Introduction

Analyzing the paths that your customers take across your pages can certainly tell you what they are doing and where they are navigating on your site, and this insight can begin to reveal trends in customer behavior and help you determine which paths are most successful. But, today, to truly optimize your online customer experiences requires both quantitative and qualitative digital analytic capabilities, where you also understand why customers choose – or perhaps abandon – particular paths. The integration of these capabilities, as enabled by IBM’s new Watson CXA offering, provides a consolidated view of your customers’ journeys and experiences allowing you to leverage your customer data as a competitive tool.

Analysis Overview

By combining the observations from IBM Digital Analytics (DA) Clickstream reports that analyze paths that visitors take through your website with the increased visibility into customer experiences offered through Tealeaf analysis, you are better enabled to optimize your site and maximize customer conversions.

Analysis Benefits

• Analyze paths that visitors take through your website to reveal trends in visitor behavior and help you to determine the paths that are most successful in leading to conversions.
• Incorporate customer path analysis with additional visibility into your customers’ experiences to assist you with identifying best practices and areas of improvement for optimizing your site.
• Offers enhanced insight that you can use to improve your customers’ experiences thereby increasing customer satisfaction, building brand loyalty and maximizing sales.

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will assist you with leveraging insight from IBM DA Clickstream reports and combining this customer navigation data with the analysis of customer experiences available from Tealeaf. At the same time, the formula will illustrate how awareness of customer paths observed in Clickstream reports can be used to assist with building the necessary events in Tealeaf to provide optimal reporting on customer experiences.

Understanding customer navigation paths with Clickstream

First, you will want to use Clickstream reports to analyze paths that customers take through your website either before or after they visit a specified page. To ensure these reports offer a valuable view into customer navigation, you should create Clickstream reports that provide the following analysis objectives:

• Track entry page performance: Analyze how many sessions are departing the website from a specific entry page and/or analyze the path of sessions before or after the customer arrives at the page. This information can help you identify underperforming entry pages and offers opportunities to enhance the effectiveness of your entry page.
• Track path abandonment from specific pages: This analysis can help evaluate and address causes for path abandonment from specific pages in the path.
• Improve site search design: Analyze the use of your site search input mechanism and results pages. You can use this information to increase search usage and search usability on your site.

Through the Clickstream reports, you can begin to reveal trends in customer behavior and quickly identify those paths that are the most successful in leading to conversion, as well as determine which paths are frequently abandoned by customers. These reports can help you understand: What were the paths – and pages – associated with successful sessions? Are customers following your designed conversion path? Where do customers typically abandon a path? When customers abandoned a page, where did they typically navigate next? So, the Clickstream reports are very helpful in identifying what is happening on your site and where customers are navigating.

Insight into Customer Experiences with Tealeaf

Armed with the information on what paths customer are navigating, you can then use the additional analysis offered through Tealeaf to drill down further and understand the customer experience and why customers are navigating – or abandoning – a particular path.   Tealeaf’s capabilities allow you to segment sessions to understand what impacted the customer experiences and influenced the customer behavior.  For example, once you identify particular pages that are involved with successful paths or abandoned paths, you can create the appropriate events in Tealeaf to help segment and better understand this data.  Some of the events and dimensions you could consider building include:

• Events that capture when customers click on the submit order page and receive the confirmation page (i.e. complete a successful conversion)
• Events that capture when customers have placed items in their cart but do not click to submit their order or do not receive the confirmation page (i.e. abandoned cart resulting in a lost conversion)
  • The above events can then by segmented by the dimensions of payment type, product ordered, coupon code entered, and browser type used to help you identify what factors may have led to success or failure with conversions on your site.
• Events that capture search terms on frequently abandoned pages that can then be used to help with improving search and search terms on your site.
• Events that capture clicks on videos or other call to action (CTA) on popular pages in paths (as identified in Clickstream reports) could also be helpful in understanding if they contributed to shortened customer paths or may have led to longer paths to conversion.

Understanding the customer experience factors that lead to success or failure allows you to take the appropriate actions to replicate best practices or rectify issues that may cause customer struggle.

In addition, the session analysis and session replay capabilities in Tealeaf further enhance your view into the customer experience.  By allowing you to identify and replay particular sessions, you are able to see exactly what your customer encountered on your site for both positive and negative experiences.   Did they try to submit a particular coupon code that was not accepted and then abandoned the check-out page?  Did certain search terms they entered lead to success or failure with converting to a sale?  Was there a particular page that was slow to load on your site, so they navigated to another page?  With Tealeaf analysis offering increased visibility into the customer experiences, you are able to quickly and easily identify where your customers may struggle, as well as recognize what led to positive experiences and sales conversions on you site.

Enhancing path analysis to optimize customer experiences

IBM DA Clickstream reporting sheds light on the paths that customers navigate, but combining this data with the capabilities of Tealeaf analysis can further illuminate those paths and help you understand the customer experience and why customers take a particular path – or abandon a particular path.    The integration of this customer data allows you to take the important steps to optimize your site and increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty, while maximizing your sales.