It’s no secret that brick-and-mortar stores have been struggling to attract shoppers in recent years. Now, digital businesses are facing similar challenges with their equivalent of footfall— web traffic.
As revealed in The 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report and Interactive Explorer, our latest annual survey of the digital customer experience, visits to websites fell -3.6% year-on-year (YoY) in 2023—and a majority (55%) of sites saw lower web traffic.
In this article, we dive into key findings from our Benchmarks around the traffic data trends of 2023.
Plus, we discuss how digital experience analytics (DXA) helps you get your website (or app) out of this traffic jam in 2024.
Why the cost of doing digital business rose last year
Not only was there less website traffic last year, but brands were paying more for it—as paid advertising drove one in three visits (33.8%), a +5.6% YoY gain in traffic share.
At the same time (as highlighted in Tinuiti’s Digital Ads Benchmark Report), ad spend rose across the most critical acquisition channels—+17% on Google and +13% on Meta’s social media platforms.
Given this increased bill, why are websites still so reliant on paid advertising?
One big reason is that the most traffic came from mobile: it accounted for two in three (69.7%) visits to websites last year (while desktop visits dropped by -11.5% YoY).
Furthermore, 39.5% of mobile traffic came from paid advertising in 2023 (up from 30.5% in 2022), compared to only 19.3% of desktop visits.
Websites’ increasing reliance on increasingly expensive paid sources, combined with the drop in traffic volume, meant cost per visit rose by +9.4% in 2023.
3 ways to increase web traffic with digital experience analytics
Whether it’s a temporary economically determined trend or not, the decline in traffic volume last year has to be reckoned with this year.
And there’s a very real upside to this ultimatum.
The volume drop could be the forcing factor needed to shift the mindsets of digital teams away from simply acquiring new visitors and toward a better, more nuanced understanding of the traffic that does show up—so they can make the most of it.
There are few (if any) more powerful tools for doing that than a digital experience analytics platform like Contentsquare.
Here are just three examples of how DXA helps you capitalize on every visit you get.
1. Understand who your visitors are and how they’re behaving
Our Digital Experience Benchmarks will help you understand the sort of traffic you can expect to see on your website and app this year—and prepare for it.
But to really get a handle on who you’re serving on a daily basis, your business needs specific and up-to-date information on incoming traffic.
A good DXA platform tells you how your visitors got to your site or app (whether that’s via a paid or unpaid source), what device they’re using and whether they’ve visited before.
It tells you how different visitor segments behave once they’re actually on your site or app—so you can compare the behavior of these segments and see where you’re failing to serve one segment while satisfying the other.
Use Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification to do an extensive analysis of user segments, so you can identify trending behavior by segment, compare the impact of issues on different segments, and understand how they affect conversion and ROI. For example, you can see at a glance how many returning user sessions are impacted by errors on desktop.
2. Optimize your user journeys
While there are all sorts of ways to attract organic traffic, such as search engine optimization (SEO), to take advantage of that traffic you need to be able to understand how visitors are using your site—at both a macro and micro level.
On the macro side, you need a high-level view of your customer journey.
Customer journey analysis gives your teams a full overview of every visitor’s on-site journey, including where it started, where it ended and the path they took in between.
Using Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Analysis, you get clear, color-coded visualizations that help your teams identify opportunities and issues within seconds.
Our Customer Journey Analysis also lets you segment data to understand how different customer types—defined either by where they came from or how they behaved—are progressing (or not progressing) through your experience.
And, thanks to our recent acquisition of Heap, a leading product analytics platform, Contentsquare also empowers you to understand and optimize user journeys—not only within your website and app, but across all your branded experiences.
3. Minimize frustration and maximize engagement on every page and screen
The 2024 Digital Experience Benchmarks report states that the average bounce rate for websites in 2023 was 48.7%—and that the bounce rate exceeded 50% in six of the ten industries analyzed.
Furthermore, there was a -5.5% YoY drop in conversion rates. This means that not only were teams paying more for less site traffic in 2023—but they also were wasting more of that spend.
One of the biggest factors behind the poor outcomes we saw last year (if not the biggest) is user frustration, which (in a world where customers increasingly expect frictionless experiences) can do real damage to your metrics.
Frustrated visitors might fail to convert, or leave your site or app, never to return. Often, they’ll also spread the word about their bad experience to other potential customers.
DXA platforms equip you to detect and fight frustration with error analysis—a capability that leverages AI to identify, prioritize and alert your team to frustrating technical issues, such as Javascript errors (the culprit in 17.7% of visits in 2023) and malfunctioning buttons on your web pages.
Contentsquare even features an AI-powered frustration score to help you surface where frustration is being fueled the most on your site.
A great DXA platform also gives your team the analytic tools it needs to investigate and fix these issues—as well as user experience (UX) issues relating to page design and copy.
Use Contentsquare’s Zone-Based Heatmaps (pictured below) and Session Replay to see things from your users’ perspective—and identify exactly what and what isn’t working on every page and screen of their brand’s digital experience.
Not only does this empower your teams to reduce frustration, but it also enables them to optimize your experience to drive engagement by improving your site content.
Discover the biggest global web traffic trends, today
Only by optimizing your experience from end to end, for every type of visitor who arrives on your site or app, can you ensure that the traffic you’re getting and the money you’re spending translate into more business growth.
For a more in-depth examination of the global web traffic analytics and trends discussed in this article (including which channels drove the most visits and how traffic split between new and returning visitors), register now to access the 2024 Digital Experience Benchmarks.
Plus, you’ll also get an assortment of strategies to help you respond to our findings—and elevate your experience in 2024.
Jack is Content Writer for Global Marketing at Contentsquare. He’s been creating and copywriting content on both agency and client-side for seven years and he’s ‘just getting warmed up’. When he’s not creating content, Jack enjoys climbing walls, reading books, playing video games, obsessing over music and drinking Guinness.