Experience Analytics for eCommerce Platform Migrations
So you have decided that it is time for an eCommerce platform migration. Everyone is excited about the new capabilities that comes from upgrading the technology behind your webstore. You will be able to build better user experiences, effectively integrate with more systems, have a more scalable environment, create more personalized content, and do all of the things you’ve ever dreamed of (I may be slightly exaggerating)!
The problem is: reaching your end-goal first involves a nightmarish amount of work and risk. Unsuccessful eCommerce platform migrations with poor URL redirects can result in a double-digit percentage drop in organic traffic and improper integrations can lead to problems with fulfillment and customer service.
The good news is that newer technologies can be leveraged to better mitigate the risks involved in the move. Specifically, digital experience analytics platforms can be utilized to increase site revenue after the migration and address unforeseen gaps. Here are 3 benefits of using digital experience analytics during a platform migration:
1. Validating Improvements and Uncovering New Problems
After a platform migration, your site is essentially brand new to both you and your customers. That means not only have you addressed common issues that you had with your last site, but you potentially have created new issues that you are completely unaware of.
There is no better way to understand where customers are struggling or encountering bugs than witnessing them interact with your site first-hand. By watching session replays of actual customers browsing and buying on your new platform, you have the ability to validate site improvements and uncover new detractors to conversion.
2. Identify the Financial Impact of Change
As noted above, after an eCommerce platform migration, it is like starting from scratch. Your data and analytics from your previous site are no longer the baseline for expected performance or potential issues. Unanticipated issues will arise and when they do how will you know which to prioritize?
Having a digital experience hub that can identify, quantify by financial impact, and prioritize these net new issues is crucial to not getting quickly overwhelmed and buried in errors. Your teams’ time is valuable and it is critical that you use it wisely when making website and mobile improvements. The last thing you want to do is prioritize site fixes and modifications that will not move the needle on your KPIs.
Post-migration you need to understand which errors or bugs are hitting you the hardest in terms of conversion rates and what to prioritize first in order to increase revenue immediately.
3. Recover Faster
Inevitably, no matter how much planning you do before the replatform, there will be issues to improve after launch—both expected and unexpected. Even when you use Google’s recommendations for website migrations, there will be a brief period of organic traffic decline due to Google’s bots needing to recrawl and reindex your site.
During this period of decline, it is important for businesses to identify what URLs are missing and what page errors exist. With the right predictive analytics and intelligent system in place, your business will be able to more quickly catch these issues and resolve them. By lowering the time to identify and resolve these issues, your business will be able to recapture revenue more quickly, provide a better experience to users, and rebuild organic SEO more quickly.
Visibility into user experience is a key component to a successful eCommerce platform migration. It is critical to ask yourself, “Do I truly know which user journeys are working and which ones are most important to fix during this transition?” A smart digital experience analytics system will help you find these answers and better prepare your organization for the move. It will also mitigate the time it takes for you to identify and fix the issues that arise from the migration. The end results will be greater revenue gain from the move, less customer service complaints, and quicker recovering of organic SEO after the switch.
