Inside The Black Box of Onsite Analytics: An Interview with David Bochsler
We sat down with David to hear why he joined the team and why he’s optimistic about Contentsquare’s APAC expansion. Here’s what he had to say:
Why are you excited to join Contentsquare?
Well, a lot of different reasons, but the main reason is where you’re going. You have to be excited about what you’re selling. Rule number one in sales is to believe in what you’re selling, so the technology had to be something that I understood and could use.
I’ve always been a data guy. My first job out of school was in database design and business intelligence, so my entire career has been involved in some form of data. In the last 10-15 years, I’ve been involved in the ad tech and the MarTech side of data, where the focus has been on A/B testing and optimizing ads.
I love the idea that data can help us all make better decisions, but I always wondered why, especially online, it was just always a black box. So many brands I’ve worked with struggled to understand online user behaviors. Contentsquare is the first time I’ve seen any technology that’s showed me what’s inside that black box. Brands can finally understand why digital visitors behave the way they do.
Those tests are still very important and a big thing that our technology can help out with, but what’s amazing for me now is that besides just saying, “Yes, this is the direction the data is telling us to take,” I understand now why a choice like that is made by brands who need a better understanding of their digital visitors, and that helps accelerate all future tests for a visitor – to have a better understanding of the potential customer. It’s not just ‘let’s do another test’, but it’s the fact that brands have got a better chance of accelerating the success of tests the more they understand their visitors’ behaviors.
When I saw how visual Contentsquare’s platform was, how easy it was to visualize insights – essentially putting the data into the hands of everyone on the team, Contentsquare calls it democratizing the data, as soon as I saw that demo, I was hooked, because I knew that was a technology that pretty much anyone could understand and utilize.
Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis sunburst tool allows you to see how visitors progress through your site, page by page.
Why does Contentsquare’s technology stand out?
I think you can distill it all down to two things Contentsquare does exceptionally well.
One is understanding digital behavior.
Most people think of digital analytics as tracking how visitors behave on a site, from where people are clicking to the average time they spend on a page. But Contentsquare shows you everything that happens between clicks. It is not just about where someone has been, it’s what they’re doing and why they’re there.
I like to use an analogy of an alarm system. Traditional analytics is like putting motion sensors around your house. They tell you someone’s in the kitchen or someone’s in the dining room, but you have no idea of their intent – if they’re friend or foe. With Contentsquare, all of a sudden, it’s like you’re a security system. You’ve got video cameras and everything you need to understand if someone’s interested in this content or that content, or if they’re frustrated because they’re clicking in non-clickable areas. With Contentsquare, you can easily and readily access all of that information.
The second thing is data is only useful if people have access to it and can understand it. So the second thing that Contentsquare does exceptionally well is putting data in a format that’s very, very easy for people to understand and making it accessible to all team members, not just analysts. It puts data in the hands of content, UX, merchandising, and eCommerce teams, and even senior C-level folks, so that they can easily look and understand what that data is all about.
Let’s take a retailer, for example, you understand your product, your website, and your apps, but you want to understand what site content is resonating with visitors and what’s falling flat. The Contentsquare platform helps align digital teams. Everyone works off the same data to get a holistic, consistent view of customer behaviors, so they can make data-driven decisions with the customer’s best interests at heart. It transforms any website into an easy-to-understand dashboard, instantly overlaying the clicks, engagement, and revenue each page element is generating directly onto the content on your site.
Contentsquare’s Page Comparator Tool lets you compare two pages side-by-side and visualize how visitors interact with each element on your site.
Why are you optimistic about Contentsquare’s APAC expansion?
Asia is an amazing place, even beyond culture, diversity, and all those things. It’s a particularly great place to do business because it houses two-thirds of the world’s population and has an ever-increasing level of digital maturity and a rich understanding of how to utilize online data.
Thanks to my years of experience working in the MarTech and AdTech industries, I see what Contentsquare is able to offer the marketplace in Asia. It caters very well not only to those very large mature, highly data-driven organizations but also to organizations that are just starting to get their feet wet as far as understanding what their digital visitors are doing. It’s amazing the broad spectrum that the platform caters to.
While the whole world can benefit from Contentsquare’s technology, I don’t see anything like it currently in the Asian market, so it’s a very untapped marketplace. I’m not just excited about our great technology, I’m also excited that we have the budget, thanks to our latest round of funding, to invest in and grow our teams across Asia. It’s very exciting for me to lead that charge. Most vendors in our space are trying to sell in Asia from afar. I know Asia. Each country is different. You need to have people in each country who really understand what’s going on there, speak the same language, and who sit in the time zones to better serve your customers. I’m excited to have the opportunity to build that here.
