Do meetings with your marketing firm ever feel like an episode of Mad Men? They come up with brilliant, flashy ideas that seem to be out of thin air? Then, six months later, your business is still performing the same it was before your marketing blitz.
There was a time when marketing was more smoke and mirrors. But today, digital marketing can and should be backed up by data. At Campaignium, we look at heat maps, Google Analytics, user experience (UX) trends, surveys and many other areas to help you build a data-driven digital marketing strategy.
Data & UX Testing
User experience is one of the buzziest buzz words around. So what does it really mean? And how does it affect your business? UX is the umbrella term for how visitors interact with your website, and it has very real consequences. Can they easily find what they’re looking for? Are they frustrated by long load times? Can they buy a product or service without a hassle? UX testing can answer all of these questions and more.
Testing provides a mix of valuable qualitative and quantitative data that tells a story. This data is crucial to improving conversion rates and optimizing your website for your target audience. While usability and design greatly influence UX, the data surrounding conversion results deserves special attention.
Most big companies collect digital marketing data based on scripts, cookies, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and other tracking systems. While this data is significant, collecting and analyzing the highest-quality data is vital to properly measuring UX and developing an intelligent marketing strategy.
One of the biggest struggles related to UX decisions is the quality of the data. An estimated 21% of marketing dollars are wasted because of poor data quality. With wasted marketing spend, inaccurate target markets, poor customer experience and inaccurate marketing numbers, data is often skewed.
Campaignium ensures the data is cross-checked with multiple data sources when developing marketing and UX strategies. By installing heat maps on the backend of a website, true UX can be captured with recordings, screenshots and user flow in real time. Google Analytics provides additional insights on specific pages, comparing past data to current heat map data. Reviewing those user trends helps us make reliable and relevant UX recommendations.
Heat Maps
Campaignium uses heat maps to help identify UX strengths and problem areas. These tools help establish user flow in real time, allowing us to better analyze goals for clicks and conversions and to test UX strategies.
Heat maps help determine where bottlenecks exist on a website. Additionally, when combined with Google Analytics, heat maps can help verify areas plagued by low session durations, high bounce rates and major behavior flow fluctuations.
Google Analytics
Looking at a company’s Google Analytics data gives insight into how users have behaved on their website in the past. From there, benchmarks can be set as you work to improve UX. Insights such as average session duration, bounce rate and behavior flow help monitor UX, pinpoint areas for improvement and influence your overall marketing strategy.
- Average Session Duration looks at the average amount of time a user spends on a specific page. No industry standard exists for average session duration due to the wide variation of content on webpages. It’s significant to UX because it helps researchers and analysts understand where users are engaging with the site and where improvements are needed.
- Bounce Rate reviews engagement—or lack thereof—between a user and the site. The higher the bounce rate, the less users are interacting with the site, either by not clicking on links or calls to action (CTAs). High bounce rate is not always bad, depending on what you want the user to do on the page. Bounce rate helps expose UX opportunities. If the user isn’t engaging on a page, Google Analytics and heat maps will give Campaignium the data to formulate a strategy to decrease bounce rate.
- Behavior Flow examines the path users take as they navigate through a website. It helps to determine the “problem pages” that need to be more thoroughly reviewed based on volume, pages exited, conversion metrics and many other factors. Behavior flow also helps identify where users are engaging on specific pages—CTAs, internal links, external links, etc.—and guides UX on those pages. As a result, behavior flow provides analysts with the data they need to support UX strategy.
UX Trends
Websites look a lot different today than they did 15 years or even five years ago. Think about MySpace’s layout and design compared to Facebook’s. The layout is much cleaner and design more contemporary. Just like these social media platforms have evolved, so have UX trends on websites. While some UX trends are pertinent to all industries, others are industry-specific. UX testing is vital to ensure that your marketing strategy and website changes are uniquely suited to your industry and your target audience.
UX Testing
How do you know our recommendations for your website and marketing strategy will work for your company? You don’t. That’s why we test them on the site before making them live.
By using tools like Google Optimize, we can test our recommended changes before actually making those changes. Additionally, language and CTAs can be tested for advertising campaigns, niche markets and specialized target markets to ensure these tactics result in maximum conversions and achieve your goals.
Understanding how your company’s website ranks with users is critical to increasing conversions and reducing marketing budget waste. By using heat maps and Google Analytics, following trends and testing strategies before implementing them on your website, we ensure our recommendations are backed by accurate real-time data.
If your business isn’t working with Campaignium on UX testing, make sure you’re asking the right questions and analyzing the right data before modifying your marketing strategy or reworking your website. Just remember, good data leads to good decisions!
