FullStory Agency Partner: Why Swanky Recommends This DXI Solution as an Essential Part of Your CRO Tech Stack

At Swanky, we take conversion rate optimisation (CRO) seriously. We want to do it “right”. Being named CRO Agency of the Year for two consecutive years – in the UK in 2021 and then in Europe in 2022 – is testament to this.

As you would expect, our process is data-led. A rigorous and sophisticated approach to CRO, one that delivers a strong return on investment for our clients, requires access to granular and insightful data to guide our direction of travel and inform our hypotheses.

Some data is readily available using free and inexpensive tools available in the typical ecommerce tech stack. These include Google Analytics, customer relationship management solutions, business intelligence (BI) tools, customer service platforms and heatmapping software.

However, a time-intensive blend of each of these data sources is required in order to verify hypotheses.

As you begin to take your optimisation program more seriously, you will need to become more efficient with your time. You’ll also require greater access to user experience (UX) data to answer the increasingly complex questions you will have about your customers’ interactions with your website.

This is where a Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) solution, such as FullStory, comes in. DXI gives you a full picture of your UX data (quantitative and qualitative), integrated with data from the rest of your tech stack. With all this data at your fingertips, you can build optimised digital experiences that improve your bottom line.

As a certified FullStory agency partner, we’re well-versed in the benefits it can deliver retailers. In this article, I explore five of the top uses of FullStory, along with the insights the platform can provide to drive commercial and learning outputs.

5 top uses of FullStory for ecommerce brands

1. Identify pain points from frustration signals

You know your website; you know where you’re not supposed to click. A new customer, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily have this knowledge. As such, they will innocently follow a series of prompts to complete their desired action. However, unbeknown to you, these prompts aren’t the ones your web team intended them to follow.

This is where frustration signals can be instrumental in understanding where users will be getting irritated by your UX.

With dozens of preconfigured signals, such as abandoned forms, scroll depth indicators, pinch-to-zoom and thrashed cursors, FullStory knows which behavioural indicators can lead to journey abandonment.

Automatic ‘red alerts’ mean you can tackle these friction points before they escalate into user churn or abandoned carts.

Let’s take a closer look at one of the most common frustration signals next.

2. Analyse rage clicks in priority order

Rage clicking is when a user clicks multiple times in quick succession in the same area, indicating irritability with that particular website element.

There are a number of triggers which can cause a user to engage in rage clicking, such as being misled by an element that isn’t clickable (think collection page product tiles that don’t link), broken buttons/links or misleading experiences, such as slow page loads.

Rage clicks are logged in FullStory and act as a useful window into UX. They signal that your ecommerce site didn’t respond the way your customer wanted or expected it to – and suggest areas you might want to look at changing.

Arguably one of the most helpful elements of the FullStory platform is that issues are prioritised by commercial impact. Quantifying the lost revenue opportunity as a result of an identified point of frustration gives you a greater understanding of which area of the customer journey to focus on first.

The intent behind customer behaviour might not always be immediately clear, which is why you need to be able to see the context behind it. Whilst you’re ideating possible tests to resolve the issues thrown up by rage clicks and other frustration signals, you can watch user experiences with FullStory’s Session Replay functionality.

3. Gain valuable context to users’ interactions with session replay

Session replay goes beyond traditional web analytics, adding another level of insight and context. Consider it the most honest user feedback you’ll ever get. FullStory allows you to review users’ interactions exactly as they happened on your website. Essentially, you can create your own version of a user testing group and imagine yourself in the customer’s shoes.

This powerful form of qualitative research prevents you from ideating a solution to frustration without understanding why customers are getting irritated in the first place. Remember, all optimisation should be a response to a proven customer/user problem, rather than a hunch you might have about your website.

With session replay, you can learn an awful lot about your users and their behaviour through inference.

Watch the mouse movements and compare with your own browsing data. Highlighting text might show that they’re paying the most attention to that part of the product description, or they’re copying the product title to compare prices elsewhere.

Watch the user interact with your menus, filters and navigation, whilst learning which parts of the page they digest or gloss straight over. 

4. Integrate with your tech stack

One of the major drawbacks of using the freely available and inexpensive tech is that you will quite often have to view your data in isolation or build your own methods of analytics. This typically comes with an expense attached when you want to view your data in one central location.

With FullStory, however, connectivity comes as standard.

It has a host of native integrations which bring across data from the most commonly used sources, such as Shopify or Google Analytics.

And on the other side of the testing cycle, FullStory integrates with many of the industry-leading CRO platforms (including Optimizely, Webtrends Optimize and Kameleoon), optimising the CRO process as helpfully as possible.

Even if you have your own BI solution, you can use pre-configured connectors with the most popular iPaaS solutions (such as Tray.io, Workato and Zapier) and take the customisation further by adding context to your insights via Webhooks, javascript and HTTP APIs.

5. Visualise and monitor key metrics with dashboards

The final piece of the puzzle, and one of the greatest selling points for anyone who is taking CRO and growth seriously, is FullStory’s dashboard functionality. You can easily create a customisable, centralised resource for all of your key metrics and performance data, forming a reliable source of truth across your organisation.

The FullStory dashboard is helpfully laid out to help you visualise your data and monitor progress over time. This makes it easy to prove wins, prioritise work, identify opportunities, and search for the answers to key questions you and your collaborating teams will naturally be asking.

You can easily pull reports on customer journeys and performance across each stage of the funnel. Plus, you can track marketing effectiveness, top browsers and device types, as well as explore how these differ between one-time purchasers and subscribers.

Looking for a FullStory agency partner?

Whilst these are our top picks of the benefits that the FullStory platform can offer ecommerce retailers, there are many other advantages to be had from leveraging such a sophisticated DXI solution. Other uses include easy-to-interpret heatmaps, journey mapping and user segment analysis, for example.

FullStory is the best solution, in our opinion, for businesses who need to better understand their digital experience and become intelligent decision-makers.

If you don’t have the in-house team to manage the platform, digest the information and help you prioritise your CRO strategy, as an agency partner and onboarding partner, Swanky can set you up for DXI success from day one and work with you thereafter.

We have a detailed understanding of the FullStory platform and how it can be leveraged to provide valuable learnings, inform testing and ultimately drive commercial success.

With proven results delivering transformative digital growth for ecommerce market leaders, our award-winning CRO specialists will become an extension of your team, leveraging data and customer experience to maximise opportunities and drive results from within.

Whether it’s optimising your paid ad campaigns, testing new website designs, or consulting on an experimentation roadmap, our first-class team of experts will work with you to unlock your full ecommerce potential.

Get in touch today to find out more.

[All images sourced from the FullStory site.]