The Digital Happiness Index: Quantifying Your Customer Experience Although conversions are the desired outcome of a good customer experience, they are not the end-all be-all for brands. A happy customer may make a one-time purchase, but more importantly, a happy customer will return to do business with your company time and time again.
But, how exactly do you define something as elusive as customer happiness? How do you understand the nuances of customer frustration and pinpoint what exactly fosters engagement? And, how do you turn all of this data and intelligence into an effective retention strategy that drives greater customer lifetime value (CLV)?
There are plenty of systems designed to measure user experience; these primarily deal with the pages users visit on your site, conversions, and the oft-cited biggest UX failure: bounces.
But, unfortunately, basic user experience metrics won’t give you enough insight into the nuances of users’ digital happiness. Sure, studying on-page experience, bounce rate, time on page, and other CX metrics are important, but they only give you a one-dimensional view of your customer experience. They fail to give you rich insights into customer sentiment. Fortunately, there is a metric that does exactly that: the Digital Happiness Index.
Calculated from several other behavioral metrics and consolidated into one mega metric, the Digital Happiness Index (DHI) is a unique measure of visitor satisfaction, providing an objective view of whether or not your overall experience is hitting the right notes.
In this article we’ll look at:
- What Is Digital Happiness And How Can You Achieve It?
- What is The Current State of Digital Happiness?
- Calculating the DHI: the 5 Dimensions of Digital Experience
- Making Sense of the Digital Happiness Index
What Is Digital Happiness And How Can You Achieve It?
Before we delve directly into the DHI, let’s start by focusing on digital happiness. A rather simple concept, it denotes the convenience, satisfaction, and even the pleasure of interacting with a website or online interface, such as a search engine results page (SERP).
As a feeling, it is incidentally difficult to pin down, even in the digital realm. But by using Contentsquare’s DHI metric, you can determine how happy your site visitors are, based on their experience with your site or app.
The first of its kind, the DHI combines KPIs from 5 key pillars that contribute to overall customer satisfaction:
- Flawless: Are customers enjoying a smooth experience free of technical performance issues?
- Engaged: Are customers engaging with and satisfied with the content?
- Sticky: Are visitors loyal, returning to the site frequently?
- Intuitive: Does the navigation make it easy for visitors to enjoy a complete experience?
- Empowered: How easy is it for customers to find the products and services right for them?
Is your site’s navigation seamless and friction-free? Is your content proving effective in helping visitors reach their goals? Are visitors coming back to your site? Are they exiting early or completing their journeys? And finally, are they finding what they’re looking for — be that information or products?
By quantifying these various strands of experience, and combining metrics into one score, the DHI provides brands with an objective grasp of whether or not visitors are enjoying a positive experience.
What is The Current State of Digital Happiness?
To better understand the current state of digital happiness in the world, we recently surveyed over 500 marketers and 4,000 shoppers from around the globe in our new Digital Happiness Pulse survey. Here are some of the shocking findings the survey revealed:
1. Most Marketers Can’t Measure Digital Happiness
- 77% of marketers say their brands don’t think about customer happiness as a key concern
- 84% of marketers can’t currently track the moods and mindsets of digital customers
- 76% of marketers can’t accurately measure whether digital customers are happy
If brands are going to understand and improve the happiness of their digital customers, they need to focus on using the right metrics, getting access to the right customer data, and the right technology to make the first two possible.
2. Why Today’s Customers Are Unhappy Online
- 49% of online shoppers feel unhappy when a site uses pop-ups and adverts
- 42% of online shoppers feel unhappy when they can’t find what they’re looking for
- 48% of online shoppers feel unhappy when a site or app crashes during checkout
When asked if they feel happy when shopping online, only 15% of consumers said yes. Considering that a quarter (25%) of customers feel nervous about shopping in-store since COVID-19, now is the time for brands to get serious about making online experiences just as good as — or better than — those in-store.
Every brand’s goal should be to create digital experiences that ensure customers leave your app, site, or online store happier than when they arrived. This doesn’t mean losing focus on retention, market share or brand awareness, but rather thinking about those objectives in the context of satisfying customers and building experiences they’ll love.
Calculating The DHI: The 5 Dimensions of Digital Experience
Using behavioral data from our tool, the DHI separates the data into 5 dimensions to filter the numbers into intelligible concepts behind visitors’ digital happiness. Our clients get a comparison to industry standards, and every score represents an aggregate of every session on the website.
As we mentioned earlier, the DHI has 5 components or 5 dimensions that make up its final score, a number out of 100. To calculate a site’s DHI, we take the average of the 5 scores of each dimension. To come up with this rating, we consider the following five dimensions: flawless, engaged, sticky, intuitive, and empowered.
Each of these 5 individual scores is determined by its own calculations, based on metrics like time spent on site, time spent engaging with pages/elements, bounce rates, and more.
It also takes into account if users have reached their destinations and the way they’ve done so. It captures whether users ran into UX issues like non-intuitive navigation — clicks on non-clickable content, misleading clicks, etc.
Making Sense of the Digital Happiness Index
Innovations in SaaS and marketing have led to more avant-garde methods of measuring digital customer experience and benchmarking customer satisfaction.
Although the complex, 5-tier system of our mega metric is supplemental, it is very much in line with our granular approach to behavioral analytics.
The fact that the 5 dimensions deal with different occurrences in the UX means the DHI is casting as wide a net as possible to capture your customer’s mindset. Based on this score, you can shine light on areas of friction and other obstacles in the customer decision journey.
Customers today will not hesitate to review a poor UX or give one star for a session that doesn’t meet their expectations. But they are also giving you continuous feedback on your site or app through their interactions — with every tap, click, scroll or hover, they are voicing their feelings about your CX.
Here at Contentsquare, we give brands the tools to capture this on-page feedback so you can hear and understand what your customers feel and want.
Happiness of any kind is difficult to pin down to a numerical format. But, by combining the 5 pillars of the UX, you will come as close as possible to determining how digitally happy your visitors are with your content.
Conversion Funnel Optimization: How a Good UX Plays a Role Conversions rarely occur on a whim; usually, there is a layered process behind eCommerce purchases. Known as the conversion funnel — or the sales funnel — this model shows the conduit between the least aware prospects to those who are most aware of your company’s products and services. Those with the most knowledge of your offerings are usually the most interested and motivated to convert.
Brands have to be both wary and strategic in the ways they set up conversions, and that is where the concept of the conversion funnel comes in handy. While no one can truly “set up” conversions, you can set the scene and command all the workings that bring visitors closer to converting thanks to conversion funnel optimization.
As UX-perts, we like to blare the horns on the importance of UX, so it should come as no surprise that a good user experience plays an important role in conversion rate optimization. Let’s take a look at how you can optimize your conversion rate by way of working in a good UX to the different stages of conversion funnel optimization. Here are some of the topics we will discuss:
- What is a conversion funnel?
- What is conversion funnel optimization in marketing?
- What does good conversion funnel optimization look like?
- The different stages of the conversion funnel
- How to optimize these stages to drive consumers down the funnel
What is a conversion funnel?
Before we jump into how to optimize your conversion funnel, we need to briefly review what a conversion funnel is.
The conversion funnel denotes a process in which brands work to turn potential customers into converting customers.
It is comprised of several stages, with each one indicating your customers’ level of brand awareness, interest, and willingness to buy — along with the gradual steps and undertakings you can take to lead users further down. Here’s a quick breakdown of the different stages and what they mean:
- Attention/Awareness: At this stage, your users become aware they have a problem and first discover your brand. This might be through word of mouth, a google search, a blog post, a display ad, an email – you name it!
- Interest: Now, your users are more interested in what you have to say. Share how can your brand help them solve their problem?.
- Desire: This is where you need to turn on the charm and sell your visitors the benefits of your products and services. You want to drive home how your company is different (and better) than your competitors, pushing your users further down the funnel.
- Action: Your users have all the information they need and are ready to pull the trigger, whether they’re checking out to buy a shirt in their cart, applying for a loan, signing a contract, or taking whatever action your company defines as a conversion.
Source: HubSpot
What is Conversion Funnel Optimization in Marketing?
While the stages in each conversion funnel may differ from brand to brand, each shares the ultimate goal of “pushing” site users down to the very last step, which, evidently, represents conversions.
Through this structure, brands can group their potential customers into easy-to-understand categories, thereby dictating several efforts they can maneuver to encourage prospects further down the funnel.
There are various marketing tactics to drive customers down the conversion funnel; they can be deployed through more than one stage. Let’s dig deeper.
What is Good UX in Conversion Funnel Optimization?
Now that you know what a conversion funnel is, the next thing to cover is how to apply good UX practices that relate to each stage in the conversion funnel. The following spells out the ways brands can enhance their UX per each stage of the conversion funnel to optimize it and garner greater conversions.
Stage 1: Awareness
Sitting atop the conversion funnel as the entry point, the awareness stage is the stage with the least… awareness of your brand or offering(s). It’s also the stage with mounting awareness, as potential clients become cognizant of your business and click onto your website, the act which carries with it the possibility to spawn possible interest.
But that requires capturing new customers. You should approach your awareness stage with the mentality of casting a wide net. You want to attract as many people as you can, so you have a higher chance of moving people further down the funnel.
We’re not saying adopt a “spray and pray” method, you still need to be strategic and methodical so you can securely create a heightened awareness of what your brand does – and attract the right kind of customers. Getting tons of traffic on your site or clicks on your ads can be exciting at first, but if these are unqualified visits, they won’t do you much good.
Here are a few ways to educating potential customers on your brand and make it easier for new users to find you:
- PPC ads
- Social media campaigns
- SEO
Take e.l.f Cosmetics, for example. To educate potential customers, e.l.f. Cosmetics allows anyone to take their skincare quiz which not only provides awareness to what types of skincare products they offer but also how their products can help alleviate a consumer’s pain points. Whether a potential customer wants to treat acne, dry skin, or improve fine lines, e.l.f. has products that cater to their every need.
Source: e.l.f. Cosmetics website
You have to keep your target audience in mind and create your campaigns accordingly. But once you’ve brought new people onto your site, the UX must be optimized, or at least suitable to pique interest within visitors (lead them to step 2), or — even better — make them convert on the spot.
UX Best Practices at The Awareness Phase
There is a slew of general ways to improve upon the user experience. But often in the awareness stage, users usually arrive at your site via a landing page.
The UX has to be top tier on this page. Keep the copy and imagery relevant to the conversion goal, while making it clear what your brand does. The latter is more important since you’re introducing new prospects to your company. The copy and other contents on landing pages should be to the point, so steer clear of wasting users’ time. In short, don’t overload it.
Most importantly, construct the landing page so that it is relevant to the message that led visitors to click on it in the first place.
Stage 2: Interest
Next, we reach the stage of interest. Now that prospective customers know your company exists, they have to frequent your website; simply knowing about your offering(s) does not ensure they’ll return to your site or engage with your content.
Content is key in this step, as it can foster relationships and maintain interest within your prospects. There’s a twofold approach for conversion funnel optimization: the first is the nature of the content and the second concerns the UX, or the feelings and attitudes users develop over their experience.
The first element deals with the core of the content — the content type, its subject matter, how it can help with your prospects’ problems, its visual identity, etc. You would need to establish a blog with relevant posts to your industry or niche. Take Slack for example, since the pandemic Slack has upped its content production, providing guides, interviews, etc to teach business leaders and employees alike how to adapt to the “new normal” with Slack.
Source: Slack
Other useful content for stimulating user interest are:
- Guides
- Videos
- Interviews
- A resources page to keep everything together in one place
- And more! The sky is the limit – get creative and see what content works for your audience.
You would have to make sure these align with the needs/interests of your vertical as well as making your content stand out and offer something different. Videos and other content, for example, should not focus on the product alone, but offer something of value — whether that’s inspirational content, news related to your niche or something else.
UX Best Practices for The Interest Phase
As for the attitudes toward the content, i.e. the UX, consider the amount of content on your page; is it slowing down your site? If so, reduce it so that you never have issues with loading speeds.
Make sure everything can be easily seen and accessed. This will encourage further browsing. For example, if you have an in-page element that requires scrolling, the width of it, at the very least, needs to be wide enough so all the content can be easily read.
You should limit scrollable in-page content to one type of scrolling function (either by length or width, never both.) This is generally length, as this is easier to look through. Use carousels, in-page recommendations, and links to other pages to incite browsing.
In fact, when it comes to the UX in general, be sure to keep it continually optimized so that all content elements are easy to understand and seamless. The best way to gauge customer understanding and frustration is of course to measure interactions with each element.
Stage 3: Desire
Once you’ve developed some level of interest, you need to propel prospects towards the lower half of the conversion funnel, which starts with desire. Representing a heightened interest, desire attracts users to your actual offering aside from your content alone.
At this stage, you should make your product or service, as the stage suggests, desirable. It’s also where you have to distinguish your offering from that of your competitors, specifically, by positioning your company as the better option.
This can be done by:
- Employing more targeted social ads that lead to pages with CTAs
- Highlighting how your product can alleviate specific problems
- Offering sales/promotions
For example, Superdry entices their customers through a series of emails providing special discounts, promotions, etc. to showcase the value of their products.
Source: Superdry
The users with the highest level of interest will sign up for a newsletter or other form of email communication. This is vital, as it enables you to see exactly who your most interested prospects are and market to them directly.
UX Best Practices at The Desire Phase
For the Desire stage, your best bet is to arrange a drip campaign, or an automated email campaign, which can be set off by different triggers and sent at strategic periods. For example, when someone signs up or makes a purchase, you can then sent prewritten emails during key periods, such as sales, new blog posts, company news, etc.
Also, although they’re prewritten content, assure that emails are personalized with the prospects’ names or their company names. Emails that appear auto-generated, or lack a human touch, yield a poor UX.
As you may have gathered, content is as weighty a component at this stage as in others. You need to eliminate any traces of a poor UX, such as an image that appears clickable, but doesn’t actually take users to a landing page, enlarging the image instead, a common UX problem. Nothing spoils a customer journey like obstacles in the digital experience — another reason to measure user behavior.
Stage 4: Action
Last, but certainly not least, we’ve reached the final stage: action. This is the most targeted stage of the conversion funnel for obvious reasons. After pumping out UX-optimized content and building a relationship with potential customers, only a small portion of them will make it to this stage.
Most will hang in the balance of desire and action, toggling between the two until they make the decision to either buy or bounce. This is where your UX can make or break you.
UX Best Practices at The Action Phase
First, you need to ensure that the navigation of your product pages are neatly organized so that products are easy to find. Don’t succumb to the UX sin of overstuffing your navigation. Finding your product/service should be a seamless experience.
As for the product pages, each must have selection tools that make it easier for customers to filter out products by way of their particular needs. (Think of common product organization types like size, color, price, etc.)
Additionally, all aspects of this experience must promote purchases, from the ability to zoom in, to quick load times of the actual product pages (when clicked on from a multi-product page), to the product image quality.
Any element can be off-putting at this stage, including non-design bits like pricing, so make sure your UX is superb and built around actual customer intelligence.
UX Insights Throughout the Conversion Funnel Optimization Process
Measuring the success of your marketing efforts does not end while you embark on optimizing the conversion funnel. In fact, you should not approach the conversion funnel as a standalone marketing tactic to reel in more conversions.
This is because not all user experience exists in such a linear way. As such, it may ring true for some users but not all. Particularly, the customer decision journey can be seen as a contrast to the funnel. This can be observed by viewing user paths and segmenting your users to narrow behavior-based categories.
By tackling a specific segment, you can customize the UX to that segment, to assure an optimized journey that reduces exists and bounces. For example, pure player brands understand that their content will not be consumed by a general audience. Only specific segments will visit their sites and social channels. As such, they create content that aligns with the interests of their segmented users.
How to Create Customer-Centric Advertising Campaigns in 2021 Most customer journeys start the second a new user clicks on your ad. That is… if you can get them to click your ad!
We sat down with David Rodnitzky, the founder of 3Q Digital, an New York City-based growth marketing agency, and Anne DiNapoli Block, SVP and Head of Communications at creative agency Trade School to hear their perspectives on how the paid media landscape has changed since the pandemic and how their clients are shifting to more customer-centric advertising strategies.
Here’s what they had to share on how brands can combine performance marketing, customer experience, and ai analytics to understand complete consumer journeys – from the moment a user clicks on your ad, arrives on your website, and, ideally, moves all the way to checkout.
What effect has the pandemic had on media spend and strategy this year?
Anne DiNapoli Block: Marketing has intrinsically changed. We saw every big-box retailer across America dissolve Black Friday. Brands offered savings during all of November and for the first time ever, we were not pushing to drive that influx of in-store traffic the day after Thanksgiving.
Last year, many of our clients invested in getting an early start on holiday gift-giving inspiration, building online experiences that drive that eCommerce, and growing the role of the influencer. Some of that is because of the production challenges that COVID has poised brands. We used to be able to do shoots in less than four weeks, but now there’s a lot more planning and nimbleness that has had to go into ad production. On the media side, that’s meant looking at different types of units to drive what we would have historically thought of as inspirational and more upper-funnel reach strategies. It also means looking at how to create a more collapsed funnel strategy so that we can really create a storyline on-site and ensure that the experiences our clients are building lives cohesively across the board.
Every brick-and-mortar brand investing in developing that inter-connective experience by defining how their in-store and online experiences work cohesively together.
With digital consumption up so significantly, the new normal is here to stay. I don’t see that shift back happening. Trends across the media landscape right now show that there is this deeper immersion, especially in mobile commerce. I think now it’s a matter of every brick-and-mortar brand investing in developing that inter-connective experience by defining how their in-store and online experiences work cohesively together. That will help brands identify where somebody is in their DXP journey and know exactly what to serve them the moment they land on an experience.
David Rodnitzky: During the pandemic, I’ve seen companies optimizing for macroeconomic trends and not microeconomic trends. There has been a lot of reactive behavior from companies based on news that’s happening. When the pandemic first started, we had clients outright pause spend. People said, “The sky is falling, pause spend!” but I would say in the last three to four months, we’ve had clients increase their spend aggressively as the stock market recovered and, as it turns out, the sky hasn’t fallen!
But, I’m not sure that either of those approaches is the right answer. I think the right answer is to look at and act based on your metrics. For those companies that had paused spend early on, had they looked at their numbers, seen their conversion rates remained unchanged, and noticed their competition had paused their spend, they would have realized their cost per acquisition was lower and they had a huge market share opportunity. They would have been in a great position. A lot of people came back and tried to achieve that, but it was too late. The answer is to look at your data and adjust in real-time.
The answer is to look at your data and adjust in real-time.
How have you seen media budgets shift as a result of the pandemic?
DiNapoli Block: The role of brand continues to be really strong, the reason for that being it really continues to build consumer trust, especially during these more uncertain times. There’s a lot of different ways to do that and it’s important to note that the tactical execution of brand has shifted. You might need to change which channels that you support brand on, or really look at how audience data and first-party data could be layered into some of those strategies to help you be more effective. Those are the larger shifts that I have seen.
The role of brand continues to be really strong, the reason for that being it really continues to build consumer trust, especially during these more uncertain times.
When it comes to focusing on channel selection, the biggest takeaway from 2020 that we’ve seen is the Facebook boycott was an interesting time. We just did a huge competitive audit across many different verticals for one of our clients. It was interesting to see there are a lot of different challenges not only with social injustice, but also the shift in consumer privacy. I’m curious to see what that owned data strategy could look like, knowing that some of our brands are trying to build their own walled gardens with their data so media exposure pumping into their data sets is becoming increasingly important. I do think the long-term effects of privacy may start changing social media significantly.
Rodnitzky: We did a survey of 1,000 CMOs back in July and one of the questions we asked was, “Where is your main concern: top of funnel, bottom of funnel, or post funnel/upsell and retention?” We found most CMO’s top concern was actually top of funnel followed by retention followed by performance marketing or bottom of funnel. I think that you can interpret that in a couple of different ways. Firstly, it helps people feel more confident around their direct response marketing. It’s much more quantifiable and easy to understand. You could also interpret it as, during the pandemic, being on-brand and maintaining a lift and preference with consumers is really challenging and requires a lot of pivoting.
We also asked people “Who do you most want to hire right now?” We found that there was a pretty low interest and prioritization in hiring media buyers and coders, which is another way of saying the soft and hard sciences aren’t in demand. Interestingly enough, the area that was most in demand was data and analytics. Those are the people who understand hard science, but can turn it into soft science. When you look at this intersection of brand and performance marketing, that’s where analytics become particularly important because you can understand the full conversion funnel and attribute credit appropriately.
Brand marketers have to understand performance metrics and performance marketers need to understand brand storytelling. Data is in the center of that.
There’s no longer a business case for CMOs to throw all their money into brand and then win an award in France and say,” Look, this worked!” There has to be a data-driven component to everything you do. Brand marketers have to understand performance metrics and performance marketers need to understand brand storytelling. Data is in the center of that. I have seen a change in the way people are thinking about the intersection of performance and brand because of digital experience analytics.
What are the most common mistakes you see clients make?
DiNapoli Block: Across the board, we see that brands don’t have someone or a process in place to do a lot of dot-connecting. You need one person dedicated to your online experience, optimizing where media should even drive to be more effective, and ensuring you’re not using duplicative messages and audience sets.
Oftentimes, we have brands compete against themselves in some of the biddable environments with their own data sets. You need a careful balance when you have up to 50 different campaigns and messages in-market. That goes back to the infrastructure of your data and analytics, how you’re tracking customer exposure across their many activities over time, and how you’re identifying a customer when they land on your experience. Where have they come from? What are they looking at? What have they been exposed to over time? What actions are they taking? Being more informed on all of these touchpoints and which campaigns you have in-market can help you prioritize certain messages for certain audiences.
Rodnitzky: If people don’t buy-in to the concept of testing and user experience at the top, it will never trickle down anywhere. I think that unfortunately there are a lot of CMOs that say they are in favor of testing but, ultimately, believe in testing some things, but not others.
I think that unfortunately there are a lot of CMOs that say they are in favor of testing but, ultimately, believe in testing some things, but not others.
If I had a magic wand to stop inter-office politics, I would let you know. At the end of the day, everything has to come from the top, as everything relating to culture does. If the CEO and CMO don’t really believe in being agnostic and instead believe in what their favorite employee thinks is the right decision, you’ll never get anywhere.
How can performance marketers partner with on-site teams to build a better customer experience?
Rodnitzky: Many years ago, I worked for a legal website that allowed people to search for lawyers through the site. The lawyers were paying the company thousands of dollars a month to be listed. We had a big yellow banner on the front page that said “Find a Lawyer,” but our DXP software told us it only had a 0.5% click-through rate. Instead, visitors were clicking on all these blue links on the side of the page. We did live user testing with CS Live and realized people were going right over the yellow banner to use a blue link because they thought it was an ad. We thought the flashy yellow button would get everyone’s attention, but in reality, people were avoiding it to go to the little blue links.
We changed that banner into blue text links that said “Here are some useful resources if you’re looking to find a lawyer” and by not being market-y and instead focusing on user experience, the click-through rate went from 0.5% to almost 8%. It was a massive success for the business.
DiNapoli Block: The role of content as we know it is really changing. Brands are becoming publishers and taking more prevalent roles in providing customers with the inspiration and education that leads to conversion.
What advice do you have for performance marketers trying to create more customer-centric advertising campaigns?
Rodnitzky: My first piece of advice is to avoid the HiPPO, or the highest-paid person’s opinion. It’s very easy to have the CEO come in and tell you that you need to have flying toasters on your site and that’s the only way to drive conversion, but, everyone’s opinion is just an opinion.
Avoid the HiPPO, or the highest-paid person’s opinion.
The second piece of advice I always give people is from a guy named Chris Goward who wrote a book called, “You Should Test That: Conversion Optimization for More Leads, Sales and Profit Or The Art and Science of Optimized Marketing.” No matter what suggestion someone has for conversion rate optimization, his answer is to say, “You should test that.” That ultimately is the essence of conversion rate testing. If you can create a process where you’re rapidly and intelligently creating a testing methodology: isolating variables, coming to statistical significance, finding a conclusion, determining the success of one test, and moving onto the next one. Do that as fast as you can and you’ll be successful.
One of the things I tell clients all the time is, “If you do one conversion rate test a month for 12 months, you’ll probably have a 20% lift in performance.” It almost doesn’t matter what it is, just do it. It’s amazing how many clients or just companies, in general, don’t do that.
This interview is an excerpt from a recent Contentsquare event, “CX Talks: Candid Conversations about The Intersection of CX and Media.” To watch the full event and hear even more ways brands are building customer-centric advertising campaigns, click here to watch the event on-demand.
Humanizing The Digital Experience: The Art of Making Data Talk
Contentsquare Data Says People Don’t Like Free Beer
Driving Personalization through Marketing and A/B Testing This article was written by our partner REO, as part of our series highlighting direct insights from our large ecosystem of partners.
In 2019, for the first time ever, digital ad spend represented more than 50% of total global marketing spend. Whilst the UK was considerably ahead of this trend (63.8% of UK’s total ad spend was attributed to digital in 2018, 66.4% in 2019), the US has now joined the group with online ad spend going from 48.6% in 2018 to 54.2% in 2019. With eMarketer forecasting a 17.6% year-on-year growth (to $333.25M) in worldwide digital marketing spend, the need to ensure each of your marketing channels is delivering the best possible ROI has never been higher.
Within the conversion rate optimization (CRO) space, most brands conduct A/B testing without fully considering which marketing channel or source their customers have come from. Customers are typically bucketed into various user segments based on their purchase history, onsite behavior, geographic and demographic data. However, users within the same audience segment can often demonstrate varying behavioral attributes when navigating through the purchase funnel, across countless online and offline touchpoints.
Let’s Take Paid Search as An Example
If a user arrives on your website via paid search, you already know what they searched for and which ad they clicked on; however, users who click on the same ad, but searched for different terms/items, will often experience the same customer journey. For instance, if a customer has searched for “luxury men’s white shirt” – not only do you know the item they are looking for, you also know they are looking at the higher end of the market.
A/B Testing the landing page a user is taken to is quite common, but you can go a step further and explore how to change the experience for the customer based on their search criteria.
A potential testing idea could involve pre-sorting these shirts by highest price first, and on the Product Listing Page (PLP), displaying all the available men’s white shirts. This can develop into personalization if the user has visited the site previously, within the cookie period; e.g. by storing size data within the cookie, you could pre-select the shirt size which the user filtered by on their previous visit.
Reducing the number of clicks and filters it takes a user to find their item can only have a positive impact on conversion rate, especially on mobile. So, by showing a customer the items they’re looking for, sorted by their desired price point and filtered by their size, you will make the purchase journey more tailored to that specific customer.
Understanding a visitor’s context (location, date and time of day, device, internet connection, etc) as well as their intent (are they here to complete a quick purchase, to research and compare products, to seek inspiration, to test a coupon, etc) add an invaluable layer of behavioral understanding to your analysis, and will allow you to execute a more impactful form of personalization.
Making the Affiliation between A/B Testing and Voucher/Cashback Partners
By applying this testing method to the affiliate channel, you can optimize the largest click and revenue drivers; namely voucher and cashback websites. After all, you can already assume that users coming from these two affiliate types are both online-savvy and price-sensitive.
Voucher and discount websites should have a conversion rate of at least 20-25% on mature affiliate programs – so any of these affiliates who have a conversion rate lower than that, represents an opportunity for incremental revenue. For cashback sites, expect this figure to be upwards of 40%.
A test idea for these two affiliate types could be to re-enforce the discount or cashback offer listed on the affiliates’ website. For instance, if the deal was “Save £15 when you spend over £100” – you could use a “loading bar” at the top of the page which gradually fills up as you add items to your basket, until the user hits the spend threshold to activate the discount.
For cashback sites, you could test a cashback calculator onsite, which automatically calculates the amount of cashback the user will earn if they purchase everything currently in their basket. This type of gamification can be incredibly effective in increasing the number of units per sale and, in turn, the average order value.
Serve Less Content, but More Dynamically
“Content is King” – we’ve all heard it before, but how can you be smarter in how you serve it? Content, and specifically dynamic content, is another channel where source-based A/B testing can improve engagement, click-through-rates and leads/ sales. If you know the article or blog post a user has come from, you can use this insight to serve them relevant and dynamic content, making their customer journey more seamless and less detached across the two sites.
User journey analysis shows that visits to content sites usually happen in the “Discovery Phase” of the sales funnel – including on product review sites, influencer social posts, news/magazine sites and blogs. Such content is informative and persuasive; perfect to push the user towards the bottom of the funnel.
Some of the more content-heavy merchants, such as insurance brands or high-end technology retailers, will have an eclectic and extensive array of content across their website, making navigation more muddled. A solution? Reducing the amount of content on-site and instead, storing the less frequently visited content pages elsewhere, to then be served dynamically.
For example, if a user looking to buy insurance is reading up on excess and the impacts it has on a claim and future premiums, the existing content about excess could be tweaked accordingly – which could be as simple as changing the title of an article, calling out the keywords or changing the order of the content on that page.
Again, a granular analysis of how customers are interacting with individual elements of content will help paint the complete picture of engagement. Measuring clicks alone will only tell one part of the customer behavior story: tracking metrics such as exposure, attractiveness and conversion rate per click (to name a few) will give a more complete view of how content is contributing to (or stalling) the user journey.
As the capabilities of A/B testing and personalization platforms continue to evolve, the way you test and analyze a customer journey should follow suit. One of the major challenges of channel/source-specific testing can be a lack of traffic volume. If you have insufficient traffic, it will take a while before a test reaches significance. For example, the 5th highest paid search term, or 4th largest voucher site probably won’t have the volume to justify running an A/B Test on.
Want to Know More?
Contact us! REO is a digital experience agency. We are an eclectic mix of bright and creative thinkers, embracing the best of research, strategy, design and experimentation to solve our clients’ toughest challenges. We work across a variety of sectors, with companies such as Amazon, M&S, Tesco and Samsung.
Also invaluable to our company is our scope of partners, including Contentsquare, which allows our customers to capture the nuances of their end users’ behavior for even more sophisticated segmentation and ultimately, deeper personalization.
Whatever the challenge may be, REO applies design thinking to identify and deliver big growth opportunities.
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Why Digital Experience Analytics Matters