eCommerce websites have become extremely interactive in the last few years, enabling customers to have a new very deep engagements with the products they are willing to buy. This makes the most common technologies used for monitoring and analysis of customer behaviour, like Page Views and Webhooks, a bit out of date. SALESmanago introduces a new technology named Semantic Webhook which translates the complex customer behaviour to a specific customer preferences. Semantic Webhooks enable eCommerce operators define a real customer interest and probability of buying certain products.
“Most popular Marketing Automation solutions were created 10-20 years ago and even when everybody is claiming they are customer engagement platforms, Page Views and Webhooks remain for them the dinosaurs for measuring customer interaction with eCommerce websites. And this way of interaction has completely changed and we all needed a new way of measuring this new behaviour” says Konrad Pawlus, SALESmanago founder and CTO. “Semantic Webhook is an idea we came up recently at our R&D team and it helps not just to track website events but allows us to add specific meaning to these events. This eventually helps us to understand customer behaviour in a much better way.”
Why do we need more than just Page View or Webhook?
A pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file (web page) of an Internet site1.
A webhook in web development is a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page, or web application, with custom callbacks2.
These days we see huge shift towards Single-page application and websites heavily utilising Javascript UX and HTML5 frameworks in order to provide more interactive user experience (Javascript is a way of making web page dynamic).
Websites that provide a superior interactive web design experience to users, generally, have more traffic, better user retention, and higher conversion rates than websites with a poor interactive experience. In other words, a well designed interactive website provides a more meaningful and engaging user experience.
Even using Webhooks we cannot cope with complex interactive eCommerce websites. Why? First of all because of lack of proper structure – Webhook data in current Marketing Automation solutions is simple – in most cases it is just a piece of text (string in a bit more technical nomenclature). But, what is even more important, Webhook lacs semantics – in simple words – it has no meaning for Marketing Automation algorithms.
So, what more interactive user experience means for Marketing Automation and user profiling?
Let’s take a quick look at a sample product page from Walmart online store:
As you can see, user interaction with just the first part of product page goes way beyond opening it. On the picture above you can see 11 touch points where user can zoom product image, read more details about it, switch photo or even watch movie of KitchenAid Mixer.
And it is not everything. Photo is interactive as well:
By moving the mouse you can see magnified part of product.It is already a lot of, but there is more – user can scroll down the page and take interactive product tour:
Or even read product manuals:
You can check this page yourself here.
Why is this so important?
Imaging user browsing online eCommerce website like the one above. In classic, approach you would see in customers profile products they just viewed, it would probably show as well as many times product was viewed. But this is history now.Relaying just on Page View is very limited – you are losing a huge amount of information about user – and remember – data is more valuable than oil right now (so you are losing money). More than that, you are relying on not fully accurate data, with classic Page View approach you would see 3 mixers visited by user, which one is the one user is most interested? You do not know. You need to measure more to answer this question. Certainly if user checks different product photos, reads more details about it or compares with others, his interest is much higher than with product which he opens and leaves without any additional interactions.
The solution
SALESmanago is ahead of changes described above and introduces new, redesigned monitoring engine. Main change is focus on user interactions with the website instead of just monitoring pages visited (page views).
Core idea behind new monitoring solution is to record user interactions with Javascript rather than only automatically report page views, which is too limited for modern ecommerce websites.
This approach gives both: well defined structure for product interactions and known semantics. So we can now react in more appropriate way with automation, build much more meaningful and rich profiles, but what is even more important – we can build much better machine learning solutions – because data now has semantic meaning!
With new monitoring we are introducing fine grain reporting of customer actions which they might take on web shop. This improves understanding of customer needs and allows to build much more relevant profiles and offer.
Implementation of new monitoring is very straight forward and requires only basic Javascript skills.
See it in action
We prepared simple demo page for new monitoring module. You might play with it and see your profile build while you interact with demo shop. You can find this page here.
Here is a short instruction for demo page:
- Category of products
- Products in selected category
- Shopping cart interactions – buy and clear
- Change product colour
- Read product details
- Read entire product description
- Add to favourite list
Of course this is demo only – production solution allows to report more events of different types and customise all parameters.
Conclusion
According to an Accenture study, 79% of enterprise executives agree that companies that do not embrace Big Data will lose their competitive position and could face extinction. Even more, 83%, have pursued Big Data projects to seize a competitive edge.
At SALESmanago we are working on many projects bringing marketing and the role of marketer to the next level, always trying to be ahead of the market and competition.
On such a competitive landscape of eCommerce shops, not utilising as much data about your customers as possible will be a killer to your business. We can help you with this!
Do not lose data anymore! Know your customer better. Send me an email to learn how we can improve your customers profiles and results of your eCommerce: konrad.pawlus@salesmanago.com
Follow
