Hello & welcome to the latest edition of What’s CEXy! 🌟 

Fun fact, I pronounce it as “What’s SEXY”. Not sure if you do, too?

This week’s newsletter is an absolute BANGER … 💥💣

Contentsquare recently released their 2023 Digital Experience Benchmarks Report which has aggregated digital insights from 35 billion sessions, across 2942 different websites & 9 industries.

As always, I’ve done the heavy lifting so you can sit back, relax and enjoy the read whilst you have your morning coffee or afternoon tea ☕️.

I hope these insights will get you thinking about what you can do to stay ahead of the digital curve. Check them out below 👇👇

2023 Digital Experience Benchmark Report! 🏆

#1 - Optimising “Search Bars” Is An Activity Every Business Should Be Focusing On 🔎

The below visual intrigued me … a lot!

Put simply, it highlights how Search pages receive the 2nd highest volume of activity but only consumes a small proportion of session time in a converted session.

This demonstrates how a strong search engine (which surfaces relevant information for the customer) is critical to a successful conversion. You have a very small window to get it right for the customer - make it count!

My recommendation: Leverage the previous search history of customers on your website to optimise content & click paths for future experiences. You will see immediate ROI!

#2 - Page Speed Matters! Longer page loads lead to higher bounce rates and fewer sessions 📈

As you can see below, when customers are forced to wait for pages that
take more than 2 seconds to load, bounce rates reach 49%, which means that nearly 1 in every 2 visitors “bounce” i.e. leave the website without getting what they desire.

#3 - Mobile First, But Desktop Shouldn’t Be Forgotten 🖥️

As you can see below, mobile website traffic grew YoY from 63.2% to 64.7%. Whilst this reinforces the importance of ensuring website design & content is mobile friendly, desktop traffic shouldn’t be ignored (keep scrolling 👇) …

As you can see in the visual below, certain industries still have a heavy reliance on desktop traffic (e.g. financial services, software):

In addition to the variance in web traffic by industry, conversion rates are also substantially higher on desktop, across all industries.

Finally, desktop visitors average 69 seconds time spent per page whilst mobile visitors average 34 seconds per page.

Moral of the story? Don’t sleep on desktop traffic 👇 👇

#4 - Return VS New Visitors - Show Them Something Different! 😡

The below visual highlights that over 50% of website traffic comes from return visitors. Unfortunately, organisations are not taking advantage of this data - they’re still showing the same generic content to return visitors.

A few tips from me:

• For return visitors, ask yourself - how can you use data from their previous interaction to personalise the content they see this time?

  
  

• As a bare minimum, you should be reminding return visitors of their previous search history / pages viewed. Make it easy for them to start off where they left the last time.

  
  

• If the customer logs in at any point throughout this journey, use their history to deliver personalised communication across all channels - outbound email, SMS, contact centre, self-service portals etc.

#5 - It takes anywhere between 23-26 page views for a user to convert into a customer 👩🏻‍🌾 ✔️

Converting sessions see 5x more page views compared to a typical visit. This means that organisations must be very strategic with the different click paths, CTAs & offers that are surfaced to customers throughout their digital journey.

As can be seen with the below visual, converting customers typically navigate through an array of different page categories to achieve their end goal. User journeys are non-linear and often inconsistent. This reinforces the importance of delivering 1:1 personalisation for users, curating content that is relevant to the intent that they have shown throughout this journey, and previous ones:

#6 - Bounce Rates Rose To 49% 😳. This means that 1 in every 2 customers will leave your website after a single page view …

Bounce Rate = total number of one-page visits divided by the total number of entries to a website.

In 2022, bounce rates rose from 47% to 49%. This is generally a strong indication that a) the content is not relevant or b) the offer did not meet the expectations of the customer:

The problem with “bouncing visitors” is that they are hard to retrieve. Businesses will typically spend millions of dollars in digital advertising trying to attract customers, just for them to leave after one page!

My recommendation: Businesses should be thinking about ways to reactivate abandoned journeys. Journey orchestration tools like MXO can begin to understand when customers drop out of certain journeys, re-activating these customers via other mediums - email, SMS, social etc. If you don’t know who the customer is, you can use this session to personalise the next session they have on this channel - there’s always a way you can do something!

#7 - Paid Search (SEM) Is The Most Productive Paid Digital Marketing Channel 🔎

If the primary goal of your paid digital marketing is to drive conversions on your website, Paid Search appears to be the way to go.

As you can see below, it is the only paid channel where conversion share outweighs the session share. This means that paid search is delivering a greater conversion ROI, compared to other paid channels.

These numbers may need to be taken with a grain of salt, as not all marketing efforts are focused on bottom of funnel conversion activities. With that being said, it is definitely worth considering paid search as a conversion tactic, if you aren’t already doing so …

Final Thoughts 🤔

• This report reinforces the need for PERSONALISATION across the user journey. Attention spans are decreasing (session durations fell 7.5% overall in 2022) whilst the amount of pages it takes to convert are increasing. The only way that you’re going to keep users engaged on your digital channels is by ensuring the content & journey is relevant to their needs. If you’re not thinking about how to personalise every customer journey, you’re falling behind the 🎱.

  
  

• More customers are bouncing early in their digital journey. Explore omnichannel orchestration tools like MXO which can help you re-activate these journeys across owned & paid channels - email, SMS, social etc.

  
  

• Get the fundamentals right. Page speed & search bars are critical to a great digital experience. Make sure your digital properties are built on concrete, not quicksand.

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