Focus 2015: drilling down on session replay data
The push to find out how consumers interact with their favorite brands has proven to be a catalyst for vendors to deliver website analytics tools. Most companies are done trying to push products onto consumers because they realize (unless you’re Apple) that it doesn’t work. Instead, they’re more focused on learning what consumers actually want and deliver on those desires.
eCommerce companies have a wealth of information at their fingertips, but only if they have the tools to collect and analyze the data. Given the fact that consumers are doing the bulk of their research online before making a purchase, organizations should be looking into the way those consumers are interacting with the website. Call it in-page analytics or session replay, but products like ClickTale, User Replay, Full Story and others are bringing the website interactions of each and every visitor to light.
A front-runner in the market is IBM’s new customer experience manager, Tealeaf, which is now part of the company’s Enterprise Marketing Management suite. IBM leaders explained details regarding the power of the solution at a recent eCommerce event in Chicago.
Tealeaf offers qualitative analytics, giving companies a revealing look into exactly how visitors use their website. If something goes wrong during a visit, Tealeaf knows because it records every connection a customer has with the website. The beauty of the application is that it applies analytics that help organizations identify trends so they’ll have more insight into customer behavior as well as the usability of the website.
Sometimes, it’s not a problem with the company brand or the product, it’s the website. For instance, if a customer repeats tasks over and over and doesn’t have success, such as entering a promo code or choosing a shipping option, Tealeaf offers “struggle detection” that will flag the issue, giving web administrators the alert they need to look into specific areas for problems.
More businesses today are focused on essentially holding the hand of their customer so they can provide a better customer experience. Making sure a customer is happy and satisfied ensures that they’ll come back for more business. However, companies don’t want to spend the time and money coding programs that give them more information on their target market, which is why vendors are popping up to do the heavy lifting. Through their analytics solutions, struggle scoring, privacy and security rules, complex pattern analysis, indexing, capturing and data storage are all part of the package.
There are many add-ons and other modules to consider with these solutions, but the point is, most retailers that made X amount of dollars on Black Friday could have potentially made more if they had better insights into how consumers interact with their website. In some cases, companies find that they get a return on their investment in as little as 15 minutes of using a basic in-page analytics solution.
There is more to talk about with Tealeaf, which will be discussed in a later blog. Until then, eCommerce companies should consider 2015 to be a prime time to look deeper into data and apply analytics tools that extract actionable information.