Customer Experience Analytics Formula Blog

Introduction

Customers today have come to consistently expect optimal online experiences.  Deliver anything less and you run the risk of not converting a user or potentially losing a loyal customer.   A crucial first step in the process of optimizing your customer experiences is your ability to quickly discover, understand and minimize customer struggle on your site.

Analysis Overview

By utilizing Struggle Analytics, a cognitive feature in Watson Customer Experience Analytics (CXA), you can easily monitor specific processes or promotional pages on your site to quickly identify customer struggle and uncover areas of opportunity to improve and optimize your customer experiences. 

Analysis Benefits:  

• Easily monitor specific processes or promotional pages for struggle activity with minimal configuration effort
• Create struggle factors based on pertinent events in your system and relative to your business focus
• Quickly discover obstacles to superior customer experience on your site by setting alerts to be notified when struggle thresholds are exceeded, allowing you to take swift action to eliminate struggle before it becomes prevalent.
• Employ session replay technology to view the customer struggle identified and rectify issues to optimize customer experiences on your site.

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will explain how to use Struggle Analytics in Watson CXA to effectively monitor specific processes, pages and events on your site for struggle activity, allowing you to quickly detect and analyze customer struggles and take corrective action to rectify issues and deliver frictionless customer experiences.

How Struggle Analytics work

Struggle Analytics is a cognitive feature that uses algorithms to learn over time what is normal user behavior on a page and what is not and assigns a struggle score based on struggle factors. The struggle score is calculated from weighted default factors and struggle event factors, and factors are weighed on a scale of 1 to 10.

By default, struggle factors for events in Watson CXA are calculated for a page URL or screen based on the following core attributes:

1. Repeat pattern – repeated patterns of unproductive user actions
2. Step count – number of user-initiated actions on a page such as clicks and entering text
3. Load time for page in seconds
4. UI element -- detect issues with UI elements, such as a user repeatedly clicking an icon

Note:  There is also the option to add user-defined events as struggle factors, allowing you to closely monitor and weight variables that are specific to your particular business.   Elements to consider could include abandonment events, error pages, no results searches, or events that capture struggle for customers in a particular region, etc.

Consider the pages you want to analyze for customer struggle

Customer struggle can vary depending on your site design or business focus, but some examples of struggles you may want to monitor could include users entering multiple credit card numbers (i.e. potential fraudulent activity) on your check out page, struggling with a form field (i.e. user confusion) on your registration page or having to wait extended periods of time for a page to load (i.e. poor or invalid web design) on your product page or shopping cart page. 

Configure Struggle Analytics for your application

Step 1 - Map pages and prepare application for analysis

1. Select Struggle Analytics in Watson CXA and then from the Options menu in the upper right corner, select Map Page.
2. Select Configure from the left side and enter a recognizable name for your mapped page or you can use the provided pages and icons to name your pages.
3. Then enter the page URL you want to monitor and select the appropriate conditions you want to include for your page mapping.  The conditions that you specify can be And or OR and are based on the page URL or an Event.
4. Next, test the set conditions against existing sessions by selecting Test Pages in the lower left.  Then, resolve any issues that are shown in the Test results window.

Page mapping for Struggle Analytics displayed in Watson CXA

Introduction

Your customers are engaging with your business across many different journeys – with customer interactions taking place over multiple channels, devices and visits -- and engagements occurring anywhere and anytime.   At the same time, in a competitive environment where your customers have increasing expectations to enjoy optimal experiences at every touchpoint, addressing the challenge of visualizing and understanding your customers’ complete journeys is essential for enriching experiences, building loyal customers, and maximizing conversions. 

Analysis Overview

Creating journey reports in IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics (CXA) allows you to quantify and visualize customer journeys – individually and in aggregate – across devices, channels and touchpoints, offering you the opportunity to quickly compare path popularity, duration, revenue and customer values across unique segments (i.e., web, mobile, email, etc.) and the ability to resolve potential issues, increase conversions and optimize every journey to create loyal customers.

Analysis Benefits

• Visualize a consolidated view of customer journeys to recognize the most traveled paths, the shortest paths, the paths that generate the most revenue and the paths that are most successful in leading to conversions.

• Identify where customers may struggle or succeed in their paths and drill down for a deeper understanding of customer journeys and the source of customer friction or customer conversions.

• Examine how activity in one customer path may impact performance in other paths, allowing you to optimize all customer journeys and increase conversions in all channels.

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will assist you with creating customer journey reports in Watson CXA to offer you a complete view of the multi-channel paths your customer take, enabling you to identify the paths that are the most relevant to your business, such as paths that lead to conversions or paths that top-tier buyers pursue, allowing you to drill deeper and uncover insight you can use to optimize all channels and customer journeys.   In addition, the analysis of journey reports can also assist you with evaluating the paths that may require additional optimization to increase conversions.   

Components of journey reports

As you can configure journey reports to focus on analysis of particular audiences or specific customer interactions pertinent to your business, it is first helpful to understand the key components of journey reports.

• Audiences: A journey report can be configured to include all of your customers or just a specific audience, such as top-tier buyers or customers from a specific demographic group.
• Top paths: Top paths are identified through four metrics, including path duration, most traveled, average revenue generated per customer and how many unique customers traveled the path.   Journey reports can be configured to include the top five paths in the report results or only the top path.
• Touch points: A touch point is the starting point or the ending point for a path in a journey report.  You must define at least one touch point—a start point or an end point -- or you can define both a start point and an end point.
• Range of interactions: Touch points are the foundation that defines where the path starts or ends. If you define both a start and end point for a path, the path results include all interactions that occurred between the two touch points.  If you define only a start point as a touch point, you can specify how many days from the start point you want to look forward for interactions. If you define only an end point, you can specify how many days from the end point to look backward for interactions.

Creating customer journey reports

To create a journey report in Watson CXA to visualize the customer journey paths or patterns that you want to analyze for your business, do the following:

1. In the navigation panel, click Create > Journey report. 
2. From the Audience menu of the report builder panel, click the Edit icon to select an audience, or accept the default value of All customers.
3. In the Interactions menu, click the Starting or Ending icon, or click one of the touch points on the page to add an interaction. Then, select an interaction to associate with the touch point.
4. Accept the default date range to report on or you may click Modify to change it.
5. While optional, you can add one or more filter conditions to the event by doing the following:
1. Click Add filter and select an event attribute and operator from the lists.
2. Enter a value to filter on.   If you want to add another filter criterion, click +.
3. Select the filtering logic that you want to use from the list at the top of the window and then click Apply:
• Satisfy all below applies AND logic to the filter processing where events must meet all of the listed filter conditions to be included in the results.
• Satisfy any below applies OR logic to the filter processing where events that meet any of the listed filter conditions are included in the results.
6. Then click Apply to add the interaction to the report configuration.  
   • Note:  If you want to define another interaction, repeat the process of selecting an interaction, date range and filter conditions (if applicable.)
7.  In the Look period menu, you can specify the number of days in the range or accept the default range of 14 days.
   • Note:  If your path includes both a starting interaction and an ending interaction, you do not need to specify a look-back or look-forward range, as the report results will include all interactions that occurred between the starting and ending interactions.
     1. Enter the number of days to look back or forward in the box and then click Done 
8. From the Metrics menu, select a criteria for ranking the paths in the report results:
   • Top journeys of individual metric. This option returns results for the top five journeys ranked according to the metric you select:  Most traveled, Duration, Average revenue, or Unique customers.
   • Top journey for all metrics. This option returns the top journey for each of the four metrics.
9. To compile your journey report, click Generate.  You can then accept the default report name or change it or add a description.  Save your report by clicking Save.

Accessing and analyzing journey reports

Watson CXA processes two report types for your customers’ journeys:  Channel Analysis and Pattern Analysis.    By default, a journey report opens with the journey channel analysis results displayed when you click Manage > Journey reports and select the report you want from the list.  By then clicking on the Report type menu, you can switch to the journey pattern analysis results for your report.

• Accessing journey channel data: Helps you analyze your journey channel data by providing four path view types: Separated view, Time-lapsed view, Merged view, and Mindset view.
• Analyzing journey patterns: Helps you discover the sequences of customer behavior that have the greatest impact on the customer journey by using journey pattern analysis.

Using customer journey reports

While there are many use cases for customer journey reports, for this formula example we will apply journey channel analysis to analyze and understand the customer journeys that led to conversions and use this insight to successfully support a new product launch.   

1. Configure the journey report to understand the paths of top-tier buyers
   1. As we want to better understand what led the top-tier buyers to convert on previous purchases of similar products, we configure the journey report to show only the paths that were taken by these buyers by selecting Top Tier Buyers from the Audience menu.
   2. There may be several successful paths by top-tier buyers, so we will select to view the top five most-traveled paths by selecting this option from the Report options menu. Or, you can select to view just the top path from the options menu, if you wish.
   3. For the selection of the end touch points of the paths, we will select the Cart Purchased event, as we want our report to capture only the paths that resulted in a conversion.
      1. Additional filters can also be applied to this event. For this formula example, we will apply a filter to specify the cart purchase of a particular product, as we want to identify the top paths for customers who converted or purchased a particular product, so that we can apply this insight to the launch of a similar product. 
2. Analyzing the results of our journey report
   1. The journey channel report results show the top five most traveled paths that led to the purchase of our specified product.
   2. Each path shows the channels that customers used to interact with our brand, and the paths are sorted by most traveled in descending order. The report also provides metrics to compare paths by duration, average revenue, and number of unique customers.
   3. If we want to visually compare the top five paths along the time dimension, we can switch to the Time-lapsed view to quickly gauge the time elapsed between individual channels within a path.
3. Drill into channel activity for deeper insight
   1. Drilling into the most frequently traveled path in the channel summary, we see an aggregate view of the customer interactions that the top-tier buyers completed in the different channels along their path to purchasing our particular product.
   2. By analyzing the interactions of top-tier buyers, we can identify what influenced their purchase.
      1. Perhaps they first opened a promotional email with a 10% discount offer, clicked the email link to the product summary page on the website, and then launched the promotional product video before making their purchase. Or, maybe they were influenced through a social media promotion to visit the product page, and they then downloaded a product brochure before finalizing their purchase.   By drilling down into the channel activity, we can uncover what interactions led to conversions and replicate those offerings to support conversions for our new product launch.

While our formula example utilizes journey channel analysis to gain insight into customer journeys, journey reports can also be configured to provide journey pattern analysis to help identify high-impact customer behavior patterns in customer journeys.   Armed with deeper insight into your customers’ interactions and journeys using journey reports in Watson CXA, you are better able to replicate successful customer paths, resolve potential issues or customer struggles, and optimize journeys in all channels to increase conversions.  

Introduction:  

Offering an optimized customer experience requires more than just providing your online customers with enhanced web pages or advanced site functions -- it requires you to ensure that your entire online business process is optimized and nurtures conversions.  As customers progress through various process steps to complete transactions on your site, it is important to monitor your critical business processes and identify and alleviate customer friction within individual process steps.  Understanding where your customers may struggle within your business process offers you the opportunity to optimize your process steps, enrich customer experiences and improve conversions.  

Analysis Overview

By using process reports in Watson Customer Experience Analytics (CXA), you can gain visibility into the overall performance of your business processes and identify individual process steps that may require enhancements or improvements.   By then comparing the performance of process steps across a common process flow for different segments of your business, you can recognize segments that may require increased refinements and optimization.

Analysis Benefits:  

• Measure and score overall business process success by identifying the abandonment and conversion rates across and within each step of a critical business process
• Uncover customer struggles or usability issues in your business process steps to identify areas requiring improvements and optimization.
• Compare segments across a common process flow to identify segments that may be underperforming and require fine-tuning to increase the success of your overall business process.

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will explain how you can:

1. Create process reports in Watson CXA to gain visibility into the performance of your business processes by identifying the conversion rates and abandonment rates for all process steps.
2. Drill deeper with session analysis to understand what causes abandonments in your process steps and implement the necessary improvements to increase conversions.
3. Compare process reports for different segments across a common process flow to begin to recognize process issues with particular segments of your business, allowing you to improve underperforming segments and processes and overall optimize your customer experiences.

Create process reports for your critical business processes

Online business processes differ, but common examples include placing an order for a product on your ecommerce site or registering a new user account for your business.   Similarly, the process steps and sequence of events can vary and may include the following:   place items in a shopping cart, provide customer information and shipping address, complete payment method, review order and submit order for fulfillment.   The events that follow the placement of a customer order are key in your overall business process as well and can include:  processing payments, verification of orders and shipment of the final products and more.

As such, you will want to ensure you have events built to record the important process steps that make up the sequence of events that define the flow of your critical business processes. 

1. Create a process report using the Report feature in Watson CXA
1. Go to Optimize > Analytics and go to your workspace.
2. Select Add widget and select Create Report > Process report from the Actions menu.  The New Process Report page is displayed.
3. Select an application profile and click Next.  Select metrics as step page is displayed.
4. Select the steps that define your business process.
   1. From the Metrics column, select the events that when sequenced together define the process that you want to score or evaluate.
   2. Drag each object one at a time a time to the Steps column. The metrics are linked together in a sequential process flow in the Steps column.
   3. For each step you select, the absolute numbers of visitors are counted, and a conversion rate is calculated.
5. Enter a step name for each metric you added to the Steps column and click Next. 
6. Select any additional segments or use the default segment only. 
7. Click Create to Preview your Process report. 
8. Click Save report to create the report and add it to your workspace.

2. Evaluate your Process Report to understand how the steps in your business process are performing.
   1. Process reports automatically measure and score (against defined goals) the overall success and failure of your online process steps.
   2. Analyzing the scoring for each process step allows you to easily identify process steps that include a percentage of abandonments that fall outside expected or typical percentages for your business.

Ongoing monitoring of your process report is important and can help your identify significant changes in performance across your business processes that might signal a concern, allowing you to quickly rectify issues and keep your business processes and customer experiences optimized.

Drill deeper to understand what causes abandonments

By identifying process steps that reflect a higher than normal percentage of abandonments, you have the ability to analyze sessions to better understand the cause of customer friction or struggle within the process step(s).  

Example:  Process Report in Watson CXA

For example, if your process step for “Check Out” is showing a high percentage of abandonments, you can drill down into sessions to understand if customers may be entering expired promotion codes or an invalid payment type.  Or, if you have added a new step to your registration process, and abandonments are high for the new process step, you can use session analysis to understand if customers may be confused on the new step or if there may be an issue with your registration form or field.   As a streamlined and frictionless business process is key to creating loyal customers and boosting conversions, it is important to quickly identify and understand what obstacles may prevent customers from successfully progressing through your business process steps with optimized experiences.

Compare segments for a better understanding of your overall business process performance

Comparing your process reports for different segments allows you to look at how your various segments are performing across a common business process flow or how your data from process reports may change over a period of time by comparing different dates.   By comparing process reports, you are able to identify individual segments that encounter challenges in your business process steps and then apply improvements to increase conversions across your entire business process.  

For example, you can compare a process report for all mobile visitors and a process report for all desktop web visitors to determine if a segment encounters a struggle in a particular process step.    If your mobile visitors struggle during a particular process step, while your desktop visitors do not, you can then drill down further to understand what is causing friction for your mobile visitors.  Perhaps one of your process steps is not optimized for mobile?  Or, are your mobile abandonments isolated to a particular operating system?  You can also compare segments to understand if customers struggle in a particular geography or if customers encounter friction while using a particular browser across your business process.

1. Compare process reports for different segments

There are a couple of ways you can compare segments or audiences for process reports in Watson CXA. 

First, you can update the audience view or date view when viewing a process report.    

1. While viewing a process report from your workspace, click the audience or date boxes in the upper left corner to switch your audience view or date range view
2. The process report will refresh to reflect the data for the updated audience or date

Or, you can compare process reports for different audiences or dates for a common process flow in a side by side comparison view.

1. From your workspace Open the Process report for which you want to compare data.
2. Select the Compare The Compare mode dialog is displayed.
3. Enter the compare criteria. You can compare by date or by segment.
   1. Enter the date or segment for the current report and enter the dates or segments for the comparison report.
   2. Select Applyto apply your criteria to the report.
   3. The original report and the report with the new date or segment are shown side by side for comparison. You can view the data in chart and grid form.
4.  Select Save Reportto save the report to your workspace and enter a name for the report.
5. Select the Full screenicon on the saved report to return to the side-by-side comparison view.
6. Select the Comparelink to exit Compare mode.

 Example:  Comparison of Process Reports for Different Segments in Watson CXA

2. Analyze the comparison data across the process reports

Comparing the performance of process steps for different segments across a common process flow allows you to easily recognize customer struggles for a distinct segment and understand if a particular segment is impacting your business process success.  With this increased insight, you have the ability to make improvements that will increase conversions and the success of your business process across all segments  

By creating process reports, you are able to look at the performance of your overall business process and understand where you may be losing customers in your process, providing you the opportunity to optimize your process steps to improve the customer experience and boost conversions.

Introduction

As customers expect an optimal experience every time they engage with your business, understanding where – and when – they may struggle on your site is crucial.  The ability to readily identify customer struggle, and quickly rectify issues for a consistently optimized customer experience, can be further compounded by the number of channels and campaigns that may be involved in driving your business, where you are required to optimize many more pages and potentially new processes.   But, how can you know exactly when customers encounter struggle on your site?  

Analysis Overview

Enabling real-time alerting to be automatically notified when struggle events occur on your site can assist you with quick detection and analysis of customer struggles, allowing you to swiftly take corrective actions to deliver frictionless customer experiences.

Analysis Benefits

• Discover obstacles to superior customer experience through alerts that notify you at the first sign of customer struggle on your site.
• Swiftly act on alerts and insights to proactively eliminate areas of struggle before they become prevalent.
• Quickly optimize customer experiences with real-time struggle detection and alerting.

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will demonstrate how to create, use and manage alerts for defined struggle events on your site using Watson Customer Experience Analytics (CXA), allowing you quick notification of and increased insight into customer struggles that you can then use to rectify issues and optimize customer experiences. 

Consider the struggle events you want to closely monitor

Events are the foundation of alerts, as alerts are enabled to notify you when specific struggle events exceed a defined threshold on your site.   You can set alerts for:

1. Struggle events you created using Struggle Analytics in Watson CXA.
2. Events you have built in Event Manager to monitor struggle on your pages.

Depending on your website design and what activities you would like to monitor, you could consider creating events to evaluate struggle or user confusion on your check out page, product page, registration page or shopping cart page, and more.  

Set up alerts to monitor relevant struggle events

As configuring an alert requires some consideration on the threshold values and threshold intervals that are best to use for accurately monitoring your event activity, it is helpful to first let your events run for a short period of time.  This will allow you to observe what event activity is within expected or typical range on your site, so that you can better configure your alert notifications to trigger when your event activity falls outside of normal range.   However, if you are launching a new page (i.e. campaign or promotional page), a new process (i.e. registration), or perhaps launching into a new market, you may want to set up alerts right away to notify you of any immediate struggles or issues users encounter.

Alerts are created and monitored from Alert Manager in Watson CXA, and alert notifications are based on:

• Event
• Alert type
• Threshold operator, greater than, less than, or in the range of the Threshold value
• Time between alerts notifications

Select Alert Manager from the left navigation in Watson CXA and click “+ New Alert” in the upper right.   The basic info screen for creating alerts will display.

1. Average: Sends an alert notification based on the average of a numeric event value collected during the alert interval based on the threshold value
2. Count: Sends an alert notification based on the event count as compared to the threshold operator and value.
3. Maximum: Sends an alert notification if the numeric event value collected exceeds this defined maximum during the alert interval based on the threshold
4. Minimum: Sends an alert notification if the numeric event value collected exceeds this defined minimum during the alert interval based on the threshold value
5. Ratio: Sends an alert notification based on the ratio of two events. You choose two events, one as the denominator and the other as the numerator. Alert notification is sent once the threshold has been met. The threshold is set as a percentage.
6. Sum: Sends an alert notification based on the sum of a numeric event value collected during the alert interval based on the threshold value using the threshold operator.

The most common type of alert is typically count, as there are many events where a high or a low count could signal an issue with your site.  For example, a high number of bounces from your check out page or a low number of counts to your landing page.

Example:  Basic info screen for real-time alerting in Watson CXA

Additional considerations for configuring alerts

With the ability to select different alert types, as well as add dimensions to the event you would like to closely monitor, you have the flexibility to apply some creativity and uncover different activities that are taking place across your site and move beyond simply tracking page load issues or page not found errors.    

Use case examples include:  

• Uncovering fraudulent activity on your site
• Monitoring reception of a new product or campaign
• Gauge progress in a new market
• Identifying user struggle during peak or high-traffic times.

For example, if you want to be alerted to possible fraudulent activity taking place on your site like a user entering multiple credit card numbers in the same session, you can configure an alert for events tracking the process on your checkout page.  You would select ratio as the alert type and apply an event recording total credit card entries as the numerator for the ratio and an event recording the total sessions as the denominator.  

For global operations, you can apply dimensions to the events you are monitoring to segment by location and receive alerts for struggles that may occur in particular geographies or regions.   Or, perhaps you need to monitor influencers or referrals to your landing page as part of a new campaign.  Applying dimensions to your monitored event can allow you to be notified, for example, if counts to your campaign landing page drop or fall below expectations for your campaign.

In addition, if you are implementing a new campaign or registration process, you could consider configuring alerts for notification on the potential use of invalid promo codes or login issues on your registration page.   Monitoring abandoned cart rates or percentages is also helpful in alerting you to potential user struggles that could signal potential page or process issues.

Click continue once your alert parameters are defined and the Recipient info screen is displayed. 

1. While the email address defaults to the email address of the person creating the alert, you can add additional recipients to receive alert notifications.
2. Helpful tips:
   1. Use Email to SMS Text gateway to send the alert notification email as a text message to your mobile phone or a recipient’s mobile phone.
      1. For example, if you are a Verizon user and your mobile number is 949-555-1212, you can receive the email notification as a text by using [10-digit phone number]@vtext.com or 949-555-1212@vtext.com
   2. Review and update the email subject to ensure it is prescriptive and allows you to readily identify the alert notification when it is received. This is especially helpful if you are receiving multiple alert notifications.

Example:  Recipient info screen for real-time alerting in Watson CXA

Click Continue once your Recipient info is confirmed and the Blackout info screen displays.

Note: You can also specify blackout periods during timeframes in which you may not want to receive alerts like during non-business hours, for example.

It is also important to consider that very few systems will operate with 100% uptime or that your site will experience a struggle-free environment.  So, be sure to check your alert configurations if activity seems unusually quiet. 

Finally, complement real time detection of customer struggles with session replay technology in Watson CXA for increased visibility into your customers’ behaviors and struggles to pinpoint where and why experiences are occurring, allowing you to quickly rectify issues and readily optimize your customers’ experiences.

Introduction

There are a lot of factors to consider when developing your marketing strategy and campaigns.   One very important component that deserves special focus is the marketing landing page.   In many ways, your marketing landing pages are the heart of your campaigns and play a crucial role in a campaign’s success.  A great landing page not only serves to generate leads and create conversions, but tracking performance of your marketing landing pages can provide valuable insight you can use to better align your marketing strategies and maximize the effectiveness of your campaigns.   So, how do you go about ensuring your marketing landing pages are optimized to support your business objectives?

Analysis Overview

In this analysis, we will show how using marketing optimization reports can provide you an end-to-end view of the effectiveness of your marketing landing pages, offering insight from your customer behaviors that can assist you with optimizing your marketing landing pages to help improve engagements, enhance customer experiences and maximize conversions.

Analysis Benefits

• Optimize marketing landing pages and maximize effectiveness of marketing campaigns utilizing a better understanding of customer behaviors and interactions.
• Uncover usability and design flaws on your landing pages for increased visibility into areas requiring improvements and fine-tuning.
• Utilize marketing insights to make better-informed decisions on how to best align your marketing strategy and improve campaign performance.

Analysis Formula

This customer experience analytics (CXA) formula will explain how you can use marketing optimization reports and usability analytics in Watson Customer Experience Analytics (CXA) to track landing page performance and identify areas for improvement on your marketing landing page design and overall campaign marketing strategy.   With this insight, you are better able to optimize your landing pages to improve the customer experiences and conversions while maximizing your marketing efforts and budgets.

Create MMC codes used in generating attribution reports

1. Use the Marketing Channels report to track key performance indicators for each channel, such as bounce rate, conversion rate, sales, or percent share of traffic, and monitor for significant changes in performance that might signal a concern.
2. Use the Marketing Program report that provides a comprehensive view of your online paid marketing activity to drill deeper into your marketing campaigns and help identify potential reasons for changes in performance across your paid marketing elements.

Apply usability analytics for increased insight into customer interactions

Apply usability analytics, like heat maps, to evaluate customer behaviors and understand if your landing page design is optimal or if usability improvements are needed to improve your customer experiences and increase conversions.   Heat maps are helpful in identifying where customers are engaging on your page and recognizing areas of your page that may be causing struggles. 

Generate marketing optimization reports to evaluate landing page performance

A successful marketing campaign – and optimized landing page – encompasses more than one strong component.   So, creating an end-to-end view of campaign activities – before, during and after engagements with your landing pages – allows you to pinpoint what elements are working and identify the segments that may be underperforming.  

1. This is a great first step in helping you quickly understand how all of your landing pages are performing and allows you to zero in on the pages that are readily viewed and those that are not. Is there a landing page or two that really stands out?   Are there pages that peak one day to only drop in views the next?

Example:  Daily landing page views by MMC

1. Understanding how landing pages are performing by campaign allows you to take a further step in identifying what campaigns are driving interest and what campaigns may need fine-tuning or more evaluation. 

1. This report will help you understand what influencers are driving traffic to your landing pages and what their impact on your campaign is. What marketing channels are driving the most traffic to your pages?   Is there a channel that is underperforming and could be eliminated to conserve budget or perhaps improved to maximize conversions?  
2. You might then create a report that offers a view of landing page performance by MMC code and referral source allowing you to evaluate if a particular combination of referrals by campaign are working exceptionally well – or perhaps not well at all.

1. With a better understanding of what channels and what campaigns are driving traffic to your landing pages, you can then begin to take a look at how well your marketing landing pages are performing and driving interest. How well are customers clicking on your CTAs across all your landing pages?   Is there a landing page that received a lot of views, but then CTAs were low?   Is there perhaps a design flaw or poor content placement on your underperforming pages that might be causing confusion or struggle? (Heat maps, as explained above, can help you evaluate if design issues may be an issue.)

Example:  Landing page clicks by landing page

1. Of course, one of the valuable pieces of information is whether your landing pages are leading users to convert to customers. Are there any pages that perform exceptionally well with conversions?   Is there a conversion event you can identify?  Or was there a progression of success factors that contributed to conversion based on your collective review of the marketing reports?

1. A cumulative report will allow you to understand what marketing elements are working together to drive your business and what elements may need some further evaluation and fine-tuning. In order to best view this aggregate data, format in a table or a stacked bar or create the report with filters so you can refine the views to get a better understanding on how different elements impact your marketing efforts.

In order to ensure you can create the appropriate marketing reports, you will want to be sure to have the correct events enabled – like events to capture views on your landing pages, clicks on your CTAs and conversions events.   At the same time, the ability to dimensionalize your marketing data by campaign and channel is key, so it is essential to have the correct MMC codes generated for use in the various marketing reports, so that you can further evaluate what is impacting your campaign performance.  With a better understanding of what is driving your campaigns and leading to conversions, you gain valuable insight you can use to develop optimized marketing landing pages – pages designed to create enriched customer experiences and brand loyalty.   So, with the critical role that landing pages play in your campaigns, an optimized landing page ultimately translates into an optimized campaign driving maximized business results.