NEW YORK, NY 10 MARCH 2020 — Over two thirds (69%) of all web content published by brands still goes “unseen” by consumers. This is just one of the findings revealed in a new global study from Contentsquare, the leading provider of digital experience analytics. Of all the sectors analyzed, banking has the highest amount of unseen content (75%), closely followed by beauty websites, where 74% of content is rarely being accessed by visitors. The research reveals that home and technology brands are the most effective content marketers, with 40% of their content viewed by users.
The ‘2020 Digital Experience Benchmark’ incorporates global Contentsquare session data from some of the world’s biggest brands. The anonymized data set includes over 7 billion web sessions from over 400 websites around the world, providing unparalleled insight into previously misunderstood user behaviors.
Mobile continues to be the context for most new site visits. 55% of visitors get to a site using their mobile phone, with luxury topping the mobile traffic table (67%). The energy sector, which has been lagging in the smartphone traffic boom, recorded an 11% increase in mobile traffic since 2019, and travel saw a 5% increase. Mobile experience is now a critical battleground in every industry, regardless of its typical purchase size, frequency or cycle time.
Visitors require 3 sessions on average to convert, but with only 55% of users returning visitors, there is a tremendous opportunity for brands to harness great customer experiences to encourage return visits and maximize retention.
44% of visitors who reach the payment page on a site will not complete their transaction, and 56% of visitors who reach the shipping/billing page won’t convert, highlighting the critical importance of optimizing the checkout process.
Commenting on the findings, Aimee Stone Munsell, CMO at Contentsquare said, “The window of opportunity for brands who haven’t turned digital experience into a competitive advantage is rapidly shrinking. The good news is today, we’re able to locate with precision the stumbling blocks along the customer journey. Marketers and UX teams who have a granular understanding of customer behavior can uncover simple improvements that shrink the experience gap and multiply their conversions.”
“Being able to visualize customer journeys and uncover user behavior presents an opportunity to understand and optimize content placement and sequence to increase the ROI of what you produce. That’s why experience analytics is so valuable. Just as we’ve done with this study, brands can use experience analytics to uncover hidden behaviors and to create better digital experiences for maximum impact in the shortest space of time.”
Contentsquare’s full Digital Experience Benchmark is now available online. Contentsquare also analyzes trends in shopping behaviors in line with e-commerce trends and current affairs such as the Coronavirus.
Methodology
Research based on 12 months of Contentsquare data from 400 websites in 9 different verticals from 13 countries including US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, China and Canada. “Unseen” content metrics are calculated by comparing the total number of pages on a site with the pages viewed by 95% of traffic.
Aggregators’ laser focus on digital experience has given them an edge when it comes to online conversion. They leverage data to understand how their users behave and buy online, which enables them to A/B test improvements quickly and efficiently to drive sales.
Identifying purchasing trends allows them to spot up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, react to changing customer expectations, and tailor products to meet user needs. Insurers would do well to imitate. 50% of Online Insurance in Europe is sold via aggregators.
Ecosystems Will Account For 30% Of Global Revenues By 2025
7 of the 10 largest companies by market capitalization are ecosystems – Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tencent.
Ecosystems’ one main focus is to have customer-centric digital activity. Their expansion puts insurance brands at risk. Products like Amazon Protect, focused on device insurance, are the first examples of a potentially untapped market for these tech giants.
Insuretech
9 In 10 Insurers Fear Losing Part Of Their Business to Fintechs
Pressure on margins, loss of market share and information security are among the top concerns for insurers, but according to PwC, a large proportion also see opportunity. Many think new technologies can offer reduced costs through automation, improved customer retention and a differentiated service.
Insurers
71% Of Consumers Surveyed Used Some Form Of Digital Research Before Buying Insurance
To compete, insurers must adopt the same customer-first mentality as digital leaders like Amazon. Namely: A relentless focus on finding and eliminating friction, particularly for key journeys like account registration, troubleshooting and account management.
Many companies fail to improve customer journeys because discovering what customers value isn’t easy. Translating that understanding into operational performance improvements is even harder, requiring deep customer insight, robust analytics, and a detailed model of key customer journeys, with ownership across functions and end-to-end management.
Digital channels like web and app offer important opportunities to analyze customer interactions and uncover friction. This data is essential to creating services that don’t just work, but delight customers.
Insurance Trends
Traffic per Device: Traffic shifted from desktop to mobile in 2019 – a 48% increase from 2018.
Number of Pages Seen: Visitors seem to consume more content per page, with an increase in the session time (+35% on desktop) but a decrease in the number of pages viewed on average (-6% on desktop).
Percentage of Content That Is Never Seen: Despite visitors consuming more content per page, the percentage of content that is never seen increased.
Average Page Views For A Lead Generation Visit: Visitors consume lots of content before converting whether this is informational content or the form pages themselves.
The Problem
Insight into customer behavior trends is crucial to building an online experience to rival the Amazons of the world. Yet insurance brands still frequently struggle to understand the “why” behind customer behavior, and many still use tools like Google Analytics to get answers. While these tools effectively answer the “what” – ie. which pages are being viewed and for how long, this information doesn’t help when attempting to understand visitor behavior at scale.
Many rely on session replay tools to try and uncover user experience issues, but few have the time to gain effective insight. Others rely on analysts to answer their on-site questions. This too requires significant time and manual effort, and puts a strain on analyst resources.
The “Tag, Wait and Learn” methodology is outdated. It relies on having to guess where issues might be ahead of time, leaving businesses “not knowing what they don’t know.”
A Solution?
UX Analytics helps organizations make faster, smarter decisions by giving each team the means to answer their own optimization questions. With these tools, they can access aggregated data on visitor behavior; robust enough to underpin data-driven decisions, and presented in a way that even non-analysts can understand. Contentsquare’s platform is purpose-built to be easy to use, accessible to a large number of users, and not to sit siloed within Analytics teams.
According to our Digital Experience Report on insurance Bank of America has 30 people trained on the tool to measure the impact of every experience, and piece of content.
Find out how Contentsquare’s solutions can help insurance brands by accessing “The Digital Experience Report – Insurance” below