limit the number of people who can access insights quickly and effectively. The key to working efficiently is to democratise your data to empower more than just a team of data analysts.
Excuse Me, I Believe You Have My Data
One of the biggest hang ups digital teams experience is that they can’t answer their own questions about optimisation. Too often, they’re relying heavily on analysts (who, might we add, are likely very overworked with their own day jobs) to provide data and insights quickly.
Content teams, digital teams and UX teams should be able to mark their own homework. Rather than relying on one or a few analysts to provide insights on performance data, these teams should have unlimited access to measure the impact of their digital actions in order to ask role-specific questions and answer them, without the outside help of an analyst.
You may be thinking “Well, I’m not capable of learning how to be analyst!”. But, you really don’t have to if you equip your teams with a new breed of UX analytics, like ContentSquare, which will empower your teams and accelerate speed to actionable insights.
You Had Me at Better Data
As an online retailer, you deserve a better way to not only understand your site’s performance and customer journeys, but also a more efficient way of accessing that information.
Rather than relying on outdated legacy tools and tired analysts, it’s time to shift your analysis process from the 90s and into the present. Advanced technologies like UX analytics and insight platforms are crucial to empowering digital teams to work faster, smarter and more efficiently. These tools create breathing room to prepare for eCommerce events far in advance.
Retailers who have jolted themselves away from outdated methods are able to implement practical ways to give themselves a competitive edge in the mobile eCommerce experience while extracting actionable insights without drowning in data.
Contributor: Content Square
