Marketing leaders are investing in digital experience (DX) technologies including adtech, martech, and commerce tech to support their digital marketing, commerce, and customer experience initiatives. But many struggle to measure success due to a lack of relevant metrics. My latest published report, Drive Your Digital Experience Investments And Operations With The Right Metrics, provides a set of key DX metrics across business, operations, and customer categories that B2C marketing leaders and their teams can use to establish a clear measurement framework and ensure the success of their DX investments and operations.

Marketers Struggle To Measure The Success Of DX Investment And Operations

According to Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2022, on average, global B2C marketing decision-makers spend 21% their budget on technology. Knowing whether these outlays are generating value, however, is another story: 21% of marketers considered a lack of defined metrics to measure success as a top marketing challenge, due to the complex nature of DX initiatives such as a wide variety of DX technologies, a complex network of DX decision-makers, and the coming threat of data deprecation.

Measure DX Success With Business, Operational, And Customer Metrics

B2C marketing leaders and their teams should focus on four categories of metrics:

  • Business metrics connect DX initiatives to business value. These effectiveness metrics measure DX’s contribution to business success or revenue. Most of the value-based metrics in the business growth category connect directly to revenue or sales, such as transactions and wallet share. Leading indicators, such as lead generation and average basket size, correlate strongly to business outcomes and are thus metrics that you can use to predict business success.
  • Operational metrics measure internal efficiency and cost savings. Operational efficiency metrics show the ratio of output to input in operations, so most of the value-based metrics track savings of time and money, such as material and operational cost savings. Leading indicators like asset reuse and workflow visibility correlate strongly to efficiency improvement.
  • Customer metrics measure success from the customer perspective. The most used value-based customer experience metrics are the Net Promoter Score℠ and customer satisfaction scores. Some firms actively track rates of customer engagement and task success as leading indicators to predict customer success.
  • Diagnostic metrics track the operational performance of a tactic or a channel. These metrics neither link directly nor strongly correlate to business or customer value. Diagnostic metrics like site performance and checkout time help diagnose the health of specific digital channels; email deliverability and response rate zoom into a specific channel to help identify opportunities to improve campaign performance. Data deprecation will affect some diagnostic metrics at the level of touchpoints and tactics, but marketers can still get the metrics and insights they need at an aggregate channel level across cohort customer groups.

Measuring digital experiences successfully goes beyond having and employing an inventory of well-defined metrics. To learn the details of the most useful digital experience metrics and how to use them wisely to achieve measurement success, Forrester clients can read the full report and schedule a guidance session.