Enter: connected Website Intelligence Workflows. A Key Mechanism in the Customer Experience
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Much like business intelligence is comprised of the strategies and technologies companies use to monitor and analyze their business`s overall health and performance, website intelligence refers to the processes and platforms that help teams track their websites health and performance across a holistic set of categories and metrics.
Website intelligence is not limited to one aspect of your site`s success; it encompasses numerous website-related disciplines that work in tandem to provide maximum business results. It includes:
Often, businesses struggle to monitor and manage all of these varying aspects of their sites in a streamlined, coordinated manner. There are many platforms out there that help website teams monitor individual aspects of their site - and, increasingly, these tools offer integrations and API`s to help connect workflows and data across different tools. This creates an ecosystem of related processes and datasets across a number of platforms. For marketers and digital leaders, learning how to harness the website intelligence ecosystem can help build new efficiencies and greater effectiveness into their digital growth strategies.
Defining Website Intelligence
A brand’s website is a multi-headed beast. There are numerous teams and platforms involved and, often, a lack of a coherent system for managing the wide array of factors that contribute to the channel’s overall success. Website intelligence aims to help tame the beast and keep cross-functional website teams within an organization better aligned on their inter-connected digital efforts.
Website intelligence refers to the strategies and technologies that help digital teams track their websites’ health and performance across a wide array of goals and metrics. It helps provide a holistic view of their website’s overall condition, aligns cross-functional website staff on priorities and timelines, and enables businesses to efficiently address areas in need of improvement. Website intelligence encompasses the processes and tools used for monitoring various aspects of your website, such as:
Why is website intelligence important today?
With the decline of third-party cookies in the online advertising space, global economic uncertainty, and budget and staffing cuts happening across organizations this year, many digital teams are reprioritizing organic marketing channels (like their website) as the need for more cost-effective ways to drive business growth becomes clear.
Ensuring your website is poised to drive growth is no easy feat. Numerous departments within an organization have to work together to ensure a site can reach its full potential, including everyone from marketers and developers to SEOs, UX designers, content strategists, accessibility professionals, product teams, and the C-suite. For large-scale sites and organizations, this becomes exponentially more complicated to manage.
To succeed in this key organic marketing channel in 2023, businesses need to have a full view of all of the elements that contribute to their websites’ health and performance and would benefit by having a strong Digital Operations structure in place to unite cross-functional website teams. Which is to say, businesses need to understand how to take full advantage of the website intelligence ecosystem.
How Website Intelligence supports the modern customer experience
Marketers are no longer just developing a message and choosing which medium to disseminate it on; they’re responsible for the customer’s overall experience as they discover the brand, interact with its messages, and make purchasing decisions.
The ‘mechanism’ dimension of the customer experience marries form and function. Users aren’t just interacting with a static message anymore. Marketing mechanisms, like your website, offer a host of new levers marketers can pull when crafting their strategies and provide more control to marketers hoping to ensure a positive interaction between consumers and their brand.
The various ‘levers’ that can be adjusted on a website influence its overall performance as a marketing channel. Marketers need to consider not only the look and feel of their site’s design and the content that appears there, but also usability, discoverability, and experiential elements like site speed, interactivity, accessibility, SEO, CRO, and UX best practices.
All of these website elements influence how a customer experiences and understands your brand and business offering. These varying elements work on your website can have a major impact on marketing and business goals.
For example, a one-second delay in mobile load times can reduce conversion rates, even by up to 20%, according to Mary Ellen Coe, president of Google Customer Solutions. Elsewhere, in a Vodafone case study, a 31% improvement in the website experience metric known as “Largest Contentful Paint” (also referred to as LCP; part of Google’s Core Web Vitals and a search engine ranking factor) was tied to an 8% increase in sales.
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Website intelligence systems help businesses stay abreast of the myriad issues that can impact their site’s success. The data gathered and monitored through website intelligence platforms help align the marketing leaders who care about conversions and sales with the developers, SEO`s, and UX designers who are tasked with improving specific site attributes like load time, crawlability, indexability, and Core Web Vitals across the brand’s most crucial marketing mechanism - its website.
Building Connected Website Intelligence Workflows
Having a connected workflow for auditing, monitoring, solving, and reporting website issues can be a game changer when it comes to improving efficiency and collaboration across the many individuals that are involved in a website’s overall performance.
The cross-functional teams that work on your website will have varying needs, for example:
Marketers: Need a high-level view of their website’s overall health and performance - and how it contributes to broader business and brand goals. They need to track traffic, customer acquisition sources, and conversions from the website. They also need to ensure their site’s content is optimized for search engines (SEO) and primed to drive visitors to convert (CRO) - as well as ensuring a positive customer experience is in place via elements like site speed, accessibility, and UX. For businesses operating in multiple geographies or with numerous subsidiaries, marketers may need to track these issues across multiple website domains or subdomains.
SEO`s: Need the ability to analyze aspects of their website’s technical health, backlinks, and content and keyword optimization in great depth. This includes analyzing keywords, content, and a host of technical SEO factors like indexability, crawlability, Core Web Vitals, site structure, HTTP status code availability, redirects, and more. SEO teams need to track trends in their site’s organic search performance, be able to identify and hone in on the exact URLs and site elements that are causing issues, and communicate these needs to developers, marketers, and leadership teams to ensure SEO problems are addressed in a timely manner.
Developers: Need to be sure their code works as intended, of course, and need to be aware of how the site and code changes they are implementing may affect users, SEO, and business goals. They need methods to check for quality assurance issues on both the staging site as well as the live site in order to ensure the code they publish will not negatively impact site traffic, usability, and business aims$ Developers need to be quickly (ideally automatically) alerted of critical issues that may break interrelated third party plug-ins or tools that rely on the website and need to ensure efficient ticketing requests and prioritization methods to get their work done.
Accessibility & Compliance Specialists: Need visibility into how well their website’s structure, code, and third-party plugins adhere to legal guidelines for privacy / GDPR / cookie compliance, security and digital accessibility best practices.
Product: For cloud-based SaaS products in particular, the operation of the website plays a major role in how their product operates and serves users. They need insights into overall quality assurance, UX, and user behavior.
UX & Design: Designers and UX professionals need to ensure their designs are operating as intended on the live website. They benefit from insights into user behavior, usability, site speed, Core Web Vitals, and more. Many UX professionals also tackle elements of digital accessibility and need insights into how well their sites are complying with guidelines and best practices.
C-Suite: The website often serves as the primary digital ‘face of the business’ and contributes to customer acquisition, lead generation, brand recognition, discoverability, consumer sentiment, and retention - to name a few! While business leadership teams may not need to know the technical intricacies of a website’s inner workings the same way that developers or SEO`s do, they benefit from having a high level view of the site’s health and performance. Access to overviews, business intelligence integrations, and easily digestible reports are key for nontechnical, commercial leaders.
Shared knowledge across these teams, seamless integrations across platforms and processes, and flexibility in reporting to ensure they have easy ways of accessing the data that matters most to them can help build efficiencies, align website projects, and enable better business-wide prioritization.
Website work is never a ‘one and done’ task. In-depth audits of key areas are necessary, but so is ongoing monitoring, trend tracking, updates and improvements, risk prevention, and reporting to tie these efforts into broader business aims and competitive landscape evaluations.
Flexibility & Composability
Alongside this shift to interconnected platforms, tool flexibility has also been a growing trend. WeDevTeam (Nexa) is offering more building-block features for composing bespoke solutions and flexible reporting options that map to a business’s unique needs and individual use cases rather than requiring marketers rely on out-of-the-box solutions.
For example, there are robust options for creating custom segmentations and custom creation that allow users to flexibly align the full power of the platform’s underlying website crawler to specific business needs, in addition to providing access to its built-in features and reporting options.
These customization options, alongside an API and a suite of integrations with business intelligence (BI) and developer platforms, help tie data from website crawls to various business needs and allow for more tailored control of how the platform is used.
Tasks accomplished with WeDevTeam (Nexa) connected website intel workflow:
Unlocking Website Intelligence Workflows For Smarter Decisions. As you take hold of your digital thread in 2023 and accelerate digital transformation in your organization, look to WeDevTeam (Nexa) as a partner for key intelligence and capabilities in your ongoing success.