People find websites hard to navigate, but their creators think they are easy to use. How will this be solved?
Heap has released its 2021 Digital Experience Insights Report, and the results are “disconcerting”. That is what the report’s authors say, in any case.
The report examines anonymized data from hundreds of customers and thousands of user funnels in order to quantify the information teams are missing. The whitepaper aims to find out why nly 24% of digital experience owners say they have full insight (75-100%) into the user journeys on their site. It also looks at why only 16% of digital experience owners say they know why most customers drop off their site.
The report is based on a national online survey of 1,000 US employed consumers and 200 full time product managers/team members, ages 18+.Heap conducted the survey in partnership with Propeller Insights between June 1-3, 2021.
Heap found that 43% of consumers believe the majority of websites on the internet are not designed around the needs of the end-user. This stands in sharp contrast to the 95% of product teams who say it’s “somewhat” or “very easy” for users to navigate their site. That begs the question: why would so many digital experience builders believe their sites are easy to use, when users clearly don’t find them so?
Examining why funnels fail
The Heap report is built around the concept of the digital marketing “funnel”. The digital marketing funnel definition is a framework to help define, understand, and follow the different stages buyers pass through during the customer life cycle.
The results of the report indicate that the gap in opinions could be due to the product teams not having the right data available to them. For example, only 24% of product teams say they have full insight into the user journeys on their site. Even worse, only 16% of respondents say they know why most (>75%) customers drop off their site.
The report found that 38% of funnels are missing a key step, resulting in over 6% unknown dropoff. In addition, 12% of funnels mis-identify the step with the highest dropoff, leading teams to prioritize the wrong investments. And half (50%) of all funnel steps include more than 5 actions, which cuts their conversion rates in half.
“These numbers are truly the tip of the iceberg,” Heap conclude. “As we continue to apply data science to the data captured in our Data Foundation, we hope to be able to even more precisely pinpoint the information that digital experience teams are not seeing,” they added.
This, they say, will give those teams “better recommendations about how to give themselves that visibility into the customer experience.”