Technology never stands still for long, and the winning brands evaluate every challenge and opportunity as a potential for further expansion, education, and improvement. As changes to consumer behavior continue to accelerate, the tools we use to measure that behavior face pressure to keep up. The definition of how we measure and understand success isn’t changing, but rather maturing as the digital age pushes forever onward and the myriad of customer touchpoints built over the years evolve into a more cohesive and ubiquitous experience. As the most efficient strategy continues to evolve, the best tools for the job become even more critical. When roadblocks and unexpected challenges simply come with the business, a comprehensive and holistic tool helps stave off silos and allows you to see your user as a whole person.
Experience Consistency and Unification Through Tool Selection
The industry is moving toward, and has been embracing for some time now, an increased emphasis on presenting a polished and unified experience. Users don’t want a generic and patchworked experience: they want one that is unique to them, but also consistent across platforms. Delivering such an experience requires a fully integrated tech stack and measuring the experience demands analytics tools that follow the same pattern.
At the center of your unified experience is the customer. A single customer. A single person. The central idea is to treat your customer as the same person no matter where you interact with them. All their likes, dislikes, past behaviors, and other preferences inform how you treat them from one moment to the next, from one platform to the next. If your unified customer experience takes a 360-degree view of your customers, your analytics must be able to do the same.
Anyone can look at website traffic from any tool, but seeing the whole picture is what lets you make the types of decisions that ultimately bring value.
Rather than using all kinds of tools with all kinds of different data sources analyzing things differently in different places and resulting in siloed versions of your customers, it’s vital to use a solution that allows you to see your user as a whole person. Using a collection of separate tools makes it even harder to produce a cohesive experience when the data foundation of your understanding is fragmented and siloed. By keeping the process within one ecosystem, you keep all the data in front of you rather than fragmenting it across multiple tools and bogging down your entire process.
Keeping operations within one tool also makes maturing your analytics easier. Anyone can look at website traffic from any tool, but seeing the whole picture is what lets you make the types of decisions that ultimately bring value. Expansive tools designed for all-encompassing experiences allow for comprehensive and familiar methods without limiting future growth, and the core foundation of quality scales with your needs rather than limiting your future potential.
Price to Time Ratio
The idea of minimizing expenses while accomplishing your goals is an achievable reality, but finding the balance in practice is anything but easy. Multiple combinations of tools will all accomplish the same task, but each method comes with pros and cons. The high price point of solutions like Adobe Experience Platform may intimidate some and push them to adopt a patchwork approach, but this approach is unlikely to save money in the long run when you consider everything that comes after the initial purchase.
Don’t let the upfront costs of a proper solution scare you into accepting an unnecessarily complex web of less comprehensive alternatives.
With the end of Google Optimize and Universal Analytics 360 approaching, many businesses are currently reevaluating their preferred tools. Google Analytics 4 may be the more economic option, but the time and personnel investment required to achieve the same results as before is an unappealing prospect. Don’t let the upfront costs of a proper solution scare you into accepting an unnecessarily complex web of less comprehensive alternatives.
Endless Educational Expansions
Consistent and stable don’t have to mean stagnant. Many businesses learn and build upon tools for years only to have changes disrupt their workflow. The sunsetting of Google Optimize is one such shift that has many organizations reevaluating their tool selection. Adapting to change is part of experience creation, but it’s hard to maintain experiences for users when external forces upend your foundation. Feature updates and modernizations are one thing, but requiring major platform migrations is undue stress businesses don’t need. Conferences, educational modules, support systems, new features, and a good foundation to grow are essential qualities of experience creation tools.
Perfect Time to Learn More – Your Next Steps
BlastX is always on the cutting edge of experience cultivation, and part of that means understanding the tools in the industry. This includes participating in Adobe Summit, so BlastX and other leaders in the field can gather to share and learn. Talking shop with your peers is a fantastic opportunity that can spur new ideas and innovation. If you’re interested in attending this year, use the BlastX discount code, S23SPMK, at registration.
Already have your Adobe Summit ’23 tickets? Request a 1:1 meeting with a BlastX expert to discuss the best tools your organization can use to reach your experience goals.