Whether your visitors are connected or anonymous, to optimize their experience, rely first on your media
It is a fact: the “user journey” is becoming more and more difficult to map. And the GDPR further complicates the situation. This is all the more reason to focus on media consumption data and analysis.
“What if we created a personal space on the website to invite visitors to log in and better track their actions?” This question is increasingly raised during brainstorming sessions dedicated to website redesign. Not surprisingly, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), which imposes rigorous consent collection, has sometimes blinded marketers and degraded the user experience. As a result, the analysis of the famous “customer journey” (or “user journey”), has become much more difficult, to the point of opening the debate on the decline of “Customer Journey Mapping”.
In practice, monitoring this path was already difficult before the GDPR came into force. The tracking of an offline user is based on a cookie, a file associated with a browser. However, this “tracer” has known limitations. A visitor who, from their smartphone, clicks on a link within the Facebook app will open a browser integrated within the app. Each time this user returns to this same site later using another browser, from this smartphone or another device, he/she will represent many “new” users.
Difficult to obtain a reconciled view of the user journey
In short, on the sole basis of a cookie, reconciling the paths between devices, or even within a single device, represents a technical and legal challenge, which the GDPR has further complicated. Whether it is a question of analyzing the journey on a site, carrying out A/B Testing, or orchestrating advertising retargeting, each use of the data collected must now be subject to explicit consent. Hence the pop-ins that have invaded our screens, on apps and browsers. Hence, too, this interest marketers have for creating personal spaces which, by authenticating users, allow them to have a certain readability of the route. Still, it is necessary to have the means to make a sufficient promise to the user in order to justify such a login. Not so easy….
How can you maximize the experience of users whose journey is becoming increasingly difficult to map? The answer is obvious: based on the content they actually consume. And the richer the taxonomy of this content, the more relevant the content is. What are the most popular formats (texts, images, videos)? Is content that explicitly mentions the brand’s products (tutorials, for example) more popular than others? How does the video completion rate evolve according to the personalities featured or the technicality of the content?
Each asset categorization element represents a potential analytical dimension. This taxonomy, managed within a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, represents an underestimated pool of information. While this information is not enough to visualize a user experience in an orderly manner, it does give a fairly accurate idea of the content to be used to capture the attention of an audience through their interests, moments of life, etc.
Compare and test media performance with DXM
In other words, where cookies today provide only a very fragmented view of the journey, media consumption provides a very qualitative understanding of the audience’s expectations and interests. Especially since, even in the constrained context of the GDPR, contextual data can be collected and associated with this media consumption data. Enough to allow a retailer to analyze the impact, for example, of video on an average basket.
The objective is not only to “observe” the performance of the various assets, but to maintain optimization cycles to ensure an increasingly engaging experience. This is the role of a DXM (Digital eXperience Management) solution that, at the crossroads of content and context, is able to adapt media. Coupling the richness of media taxonomy with some contextual information – origin of the visit, device used, time of consultation, page from which the content is consumed, format and duration of this consultation – is already enough to feed variations to test asset performance and maximize the user experience.
Discover how our customers use the Wedia solution
Within its DXM module, Wedia combines Content Scoring and Data Visualisation to facilitate the analysis of media consumption data. And, for once, the data here is really exhaustive, since the DAM, which supports the DXM, centralizes the content. Good news for marketing managers in charge of Brand Content, Content Marketing or User Experience: if the data required to know the “customer journey” becomes difficult to collect, those related to media consumption are just waiting… to be exploited.
