Data-Driven Websites and How to Leverage Them

What is a data driven website? Well it’s exactly what it sounds like. Data-driven websites are websites that are created and keep evolving using data. An example of a data-driven site might be, using your desired target market information to create a website that tends to their needs. This type of website uses all the data they have to design an impactful website. This data could be quantitative like the number of visitors to your website or qualitative like what location people tend to access your website from. Even if you think you don’t have enough data to create a superb website, you might be surprised to learn that there are actually many sources from which you can boost your data. For instance, there is onsite data (sourced from your own website analytics software), third-party data, social data, and more. Today most websites use data to create their websites, as it is what drives their effectiveness and efficiency. Hence this article will go through the benefits of data-driven websites and how to implement them so you can leverage your data to not just enhance your website, but also augment your business.

Benefits:

Creates a Base

Have you ever gotten stuck and not known where to start on a project? This is something we all experience every now and then. For instance, it happened to me as I was writing this article. However, after conducting my research on this topic and planning the content of the article, the words began to flow without a problem. The same thing is applied to website development, which is why it is important to implement data when creating one. For example, if I were to ask you to build a website for a small retail store with basic information like their name, what they do, and what they want, you would still want/need more information to build an effective website. You would want to know about their target market and their messaging.

Data-driven websites take this a step further and you are not just building one with the information previously mentioned, but also using data like what users in that target market click on, what calls them into action, when and where they visit the website, how do they share content on social media and much more. Ultimately, leveraging data allows you to understand exactly what you need to start with, instead of starting from scratch. In fact, it would also reduce your chance of error, as your website was built based on proven facts and hypothesis, instead of assuming something will work. Of course, it is important that one deters from just copying existing competitors, as you want to build something unique that would differentiate you from them.

Identify Customer Journey

Another key benefit of data-driven websites is that you are always tracking the activity of your visitors. This means that you are not just continuously gathering data to improve your website, but you are also able to map out your customer’s journey. In other words, you can see how they explore your website, and that led them to make a purchase or do some other action which we might consider a “conversion”. This information allows you to further improve your website and your business strategy in order to better reach your customers with an enhanced customer journey. For example, you could tell where your customer came from, and hence focus your resources on that source of visitors.

Measure and Analyze Your Marketing Tactics

This takes us to another benefit, which is the fact that your marketing team would have additional ways to analyze and provide returns on investment (ROIs) on their marketing operations. To illustrate, you will be able to gather information like where users came from and what drove them to certain actions. Marketers will use this information to understand which one of their strategies is most effective and efficient, prompting them to focus more on that strategy. Additionally, this not only makes your marketing team’s job easier but also gives you more assurance that what you are doing is working. For instance, as a marketer, I have worked on projects in which business owners were not convinced of the impact of the marketing tactics until we were able to show the actual numbers (number of visitors to the site, number of actions taken by those visitors, etc.). As you can see, by implementing data-driven websites, you will be able to understand what tactics work. You will also be gathering information and analyzing it to further improve current marketing/business tactics.

Implementation:

Obviously, the main way to implement data-driven websites is to gather the data needed first. As mentioned before, there are many ways you can learn more about your target market, from qualitative and quantitative generalize data to social media data. In fact, you could even conduct your own primary research, conducting initial interviews or surveys to learn more about your target market. All in all, this should initially help you start your website, to which you would then need to integrate website analytics software so you can continually collect information on your website and target market. Some examples would be Google Analytics and other innovative augmentations like heat maps that allow you to see exactly where your users click on and how their cursor moves.

Once you have your website set up, and data being collected you can begin to truly develop a data-driven website. You will use this information that you are collecting to create a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an educated guess of what you think will happen depending on the change of a variable in your website. For example, one could hypothesize that a website will get more conversions if a “call to action” is placed earlier on the page, as more people will scroll through it rather than if it was at the bottom. You would then use your website and data to determine the truth of that hypothesis and update your website accordingly. For example, creating two types of designs you want to test, and conducting A/B testing on them, which is basically comparing their results against each other. The whole idea of the data-driven website is ultimately to conduct continuous experiments to determine what works and what doesn’t, hence allowing you to constantly evolve your website to have the most effective and efficient one in place.

Boost Your Impact:

All in all, something that all the previous benefits have in common is that data-driven websites ultimately improve your website’s impact on your business. For instance, it can enhance your customer journey, enhance your marketing and business strategies, in addition to many other aspects like boosting conversions. To illustrate, data-driven websites are great for e-commerce websites as the data they gather and analyze helps them design a website that maximizes their goal of encouraging people to purchase on their website. For example, companies like Amazon ultimately use data on complementary purchases and decide what other products to recommend based on the customer’s current shopping cart. In short, data-driven websites are a key way of achieving good web design .

Here at Jonajo we are experts in creating data driven websites. Between our incredibly talented design team, our diligent engineers and our marketing team’s expertise in strategy we have all areas of the website creation process covered. We are happy to lend a hand to anyone getting started in this process. Get in contact with us today to see how we can help you.