Digital Performance Management---A Step Ahead, From Insights To Impact

The web is continuously evolving. Today, every business has a website and knows the importance of a holistic web presence. As digital presence providers, we have focused on the earned, paid, and owned presence platforms. We also have been measuring and monitoring the outreach and the inbound traffic to these platforms. The most commonly used tool being the Google Analytics. As the digital efforts mature and the digital presence starts to spread out to search, social, mobile and global, the need to measure, monitor, understand and study the user behavior becomes increasingly important. Once we reach out to the  targeted audience and the inbound traffic starts increasing, the next logical step is to move on from:

• Content to context
• Monitoring analytics to using analytics data for management
• Quantity analysis to quality analysis

Digital performance depends on upon three essential factors:

• Customer/User experience
• IT performance
• The business outcome of the digital effort

This is where the Digital Performance Management (DPM) comes into the picture. It focuses on the challenge of connecting the gaps between the user experience, IT performance, and the business goals & results. DPM is performance monitoring which helps business to assess and manage the performance of their website. Usually, analytics and monitoring tools focus on any one of the above factors. These metrics are mostly quantitative and silo in nature. Digital Performance Management analytics focuses on the quality and the quantity metrics to help take decisions.

The success of any online business depends on how satisfying the customer journey has been. The customer journey begins when he starts his search on the internet and finds your digital business presence on any media (paid, organic or earned).Digital is not longer a word signifying a certain technology, it is the DNA of every organization. In 2015 Gartner noted that, 89% of companies  primarily compete on the basis of customer experience, and that these interactions are becoming rapidly more digital. Forrester estimates that a one-point improvement in a US wireless provider’s Customer Experience Index score (CX Index™) results in an additional $175 million in revenue. The DPM approach thrives when all the following teams work with synergy and have a common goal in mind:

• Marketing
• Technology
• eCommerce
• Infrastructure & Operations
• Product
• Services

Traditional analytics gave data about the performance of a website or the mobile app.DPM analytics goes a step ahead and gives actionable insights to help in decision-making. As the mobile web expanded, from simple website analytics tools which offered visitor and location data we moved on to the Application Performance Management tools getting insights about the mobile applications. As the search engines evolved, the SEOs and search marketers included social media services and the content services into their range of services. I think in order to add more value to their services, the addition of the DPM is the much-needed extension.

Jason Bloomberg, President, Intellyx says:

Application Performance Management tools must evolve to become Digital Performance Management. As the definition of "application" is both expanding and becoming more vague, it's important for these tools to focus on the customer experience end-to-end. That's essentially what we mean by digital performance.

Ann Ruckstuhl, CMO, SOASTA says:

2016 will see the beginning of a mass transition from APM to DPM (Digital Performance Management) with emphasis on front-end performance measurement, testing, and optimization based on analytics insights gained from the holy trinity of data - real user, business outcome and ops metrics. The need of the hour is to offer insights into data, along with the analytics data. Every search marketer with this value-added service to the client is going to future proof its growth and existence. This requires a great understanding between the client and the digital presence provider.

Erwan Paccard, Director of Customer Experience Marketing, Dynatrace says:

DPM collected analytics are uniquely positioned to help break silos by providing detailed insight around user behavior, delivered experience quality and the supporting applications and infrastructure health and performance across channels.

DPM Answers the Following Questions:

• Are the conversion goals and revenue targets defined?
• Is the infrastructure nurturing the growth rather than becoming a  bottleneck?
• Are the customers happy?
• Is there a synergy between all the teams with a common goal in mind.

As Google always says: “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”

How Does DPM Help in Shifting the Focus on the User/Customer

• DPM helps you to facilitate and design a satisfying online journey for the user.
• DPM offers insights into the user experience journey from the digital performance perspective.
• DPM gives a holistic cohesive view of a company’s performance, aligning strategy, business goals and operations.
• DPM helps in predictive analysis.

The DPM software helps the digital marketer to add that layer of intelligence in the reporting. These additional insights help the business owner identify the bottlenecks and issues in the whole online sale process.  This kind of reporting, not only give the metrics but also adds the “why” to those metrics. The term “Performance Management” is not new for any business but “Digital Performance Management” has the synthesis of technology and operations at its core. This monitoring is the backbone on which the future online business will be determined for any company.

According to Forrester analysts Milan Hanson and James McCormick's report brief:

• Digital Performance Management Is An Evolutionary Step Beyond APM - Digital performance management is APM with a companywide perspective. It goes beyond APM by managing performance in a customer and business context.
• Understand The Customer To Understand Performance - Good or bad performance depends on the customer’s expectations, which can be influenced by a range of factors such as geography or even by the customer’s stage in a single transaction.
• Adopt A DPM Approach For That Competitive Edge - DPM will subsume APM, providing better insights that lead to action that is more finely tuned to business improvement.

It is high time that the digital marketing agencies start adding this layer of intelligence to forge ahead in the industry. As the majority of the traffic is received from the organic platform, the organic presence providers should be the first one to adapt to this new trend and evolution. DPM can be implemented by using any specialized software or by creating customized dashboards on Google Analytics. Google Analytics gives us a plethora of data but usually, companies just read reports and are happy with the increase in traffic metrics. By creating dashboards offering quality and quantity metrics the company can identify issues posing as a hurdle for online growth.

Google too is going ahead in this direction by introducing Google Optimize

Yesterday Google sent an email invite to Google Analytics users introducing Google Optimize. The email says: Companies big and small face the same challenge today. With ever more data flooding in, how do marketers act on all the useful insights they've learned? That's where Optimize comes in. Optimize makes it easy to test new online experiences for your customers. It's easy to implement. It's easy to create more personal experiences. And most importantly, it's easy to understand and act on the results. With Optimize you can create and deploy A/B, multivariate or redirect site experiments with our powerful capabilities:

• Built on Google Analytics. Test what matters. Use your existing Google Analytics goals and metrics to quickly get an experiment up and running.
• Advanced Statistical Modeling. Optimize will model the real-world performance of your experiments for more accurate results.
• Sophisticated targeting tools. Deliver the right experience to customers at the right time with advanced experiment targeting.

Google Optimize is easy to use, powerful, and free. Ready to discover better online experiences for your customers? Simple traditional analytics is maturing to a more holistic data analysis and visualization of  user behavior, real-world performance of the online business entities thereby giving a direction to the operations and the IT team to improvise further. Just having an overall web presence and having a good website and a mobile application is not enough. The web and the user behavior is ever evolving. The intelligent monitoring and constant changes made to the user experience by analyzing such data is the key to online sustenance. This DPM approach is a recent development and at the initial stages, but it surely going to go a long way. The time to start thinking about it and work out a value-added service for our clients is the way to forge ahead. Let us understand the why behind the analytics metrics, rather than just view them superficially. It is all about capturing more data and delving deep into insights and moving ahead from insights to impact. September 30, 2016