How Experience Analytics is Revolutionising Digital Experience Strategy

In this article you'll learn:

• Digital analytics has evolved from focusing on marketing optimization to enhancing website user experiences.
• Experience Analytics sits within the broader Digital Analytics category linking powerful user behaviour and analytics data together for a contextual understanding of why sales drop when there's friction in a website's digital purchase journey.
• Insightech provides a comprehensive solution with interactive session replays, enabling organisations to track and analyse their entire user experience to enable faster website optimisation and seamless purchase journeys.

Digital Analytics: Evolving from Marketing Optimisation to Website User Experience

Digital analytics plays a pivotal role for organisations operating in the digital realm. Initially, its primary objective was to streamline marketing expenses by making sense of traffic sources and conversion rates. To bridge the technology gap, solutions like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics emerged in the market.

However, the landscape of digital analytics has transformed significantly over time. As you can see from the below diagram the market has evolved quite a lot:

The focus has shifted beyond optimising marketing expenditures to now encompass the enhancement of the overall digital experience. This shift has given rise to two prominent categories: Product Analytics and Experience Analytics.

Event-based product analytics tools help you understand what gets used after you’ve built it. Website visitors will inevitably encounter bugs and errors which add friction to their buying journey so it is equally important to grasp why those users face difficulties in the first place. This is where Experience Analytics steps in to illuminate the scene.

Experience Analytics (such as Insightech) takes this concept a step further by offering features such as session replay, click maps, and journey maps. These capabilities provide a profound contextual understanding of user experiences and their impact on conversions.

Build, measure and learn your way to experience analytics success

The Build-Measure-Learn methodology stands as a proven pathway for continuous improvement, applicable to organisations of all sizes. In this methodology, digital analytics assumes a central role, particularly during the Measure and Learn phases.

Within the digital analytics world, Product Analytics tools have emerged as a crucial pillar. These tools offer a comprehensive infrastructure, enabling the collection of valuable data while measuring product effectiveness. Insights gained may include metrics like recent user registrations or contact information updates. However, to truly comprehend why users might struggle with certain product actions, leveraging session replays provided by experience analytics solutions becomes vital. These tools shed light on potential product-related issues that impede user satisfaction.

A/B testing tools also play a significant role, in streamlining the 'Build' phase by identifying effective strategies, optimising resource allocation, and maximising ROI. Organizations however often fall into a common pitfall - diving headfirst into A/B testing without fully understanding the underlying user challenges or reasons why their buying journey encountered friction in the first place. This premature leap can lead to wasted time and resources on unsuccessful A/B testing campaigns. A/B testing already is quite a lengthy process so it makes sense to prioritise what you’re testing and potentially deploying to your live website. The obvious blindspot to cover is at the insights layer to amplify your 'Learn' phase.

As depicted in the diagram above, insights prove to be a key component within the build, measure, learn framework.

Unlocking the Full Potential of Product Analytics: Overcoming Challenges and Embracing Experience Analytics

While Product Analytics tools hold immense value in terms of measurement, effectively tracking intended data often demand significant planning and implementation efforts. Although the concept sounds ideal in theory, the practical execution can be daunting. Many solutions tend to deteriorate once the technical expert leaves the team or when there is a lack of commitment to maintaining data quality due to resource constraints. Moreover, these solutions typically cover only the data points outlined in the initial plan, focusing on common user conversion journeys.

As we know, real-world user interactions are far from straightforward and often involve complexities. Consequently, significant data gaps emerge, making it challenging to derive objective insights from the measured data. This is where Experience Analytics takes a different approach, capturing experience-level data from all users. That’s due to the fact Experience Analytics tools empower digital teams to accurately reproduce these experiences through session replays.

At Insightech, we take it a step further by providing interactive and searchable replays, simplifying the quantification of conversion impact. This innovative approach bridges the gap between data collection and actionable insights, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of user experiences.

Insightech: Elevating Conversion Rates with Interactive Session Replay

Unlocking the power of interactive session replay, Insightech offers a comprehensive solution to the challenges previously discussed. We’ve been discussing session replay a fair bit in this article but what exactly is session replay, and how can it significantly boost conversion rates on your website?

With Insightech's session replays, you gain an in-depth understanding of the entire user experience, leaving no room for random sampling. Every aspect, from error messages to mouse movements and clicking locations, is tracked and captured. This extensive data is easily accessible for any page on your website, presented through intuitive clicks and scrolling heatmaps in the user interface. These on-page content elements are also interactive. One way to find other replays of users who experienced the same user experience friction is by creating a unique audience segmentation filter. This is done within the session replay itself (hence the interactive part) to provide a list of replays you can watch where the user encounters that same issue - for example, an invalid coupon code error message displayed at checkout or a pop-up that blocks a form submit button to name a few. Obviously, you’ll want to understand and measure the conversion impact of such an error/bug and you can do that too.

Capturing this data requires just a single line of code, eliminating the need to create separate events for tracking specific actions. This streamlined process simplifies deploying new changes to your website during the 'Build' phase. Moreover, any modifications made to your website are automatically reflected in the replays. Thus, users' sessions are faithfully reproduced, providing a comprehensive view regardless of ongoing developments on the 'Build' side. Additionally, digital experience data is captured and accessible within the Insightech data lake, enabling measurement of any scenario without cumbersome design and implementation complexity.

While the benefits may seem too good to be true, there are trade-offs to consider. By capturing everything upfront, Insightech ensures speedy implementation of tracking solutions and unparalleled flexibility in utilizing the data. However, it's worth noting that this approach may generate a vast amount of captured data, potentially exceeding your immediate needs. Nevertheless, in today's maturing big data technology market, adopting a 'track-everything' approach is not only feasible but also delivers a significant return on investment.

Next steps to learn more about Insightech for Experience Analytics‍‍

• ‍Ask a question and we'll answer it within one business day
• ‍Schedule a demo and see the magic in action!
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