Anatomy of an insight

With more and more businesses building their online presence, words such as analytics and insights have become mainstream. But how much do you understand about your insights, and what information are you actually getting from them?

Firstly, let’s have a look at exactly what we mean when we refer to insights. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, it is the ability to have a clear, deep, and sometimes sudden understanding of a complicated problem or situation.

When we apply this to the web, it is about getting a clear picture of how users are interacting with our website, and having a deep understanding of any issues or problems they may be encountering.

There are so many benefits that come with digital insights. They help you understand your customers better, improve their user experience on your site and make positive changes with speed.

Let’s look at what your insights should be delivering and the key components you need to give you the clearest picture across your website.

Key components of a Digital Insight

No matter what business you are in, it is essential to have a clear strategy in place, broken down into impactful key performance indicators (KPIs).

The goal is to be able to use your insights to determine what KPIs have been met and which areas need improving on.

By examining the data you collect through your analytics platform, you should be able to determine any issues that are hindering you from meeting your KPIs to quickly and effectively make changes in real-time.

Here are the key components that should make up your digital insights.

1. Information Collection

Understandably, one of the key roles of insights is to collect the information you need and feed it back to you.
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However, it is important to note that the information you receive from your insights is only as good as the information you feed them.

What do we mean by this? Basically, you have to know what you are looking for in order to find it. This can mean many problems get missed along the way.‍‍

‍Your insights should be making you aware of issues you didn’t even know existed and feeding them to you in real-time. The only way you can ensure nothing is missed is by ensuring you can see everything.

The key features you need:

• Comprehensiveness: the more you can see across your site, the more you can answer. Many insights only provide access to a small portion of your website (or what events you have set up to be captured). You are simply making an educated guess on the information that is available to you and filling in the blanks. The more comprehensive your data is, the more powerful your insights are, the less guesswork involved.
• Speed: the faster you can see an issue, the faster you can understand and implement changes. And with website errors and out-of-stock products currently driving immediate impact to conversions, real-time data is now more important than ever.
• Flexibility: The data points available, and how easily you can search each of those, will determine how much you can ask (and answer) about your business. Unrestricted Search™ from a comprehensive dataset, will enable you to ask the questions you need to grow your business as soon as they arise.

2. Understanding the Solution

Once your insights have helped you find any problems that need improvement, the next step is working on a solution. Here are the key components you need to look at in this step:

• Access: can this data be accessed by everyone in your team? Can they understand the data and how it is presented?
• The hypotheses and search: are you able to ask questions and then go on to explore and quantify those with answers? This determines the impact of your insights, as the more you can answer, the better clarity you can give to decisions.
• Sharing of information: once you find meaningful answers, how quickly these can be shared, and how easily these can be understood? You want to remove any barriers that are having an impact on the speed of which you can collectively make a decision and act on it.

3. Rolling out Actions

Having identified the problems and worked on a solution, you need to be able to take action and fix any issues that arise.

Insights are only as good as the actions you take from them, so informing what needs to be fixed or tested is important.

As skill sets will be quite different from those exploring, to those doing roll-out, the easier you can make it to communicate required changes between the two teams, the better.

How Insightech Helps You Drive Better Insights

Information is power, and this has never been more true when it comes to website insights. In order for your website to run effectively, you need to be able to see the whole picture and not just a snippet.

While some insights offer information about who came to your site and what they did, they often miss an important component — how they did it. For example:

• How far did they scroll down the page?
• Did they face any errors?
• Did they try to click and get misdirected?

These are all issues that can result in lost customers and lost sales. Imagine if you could quickly identify minor changes and have a major impact on your conversion goals.

A few items Insightech helps with:

• Insightech works in real-time to get you across all areas of your website.
• Any team member has the ability to explore any issues with our Full Code Reconstruction™ exactly how it was experienced by the user. This means less guesswork, and faster answers to the questions you are asking.
• With Visual Conversations™, notes can be seamlessly shared to the right department, so decisions can be made with ease.

Insights are incredibly valuable if done correctly, and ensuring you have set yourself up for success can take out the guesswork and give you a very clear picture on what will grow your business.

Further reading you may be interested in:

• 9 eCommerce Website Issues Impacting User Experience
• Beyond GA4: A Comprehensive Look at Analytics Alternatives
• Why We Shouldn't Settle for Sampled Data in Session Replay Recordings
• Simplify Interaction Tracking in GA4 with Enhanced Measurement + Insightech

While we have you, are you thinking of replatforming? Try our step-by-step guide (with free templates)

• Identifying Limitations of the Current Platform
• Aligning Re-platforming Goals with Business Strategy
• Conducting a Comprehensive UX, Marketing and Tech Audit
• Questions to consider when analysing your site’s digital experience