A strategic marketer’s principle objective is to recognize patterns, coalesce, and structure a multitude of rapidly emerging trends into a framework of identity and growth. Within a fast-evolving environment, this can be akin to juggling swords while getting dressed. Two key trends that have accelerated to the front of a marketer’s cognitive queue recently are privacy and technology. This article looks at how centralized website intelligence can solve the issues that occur at the intersection of these two topics.
While privacy and technology are hardly new considerations, their importance for marketers has increased significantly.
In a recent survey by Visitor Analytics, over two-thirds of respondents (70%) said that they believed that data privacy would impact their work more moving forwards, with two of the biggest concerns being the sourcing of new tech (19%) and fines related to legacy solutions (17%).
This is hardly surprising given the huge increase in GDPR-related fines, a potential EU-wide ban on Google Analytics, and the invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield.
This is also made more complex by the astonishingly rapid growth in the prevalence of such solutions, with a reported 5000% increase in martech over the past 10 years.
Marketing leaders are constantly faced with the challenge of determining which technology to adopt, with cost, compliance, onboarding complexity, time-to-value, and resource availability some of the key considerations.
Quick decisions are an absolute necessity and, in equal measure, a recipe for budget drain.
On the flipside, such decisions are increasingly occurring at the departmental intersection of marketing and legal, resulting in cumbersome processes.
So, what is centralized website intelligence and why is it the solution?
In a separate Visitor Analytics’ survey, the biggest perceived challenges with regards technology were the ability to fully utilize all features (28%) and the unification of data (22%), while privacy (20%) was considered a key influencing factor.
So, in short, while the problems relate to overabundance, privacy bottlenecks, and decentralized data, the solution is centralized, privacy-first technology.
When it comes to websites, the most common tech terminology is analytics. However, as part of this martech avalanche, an additional two key pillars have emerged – user behavior and user feedback, with these three pillars in combination forming website intelligence.
While the default analytics approach via Google has faced increased scrutiny – both due to data privacy and user experience – other products have emerged as competition.
At the same time, innumerable solutions have been developed to address new demands in the two additional intelligence pillars – including heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, polls, and chatbots.
This increased provision has resulted in some of the aforementioned issues, however, and this is where centralized website intelligence comes in.
By marrying the features, functionalities, and crucially, data, across the website intelligence spectrum, marketers are able to analyze and improve their websites from a holistic viewpoint, reduce the amount of new tech, save time and money, and better utilize the solutions at their disposal. You may even be able to put a smile on your DPO’s face.
