How Powerful Analytics Can Drive Better User Experiences

How can brands make meaningful improvements to their digital presence if they can’t make data-informed decisions?

Trent Ruffolo
Oct 17, 2023

For years, the digital landscape was fairly simple: a website was the only way someone could interact online with a brand. Then, the scene exploded: it grew to include email and text communications, social media platforms, mobile apps, third-party listings, and first and third-party reviews. As the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-Purpose Knowledge Discovery Software 2023 Vendor Assessment(doc #US49988523, October 2023) report notes, "The massive expansion of the scale of publicly accessible information, followed by the arrival of ecommerce, put new demands on organizations to create their own presence on the internet, including making key information and products findable for online users." Now, even the ways that consumers find your digital presence is evolving right alongside search engine updates and the rise of chat-based experiences.

The complexity of users' digital journeys has created a need for organizations to build their own customized digital experience platform, or DXP. It's helpful to build on a platform that supports all kinds of experiences in one place. This way, you can leverage the same content management system and analytics tools to inform and power your search experience, third-party listings, and more. This "all-in-one" type of platform is crucial to serving your customers now and scaling for the future — you never know which other experiences you'll want to spin up as your business needs change.

You Need A Holistic View of Your Users’ Digital Journeys

A comprehensive, holistic view of your data and analytics – from across all digital touchpoints – gives you true insight into how your brand is performing.

But how well are your analytics really working today? Take a minute to consider how many analytics tools and reporting software solutions your team is currently using:

• Search performance: You probably monitor your website's organic search performance with analytics software, like Google Analytics, Google Looker Studio or Tableau.

• Listings performance: Customers may find your Google Business Profile or Apple Business Connect profile on their search engine results page, while your listings on Yelp or industry-specific apps like Vitals and OpenTable are monitored within those site-specific reports and dashboards.

• Reviews performance: Reviews are a critical source of feedback for your brand, a space to engage with your users, and an area that provides a significant impact on search. Reviews live on sites like Yelp and Trustpilot, as well as within social media platforms and search engine listings.

• Social media performance: You may use a social media management platform like Hootsuite to schedule and monitor social media performance, or you may be working within individual social media platforms. Your business may also leverage video in your marketing strategy – meaning you'll be referencing performance analytics that live within sites like YouTube and Vimeo.

• Marketing performance: Your marketing team's tools – such as a CRM like Salesforce or a marketing automation platform like Hubspot – will also need to integrate with this data to measure lead quality and the effectiveness of your customer nurturing strategy.

• Website performance: When a customer finally lands on your website, you'll want to view marketing analytics like conversions, interactions on your site, and even common questions, content gaps, and pain points surfaced within your own search experience.

That's a lot of data – and it's all trapped in different platforms and applications.

Without one holistic view of your performance in these channels, even a small fracture in the customer journey – like a broken link to your website in your Yelp profile – can be overlooked and forgotten. While a broken link is typically a minor issue with an easy fix once discovered, every single customer on that particular digital journey will be impacted until the problem is resolved.

To better understand your users' digital journey (and your role in it), you'll need to choose a data analytics tool with one centralized view for your data. The right tool will help you and your team to understand the digital journey as it stands today – and plan for what it can become in the future.

Use Reporting Tools to Inform Strategic Business Decisions

A holistic view of your analytics data isn't the only benefit of a reports-based analytics tool. Remember, a key component of your DXP is that it enables you to optimize your customers' experiences. But if you can't even see how users are interacting with your site, how can you expect to optimize the entire digital journey?

For better or worse, the most accurate view of your holistic digital experience is the one in your main analytics dashboard. It's your opportunity to find out whether your customers are succeeding or struggling on their digital journey.

For example, the marketing analytics from your search experiences will tell you a lot about how customers interact with your brand – and how they want to interact with your brand. From here, you gain a better understanding of your users (like where they came from, where they ended up, and what they did from there).

And the insights don't stop with third-party reporting. Your first-party search experience is a treasure trove of information. From individual users' searches to trends in customer queries, your customers will tell you exactly what they're looking for – and by extension, where you can optimize your digital experience.

How to Find the Right Analytics Tool For Your DXP

DXPs are built, not bought – but the same can't be said for your analytics platform. Third- and first-party search experiences, analytics on your listings, data from your reviews across third-party sites and mobile apps, and even social media analytics are features that must be included in your DXP's analytics.

If your analytics platform can't capture these interactions, then it will not provide the holistic view of the customer journey you need.

When searching for an analytics solution, it's important to find a solution that captures and consolidates data across multiple digital properties.

This will empower your team with a holistic view of your customers' experiences throughout their digital journey, to make inferences and develop insights, and to make strategic, data-informed decisions.

For businesses that prefer to manage analytics within their native or preferred technology, automated data delivery to another system is required to meet the standards of a DXP. The key here is to look for a platform with an accessible and robust API that allows you to easily extract data for input into your own business intelligence systems or software. This will enable you to see your analytics alongside the rest of your metrics.

And, just like every other solution within your tech stack, look for an analytics solution that will complement a composable architecture. One key item to look for is the MACH Alliance seal. This seal indicates that the solution you're considering meets the standard for modern technology. This is necessary to build the composable, best-of-breed DXP you want (and stay agile for when business and customer needs inevitably evolve).

If knowledge is power, then your analytics might be your most powerful tool. Investing in the best analytics platform will give you the information that you need to improve and optimize your users' digital journeys.

Now that we've established the benefits of having an all-in-one platform with robust analytics capabilities, check out the IDC MarketScape's profile featuring these strengths Yext. The IDC MarketScape report excerpt notes, "Customers rated Yext highly on its built-in analytics capabilities, citing the ease of quickly creating custom reports that are highly tailored for search use cases."