The global revenue of the big data analytics market is due to double over the next five years—from 350 billion in 2024 to 656 billion in 2029.
No wonder digital professionals believe that data-driven insights will be a top trend in the customer experience (CX) space for 2024. According to our What’s Next in CX: 2024 Digital Customer Experience Trends report, more digital experiences will be powered by data-driven insights provided by analytics platforms.
It’s safe to say decision-making based on gut feeling is a thing of the past.
As a player in digital experience analytics, this is music to our ears! Naturally, we had to dig a little deeper to see what trends are set to dominate the market next year.
So, here are our top five digital analytics trends with insights from experts at leading brands such as Zoom, Snaplogic and Snowflake.
1. Artificial intelligence (AI)
No surprises here!
Thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, AI is more accessible than ever. Both tools have been instrumental in helping people understand the value of AI and adopting it into their daily lives.
Today, almost half (48%) of business professionals already use data analysis, machine learning and AI to address data quality issues. Having seen just how powerful it is, they’re likely to continue investing in AI-powered analytics.
But it’s not just about automation or fixing data quality issues; AI accelerates the time to insights and allows for data analysis at scale.
Analyzing data across devices, pages and the user journey is extremely difficult to do manually. AI-powered analytics automates this by predicting user intent and making recommendations, such as where to place content or how to structure pages.
But you can’t have a good AI outcome without the correct data.
In digital analytics, collecting every click, tap, swipe, and conversion is key in order to predict user intent. So before jumping on the AI bandwagon, Denise encourages businesses not to overlook their data strategy:
“Everyone feels the pressure of creating an AI strategy. But you can’t have an AI strategy if you don’t have a data strategy first. Data is the main component of AI—it’s like having a machine without fuel. So you need to start with the data strategy for your organization. Then, you can build toward your AI strategy on top of that.”
— Denise Persson, Chief Marketing Officer at Snowflake.
2. ROI on customer experience
According to Forrester, 84% of tech leaders expect spending growth in data and analytics, with (you guessed it) the AI tech category getting the biggest budget boost.
Although budgets are set to increase next year, the pressure will still be on tech, marketing and product teams to prioritize spending. This is where measuring the impact of CX optimizations and the return on investment (ROI) will be crucial.
Digital experiences must be tied back to revenue, cost of doing business, customer lifetime value and even sustainability. It’s often surprising to see that even large brands don’t have complete visibility into the performance of their website and apps and the impact that UX design can have on revenue.
It’s crucial that all teams work on shared insights to ensure that the changes they make have a positive impact on the business. Tim shares his thoughts:
“Measuring AI and making things actionable for data practitioners to execute will be key in 2024. So, turning data into reality and actually rolling it out. One of the things that my team struggles with is that we have all this data but have limited resources to execute those things. So how do we prioritize our work to have the biggest impact?”
— Tim White, VP of Marketing at Snaplogic
3. Scaling experimentation and optimization
Today, most businesses are set up to analyze data but not necessarily to take action.
In 2024, there will be a shift from speed to insights to speed to action. Experimentation provides businesses with the perfect opportunity to safely do this by showing that small incremental changes can make a big impact over time.
In fact, a recent survey by Kameloon revealed that organizations that invest in web experimentation are 350% more likely to grow.
Clearly, optimal scaling is crucial for businesses looking to drive results in 2024. Here’s Suman’s take on it:
“There’s always some buzzword flying around; first, it was the next-best action, personalization and now it’s Gen AI. But I think 2024 will be all about how you can scale effectively. It doesn’t sound sexy, but with all the great capabilities that are being introduced, it’s a matter of knowing who uses what and how they use it most optimally. So 2024 is going to be about optimal scaling.”
— Suman Patnaik, Vice President of Digital Analytics and Experimentation at Blackrock
Pierre also highlights that the economic uncertainty of 2024 will force businesses to be selective in their experimentation and optimization projects:
“People are still going to be constrained in 2024 by the macroeconomic environments. So it’s going to be about choice. We’ll have probably 20 ideas that we will want you to roll out as changes or optimizations, and we will have to find a way to select the five. It’s really going to have the best impact.”
— Pierre Casanova, Chief Revenue Officer at Contentsquare
4. Mobile-first optimization
Our 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark report showed that almost 70% of all online visits now come from mobile, while just over 30% are from desktop.
It also revealed that conversion rates on mobile fell last year, and are significantly lower than on desktop (2.19% mobile vs 4.03% desktop), meaning a mobile-first mindset is one of the biggest opportunities for businesses to make gains.
Yet, the focus is still often on web-first. We see this flipped around, with businesses designing for mobile, and then scaling for desktop. And that’s where predictive mobile analytics comes in, helping businesses better understand mobile user behavior across devices and channels.
Alexandra highlights how important it is to understand user behavior to effectively optimize for each channel:
“We’ve been saying mobile-first for quite some time now, but it’s important to understand what your app is actually used for and why your customers are using your app mobile versus desktop, especially in a hybrid world. And then you should build for that in mind because it might not be a one-size-fits-all solution and your customers might be using your app for different aspects.”
—Alexandra London, Head of Digital at Zoom
5. Insight-driven collaboration
Measuring CX is challenging not only due to fragmented tools and KPIs but also ownership.
CX is a cross-team, cross-functional and cross-journey sport. Tech, product and marketing teams must all align on common metrics with shared outcomes to deliver the experiences that people expect and deserve.
In 2024, digital analytics tools will help businesses democratize valuable data so that every function can access the same insights (without the help of data analysts or IT). Seamless data sharing and visualization will be key to fostering cross-team collaboration and insights-sharing.
Here’s what Paul says:
“The future of digital analytics is end-to-end; taking the user from start to finish. It’s about having a holistic experience with the customer. But it’s also about cookieless, multi-touch attribution and through-the-line analysis. So not having ‘above the line’ over here and ‘below the line’ over there. It’s about how can we bring them together so that we have a holistic view of analytics and digital.“
— Paul Mabb, Marketing Analytics Manager at Liverpool Victoria
6. Private and secure by default
And that’s the way the cookie crumbles…
With the long-awaited phasing out of third-party (3P) cookies in 2024 and increased privacy concerns, businesses will need to take effective action to safeguard data security.
Consumers are more aware than ever before of their own data being exploited (thanks largely to the data breaches of leading brands). Government regulations have also become stricter, and companies are now required to follow increasingly stringent data protection laws—from GDPR in the EU to CCPA California.
A first-party data collection strategy will be imperative to creating meaningful experiences that are tailored to unique user needs. Analytics platforms must take a privacy-first approach to give website owners detailed insights into their user behavior without the use of 3P cookies.
Contentsquare is a good example of a privacy-first Digital Experience Analytics platform that uses intent-based customer data and insights to help businesses unlock a deeper understanding of customers without compromising security.
Veronika believes 2024 will be a balancing act between data protection and implementing CX trends like AI and hyper-personalization:
“In the realm of digitalization, 2024 will see a shift towards hyper-personalization, with AI-driven algorithms tailoring user experiences at an unprecedented level of granularity, while also prioritizing user consent and data protection in compliance with evolving privacy regulations.”
— Veronika Morozová, CRO Manager at IU International University of Applied Sciences
Get more insights into the latest digital analytics trends
Download our What’s Next in CX? 2024 Digital Customer Experience Trends Report to dive into ten digital customer experience trends set to dominate the landscape next year, as identified by a survey of 2700+ business professionals in marketing, UX and product roles from retail, B2B, financial services, telco and many more.
Get the report to find out:
Which digital trends digital professionals think will matter most
How digital professionals think about these trends (and how to adapt to them)
What you can do to prepare your business for 2024—and beyond
Plus, find out how our digital experience analytics platform is already putting these future trends into practice to help brands increase customer happiness and drive growth.
Dave Anderson is the Head of Product Marketing and Strategy at Contentsquare.