Streamline your development processes. Implement and change vendors with greater facility. Rest easy knowing the data furnished to each web technology is accurate across the board.
Implementing a data layer will allow you to do all these things—increasing your company’s efficiency and giving you a little peace of mind.
But what about your customers? What difference will a data layer make for them?
In an age where customer-obsession ought to be the lynchpin of business decisions, the data layer is no exception. The data layer is a key factor in developing a customer-centric brand. Consider these three ways that a data layer can enhance the customer experience.
1. Faster Load Times
Data collection has an unfortunate paradox: more analytics and marketing tags increases customer intelligence, but also increases page load times. While gathering as much data as possible gives you an educated view of your customer, you don’t want to risk making them wait too long.
With a data layer, data that is common across vendors is collected once and then distributed, which is faster and leaner than collecting the same data multiple times.
2. More Personalized Content
A properly implemented data layer equals better data, and better data equals more accurate insights. That means you can provide customers with the content that is most relevant to their needs. Boom.
3. Agile Strategy
With less time dedicated to massaging your data to be consistent across your analytics technologies, polished data is available more quickly. Your dashboards will be up to date, reports will be sharper and decisions ready to execute. You will be more quickly prepared to respond to the wants of the customer, wants that are voiced through the data.
One Caveat: Your Data Layer Needs to Function Properly
The data layer can be a powerful resource for any analytics and marketing stack, but of course it needs to work properly in order to provide value.
Why wouldn’t your data layer work as expected? It’s impossible to count the specific ways a data layer could fail, but generally it fails simply because websites are entities that grow and change with time. With change come errors, which negatively impact your ability to deliver great customer experiences.
So what can you do to protect the integrity of your data layer? Test it. Often.
As an example, see how you can use ObservePoint to test the data layer across your site:
If it’s been a while since you’ve checked in on your data layer, request a custom audit of your site and data layer to ensure everything is where it should be.
About the Author
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