If you’re a right-brained professional who’s experiencing increasing pressure to deliver a hyper- personalized digital experience with proportionally less and less access to data and analytics, then this article is for you–or perhaps it may trigger you. The goal isn’t the latter, but rather to show you that there’s a silver lining (i.e., solution) if this rings true for you.

Consumers Expect Personalization of Online Experiences

At this point, it is no secret that online shopping has grown exponentially since the beginning of the pandemic and the data continues to show that it’s not slowing down anytime soon. According to a recent McKinsey report, year-over-year growth in ecommerce was 27% in March 2022. This growth, particularly among younger generations, also leads to higher expectations with regards to personalization. In the same McKinsey study, they report that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized perfection, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. Personalization and experience optimization are already teetering on table stakes. Five years ago, it was nice to have, but now consumers expect it or they take their loyalty elsewhere.

Leverage Digital Experience Intelligence Software for Enhanced Precision in Experience Optimization

Software products like FullStory can aid in addressing experience optimization efforts, by ensuring a tailored customer-first approach.

Digital experience intelligence (DXI) software products like FullStory can aid in experience optimization efforts, by ensuring a tailored customer-first approach. However, a personalized approach has some heavy stakes. According to the McKinsey study mentioned above, over three-quarters of consumers (76%) said that receiving personalized communications was a key factor in promoting their consideration of a brand, and 78% said that it made them more likely to repurchase from that brand.

 Additional benefits to FullStory:

  • Providing key customer behavioral insights to creative teams – Teams like branding and design, customer experience (CX), and user experience (UX) are often starved for key behavioral data which is needed to deliver a flawless digital customer experience
  • Driving revenue – Companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from those activities than average players. (Mckinsey)

But, before throwing another DXI analytics tool into your stack, you may be wondering why an additional tool is needed at all, especially when you use Google Analytics. There are some key differences between these two analytics tools. Both tools answer very different business questions. Both tools hold value; it is not a question of investing in one or the other. Begin by asking yourself – What questions can I answer if I add a DXI tool, like FullStory, to my tech stack that I was unable to answer before?

Basic Strengths of Google Analytics

It’s beneficial to highlight a few strengths of Google Analytics before jumping to FullStory. By no means is this a comprehensive list, but among the basic strengths of Google Analytics, you can expect it to perform the following functions well:

  • Aggregating performance across marketing channels
  • Aggregating session data at the device level
  • Aggregating page views across pages or types of content
  • Aggregating basic button and link clicks

Consumers of Google Analytics 4 data will likely use BigQuery much more often. While this is not necessarily a knock against Google, it’s worth noting that Google Analytics will likely be less accessible to the non-technical, creative departments in the future.

Basic Strengths of FullStory

In contrast, FullStory is really designed for non-technical users and provides insights for different business questions. Do you need to know some basic CSS to become fairly proficient? Yes. But that skill can be developed for free at Codecademy (or similar online coding platforms) in a few hours.

Similar to the list of strengths for Google Analytics and other analytics platforms, the below strengths of FullStory are not exhaustive, but rather meant to highlight where a DXI platform excels or differs from Google Analytics. Among FullStory’s basic strengths are the following:

  • Retroactively tracking everything your users see and click on
  • Recording session data for qualitative cohort analysis
  • Identifying frustration signals like rage clicks and dead clicks then applying a statistical opportunity cost to them
  • Providing click maps and scroll maps for cohort analysis
  • Creating custom funnels and user journey maps
  • Customizable user segment analysis across data sources
  • Customizable insights through dashboards and calculated metrics

While FullStory certainly overlaps with Google Analytics in a few ways (e.g. campaign tracking, Sankey/flow diagrams, and funnel configurations), even at a high level you can see that it’s designed for a different purpose. Google Analytics is meant to aggregate data across sessions, while FullStory is meant to provide granular, qualitative as well as quantitative data about the end user’s experience.

The experience optimization insights generated by FullStory are exactly what creative teams need in order to  provide a more personalized digital experience for consumers.

Creative Insights from DXI Tools Are Optimal for User Experience Optimization

Now that you’ve seen the high-level comparison between a DXI and a marketing analytics platform, Let’s imagine that you’re on the creative team that works on an ecommerce website, and you’ve recently rolled out a newly redesigned website. You’re eager for insights and likely to have lots of CX/UX questions about how specific design decisions are performing, and what can be learned about user behaviors in order to inform a future experience optimization iteration on the site.

After the redesign, you might have the following type of questions:

  • What type of website media (i.e. images, video, tool tips, recommendations, widgets/calculators) ultimately leads to transactions?
  • What website elements are getting rage clicks, error clicks, and dead clicks, potentially causing user frustrations? What is the opportunity cost for each of these?
  • Which product tiles are loading without an image creating a poor user experience?
  • Where do loading spinners happen and for how long do users wait?
  • How does the new design impact funnel metrics and where are users experiencing friction?
  • Where are users experiencing errors? Are they on form fields, 404 pages, modals, or elsewhere? Why and what are the issues?
  • Which user cohorts on product pages actually see the new sticky navigation design? And what is the engagement rate for each cohort? Which selectors are receiving engagement and does this functionality help users throughout the purchase process?
  • Are people who contact customer support eventually purchasing from us?
  • Which products are out of stock and can our product/content team substitute to keep up with demand?

While some basic questions are answerable by using Google Analytics, many, like the ones listed above, are not, especially if granular in nature. Because FullStory provides a retroactive view of how people engage with almost anything on your website, as well as offering robust integrations with your tech stack, it can deliver incredibly powerful insights to creative teams who are responsible for continually adapting to customer needs and expectations by uncovering relevant CX insights.

Uncover Strategic, Creative Insights for EXO with FullStory

While creative teams haven’t traditionally relied on data to inform their work, it’s becoming more important than ever to keep up with consumers’ demand for a personalized experience. Therefore, it only makes sense to empower those who are responsible for delivering the end experience with data that will help them create meaningful campaigns.

As you can now see, digital experience intelligence tools like FullStory are designed to empower these teams with enterprise level insights that can help move your brand, creative, and CX/UX teams forward in today’s competitive climate. Armed with powerful quantitative and qualitative insights, experience optimization is attainable.