Unlocking growth: 5 essential digital analytics trends for 2025

Digital leaders are sharpening their focus in 2025. Our What’s Next in CX report, based on insights from more than 2,700 professionals in marketing, UX, and product, shows teams are prioritizing 5 crucial shifts: AI, personalization, customer experience journeys, data, and content.

Among them, AI stands out—34.2% of digital professionals rank it as their top priority this year. But the full picture is broader: from building trust with first-party data to creating content that inspires and converts, the pressure is on to deliver experiences that are seamless, secure, and human.

Here are the 5 trends to watch in 2025, with lessons from leaders at Wolverine, NatWest, New Look, and Bazaarvoice.

Key insights

• Trust is the real growth driver. Across AI, personalization, data, and content, one theme stands out: none of these trends delivers results without customer trust. The winners in 2025 will be the businesses that embed transparency, consent, and authenticity into every experience.

• Experimentation is the new execution engine. Data on its own doesn’t fuel growth—experimentation does. Businesses that continuously test, optimize, and act on insights will be the ones turning trends into measurable business outcomes.

• Customer experience is expanding beyond conversion. In 2025, leading businesses are shifting from short-term conversions to long-term lifecycle engagement. The focus is moving toward loyalty, retention, and advocacy, ensuring every touchpoint strengthens the relationship.

1. Artificial intelligence (AI)

No surprise here—AI is still at the top of the list for 2025.

According to our 2025 report, 34.2% of digital professionals say they’ll prioritize AI over the next year. 

While ChatGPT and other tools made AI mainstream, the focus is now on embedding AI directly into business systems to accelerate insights and boost efficiency.

Businesses are now leaning on 2 major subtrends—AI integration and generative AI—to help teams move faster, by automating dashboards, powering conversational research, and creating personalized content at scale.

For example, at Wolverine Worldwide, AI-driven insights revealed that 40% of users who landed on a 404 page exited immediately. By redesigning the page based on those insights, the team cut exits by 32% and saved an estimated £10,000 in annual lost revenue.

And at L’Occitane, AI is supporting customer service teams and acting as a training tool for beauty advisors—speeding up support while keeping the human touch front and center.

Businesses today are using AI to embed intelligence at every step of the customer journey. And the businesses that win in 2025 will be those that know how to pair the right data with the right AI tools to deliver faster, smarter, and more human digital experiences.

2. Personalization

Personalization has been on digital roadmaps for years, but in 2025 it’s no longer optional—it’s the expectation. Customers want experiences that feel designed just for them, grounded in their own behaviors, needs, and trust in how their data is handled. This year, we’re seeing 2 focus points: hyper-personalization and segmentation, and first-party data as the fuel for trust.

Hyper-personalization and segmentation

Personalization has long been a goal for digital teams, but in 2025, the bar is even higher. Now, personalization is about responding to customer behavior in real time with the right nudge. Customers expect more than broad audience buckets—they want experiences tailored to their exact behaviors, context, and intent.

This is where hyper-personalization and segmentation come in. Hyper-personalization uses AI to deliver relevant content and offers at scale, while segmentation remains a proven strategy for grouping customers by shared traits, like frequent cart abandoners or banner-clickers. Together, they create journeys that feel individual, not generic.

Tui Cruises is a great example, here. When analyzing customer behavior, they noticed many visitors had multiple browser tabs open while searching for cruises. They launched a simple but effective personalization tactic: customized browser tab messaging. By tailoring messages specifically for families, they saw a +28% increase in users completing checkout after clicking back to the site.

Trust through first-party data

Privacy and security are central to building customer trust. With the long-awaited phasing out of third-party (3P) cookies in 2024, businesses are doubling down on first-party and qualitative data strategies.

In 2025, the focus is on using direct, consent-based data—insights and feedback customers share through owned channels like websites, apps, and surveys—to create meaningful experiences.

New Look is a good example of this—they lean into user-generated content (UGC) as a form of ‘first-party signal’. New Look tested UGC across its product listing and detail pages, and in just a week they saw product conversions increase by 19%, and revenue increase by 5.5%. By tapping into authentic, customer-shared content, they were able to deliver personalization and trust.

And Contentsquare is a good example of a privacy-conscious experience intelligence platform that uses intent-based customer data and insights to help businesses unlock a deeper understanding of customers without compromising security.

The key takeaway from this trend is that security and personalization don’t have to be at odds. The smartest businesses in 2025 are proving that a strong first-party data strategy fuels trust and growth.

3. Customer experience journeys

In 2025, businesses should prioritize building seamless, consistent journeys across every channel and device. Customers expect the same experience whether they’re on mobile, desktop, or in-store—and they reward brands that deliver.

Our Digital Customer Experience Trends report shows that converted sessions span more than 20 pages on both mobile and desktop, proving that when journeys are friction-free, users stay longer and buy more. That kind of consistency doesn’t happen by accident—it requires aligning offline and online touchpoints into one unified journey.

RS Group, for example, is focused on elevating the entire customer lifecycle. Their digital product team is moving toward hyper-personalized, journey-wide experiences, because they know that a single poor interaction can make a customer 50% less likely to return.

And of course, omnichannel success takes collaboration. Marketing, product, and UX teams all need access to the same insights to spot and resolve friction points. By sharing data and working together, they can ensure that every touchpoint contributes to the same, seamless customer experience.

4. Data

Data has always played a major role in digital decision-making, but in 2025, it’s stepped into the spotlight as a growth driver in its own right. Businesses aren’t just collecting information—they’re under pressure to connect it directly to outcomes, from customer satisfaction to revenue impact. This year, 2 themes stand out: using data to fuel growth and turning insights into action through experimentation.

Data as a growth driver

The priority in 2025 is to prove value. According to our report, data has climbed into the top 5 digital experience trends for the year, with businesses turning to first-party data and qualitative insights to better connect investments with outcomes.

Companies that embrace data-driven decision-making consistently outpace their peers. The focus now is on blending quantitative analytics with qualitative insights—from feedback surveys, user testing, and interviews—to uncover not just what happens, but why.

For example, Halfords, using Contentsquare’s tools, combined survey responses with session replay data. The insights they gleaned gave their teams the context they needed to act fast, which led to a 2.4 point increase in NPS® results within just 2 months.

Data drives alignment, too. Jan Uwland, Director of Growth at Betashares, emphasizes that getting the data foundation right is what makes collaboration possible:

If you can achieve a full picture of your customer in one place with all business properties and unified interaction history, then you’re able to actually understand your customer and also implement it in the tools you have available.

— Jan Uwland, Director of Growth at Betashares

When data is unified and accessible, teams can break down silos, make better decisions, and ensure every change leads to growth.

Data-driven experimentation

Analyzing visitor data is key to growth and building customer-centered products, but the real value comes when teams can act on the data quickly and at scale.

Companies that get this right see measurable results, and experimentation is one of the ways they achieve them. By combining quantitative analytics with qualitative insights from VoC surveys, user testing, or interviews, businesses can identify friction points, test, and validate the best solutions and fixes.

For example, NatWest, one of the largest retail banks in the UK, used Contentsquare’s AI technology to uncover a high drop-off rate in its mortgage application journey. The analysis revealed that 2 fields were blocking users from moving forward in the process on mobile. By tweaking the flow and adding an auto-scroll feature, NatWest increased completions at the next stage of the customer journey.

Don’t stop at insights in 2025—test, optimize, and measure. Experimentation is where data translates directly into growth.

5. Content

Content touches every stage of the customer journey and shapes how people discover, evaluate, and buy from brands. In 2025, content has entered the top 5 digital experience trends.

Businesses are prioritizing 2 imperatives: inspirational content that sparks emotion and sharing, and immersive content like virtual try-on technology that brings products to life. Both approaches are about making digital experiences feel more authentic and personal.

Take Bazaarvoice, for example. Their team helps brands harness UGC at scale to connect with Gen Alpha—the first generation of true digital natives. According to Bazaarvoice, over 2 billion Gen Alphas are expected to enter the consumer space in the coming years, so they’re enabling companies to turn this audience into long-term brand advocates.

As Alastair Forbes, Senior Director and EMEA Head of Ecosystem & Alliances at Bazaarvoice, puts it:

We're heavily involved in influencer marketing, social commerce, and bringing communities of people who can create user-generated content (UGC) at scale…

For us to be able to reach [Gen Alpha] and use over 1 billion TikTokers or our Instagram community to help brands get their message across, capture their attention, and create that brand affinity where they will buy—moving from 19-day purchase decisions to less than a minute—that's what we're focused on.

The brands that win in 2025 will be those that elevate content to a core driver of customer experience.

Ready to see the whole picture?

Our What’s Next in CX: 2025 Digital Customer Experience Trends report goes even deeper into the initiatives shaping digital strategies this year. Based on insights from 2,700+ professionals in marketing, UX, and product roles across industries, it highlights where teams are investing, what challenges they’re facing, and how businesses are preparing for the future.

Download the report to learn:

• Which digital trends matter most in 2025

• How leading brands are adapting their strategies

• What you can do now to turn data and insights into growth

And see how Contentsquare’s experience intelligence platform is already helping brands put these trends into practice—unlocking insights that drive happier customers and stronger business results.