Digital Analytics – Understanding behaviour from Web data
Being online is an imperative for any business today. Businesses are having multiple opportunities to touch their potential customers while the online customer is:
– Becoming aware of your services or products
– Is considering you in their mind
– Evaluating your offerings
– Deciding to spend his or her money
Most of these online interactions happen across a screen – a mobile or a computer. Technology is the layer which decides your customer experience. These experiences in the online touch points become the primary experience for the potential customer.
Can we understand this customer experience from web data?
Web analytics has matured over the years and provides a lot of digital data points for you to understand your traffic, audience, acquisition channels, behaviour and your goal achievements. To explain by an analogy, it is like you are having every minute detail of your brick and mortar store and its visitors.
Can this data analysis give me meaningful insights on behaviour?
Yes, of course. Let me explain this with one small example:
In traditional offline world, you would visit a store, pick up products, walk around the store, look at the shelves, make up your mind, read something on the labels, add it your basket or remove it from there and even come back to the shelf for an impulse purchase.
Similarly, in any online ecommerce website, you will have a lot of products, categories and related brands. Consumers come online and buy, but they buy differently, they explore differently, they pay differently. We can derive insights on this from web data.
Can we create an analogy of this offline understanding to an online shopping behaviour?
Yes, this requires critical thinking as online behaviour may not be a simple straight line or a simple combination of a few dimensions only. One needs to be able to understand the role of web data points such as page speeds, technology devices, screen resolutions, time of day and many more to get a good insight about the online behaviour. But let me highlight one or two simple metrics that give meaning full insights to show the potential of web data analysis. You can see them in google analytics under ecommerce product performance reports if you have enabled enhanced ecommerce in google analytics platform.
– Cart to Detail Rate
– Buy to Detail Rate
Without going into the exact definition of these ratios, let me interpret this from a layman perspective while I am shopping offline in a store, it is very close to the question below:
– How many products I added to my basket after seeing, reading and understanding the details written on the products?
– How many I brought after doing the above?
Now the best part of this is, the reading, seeing, understanding the details is just a click or page view away in online world. This would be a herculean task to measure in an actual brick and mortar store.
We can understand online customer experience from digital data, we just need a different point of view.
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info@voksedigital.comSource: Microsoft Power BI
