Why Umbraco Engage is a Game-Changer
Saskia Jury shares how Umbraco Engage is delivering real value to her clients - offering a cost-effective solution that boosts website ROI through smarter personalisation, analytics, and optimisation.
What is Umbraco Engage?
Umbraco Engage is an all-in-one marketing toolkit, formerly known as uMarketing Suite, which was recently acquired by Umbraco as an official product. It integrates with your Umbraco CMS seamlessly, offering functions including server-side analytics, A/B testing, personalisation, and user profiling – without needing constant support from back-end development.
Umbraco Engage offers intuitive functions to support marketers in the collection of first-party data, understanding user behaviours, optimising content and online experiences, and ultimately, improving website performance.
Whilst it’s valuable for any organisation looking to capitalise on the ROI and CRO of their website, it can also be an incredibly cost-effective tool for supporting ecommerce functions to maximise site revenue and CVR.
Why use Umbraco Engage?
Umbraco Engage enhances website experience through personalisation and analytics, driving user engagement and conversions. It allows for real-time data analysis, A/B testing, and tailored content delivery, all within the Umbraco CMS. This means businesses can create more impactful and relevant digital experiences for their audience without leaving their CMS.
Saves time
Umbraco Engage is native to the Umbraco CMS - providing operational efficiencies for website managers and marketers having these tools at their fingertips, directly embedded in the CMS. This can save days of effort getting to grips with a new piece of software with tutorials or intensive inductions, as well as improving day-to-day efficiencies by preventing the need to log in to multiple platforms to set up a new A/B test or execute a personalisation strategy.
More powerful
Tests are a lot more powerful when directly related to your Umbraco CMS flexibility, giving Umbraco Engage a massive edge over third-party services that can only manipulate the front-end in a limited fashion. Whatever your CMS can do, Umbraco Engage can test against.
More transparent
The inclusion of an analytics function, personalisation, and A/B test capabilities within one platform means the process of segmenting, testing, and deploying successful test results is easy, comprehensive, and cohesive. For larger teams containing website managers, marketers, and analysts, a single platform containing all of these capabilities creates a culture of effectiveness as there’s transparency for all stakeholders about a project and optimisation programme, with the ability to collaborate and learn together.
How have we used Umbraco Engage for our clients?
Umbraco Engage offers valuable features like user profiling and segment reporting, which allow us to dive deeper into user behaviour. User profiling organises visitors into categories based on their IP addresses, providing key insights about visit frequency, conversions, and user journeys.
We worked with our client Avient to establish Umbraco Engage on the Dyneema.com website. Dyneema® was a perfect candidate for user profiling and segment reporting, as it is a product that is used in a wide variety of industries, from maritime operations to ultralight backpacking to personal protection, such as ballistic vests.
Whilst the Dyneema.com website supports a rich, complex content structure to support various stakeholders through the value chain across all of these industries, understanding how different segments interact with content is crucial for driving conversions. Umbraco Engage’s profiling feature lets us do this without needing extra coding or setup. We’ve been able to profile audiences and collect this data; with the aim of refining these profiles into segments that are more granular and distinct over time, followed by the execution of a personalisation strategy across priority business sectors.
Segment reporting allows our team to analyse customer behaviour by offering insights into segment size, sessions, and page views. We can use this to help find the most valuable areas to focus our personalisation strategy efforts on; in collaboration with valuable business insight about target industries from our client.
With segment filters, we can create detailed profiles, allowing us to deliver the right content to the right audience, increasing the chances of conversion.
How does Umbraco Engage differ from Google Analytics?
We use both Google Analytics and Umbraco Engage to examine user behaviours in complementary ways.
Unlike Google Analytics, where data is predominantly derived from cookies and machine learning technologies, Umbraco Engage collects user data server-side from the Umbraco website, providing an accurate, reliable data source. Server-side analytics provides you with far better data accuracy, enhanced data privacy and control over data collection versus client-side services (which Google can provide, but involves some careful configuration to set up).
How does Umbraco Engage support A/B Testing?
With in-depth insights established via profiling and segmentation, we can identify missed opportunities and use Umbraco Engage A/B testing functions to validate our recommendations before implementation.
Umbraco's built-in A/B testing requires no add-ons and runs automatically, making it easy for marketers to start testing without any extra coding or set-up. The simple setup and real-time monitoring allow multiple tests to run simultaneously, comparing original content with variants. These results help inform future design and UX decisions without requiring significant upfront investment.
On Dyneema.com, we conducted A/B testing to explore ways of increasing traffic to deeper, content rich pages as an alternative to adding them into the main navigation (which would have otherwise impacted the overall UX and information architecture of the site). Instead, we tested changes to the headline copy and key components on landing pages that linked through to these deeper pages. While the results have been mixed, they have provided valuable insights for us and Avient to reconsider the role of these pages and how best to drive traffic towards them. Mixed results don’t tend to scare us, as even a ‘failed’ test provides learning opportunities on how to improve site metrics, and more importantly, prevent the implementation of a costly mistake.
What lessons have we learned so far when using Umbraco Engage?
1. Set up a tracking and measurement plan:
Umbraco Engage is designed for monitoring and optimisation, so to make the most of the tool, a solid tracking setup and clear performance objectives are crucial. Without them, it’s difficult to focus on what matters most or evaluate the effectiveness of our efforts.
2. User intelligence determines success:
The success of A/B testing and segmentation depends on having strong user intelligence. A/B testing starts with in underperforming areas, like where visitors drop off before converting, while segmentation works best when it accounts for differences between segments. User insights help set benchmarks and measure the effectiveness of these strategies, such as comparing segment interest or checking if conversion rates improve after testing.
3. Monitoring and optimisation with Umbraco Engage is a collaborative effort:
This involves marketers, developers, account managers, and the client. The tool’s user-friendliness allows everyone to see how their work impacts performance and quickly identify issues. Teamwork is crucial, as differing perspectives from analysts, UX specialists, and strategists generate valuable insights and testing ideas as well as client input to further strengthen our approach, leading to improved optimisation in future projects.
A cost-effective tool to boost ROI and deliver powerful personalisation
If you’re looking for a simple but powerful method of executing a Conversion Rate Optimisation programme, increasing the ROI of your website, or simply learning richer details about your website users, Umbraco Engage is an incredibly cost-effective tool that integrates easily into your Umbraco site. You can purchase the Analytics function separately from the full Umbraco Engage capabilities if you’re interested specifically in server-side analytics, but we’d recommend going all-in on a full Umbraco Engage licence to get the most out of the functionality and for better overall results.
71% of consumers expect companies to provide personalised digital interactions, and companies that get it right generate 40% more revenue, but many companies struggle to get their personalisation strategy off the ground. Umbraco Engage is an effective way to make your personalisation dreams an executed reality. With licences only spanning a one-year commitment, a cost-effective price point, and the ability to request a demo licence, the barriers to entry are low.
Of course, alongside an Umbraco Engage licence, you will need the right team beside you to support - not just with the installation but to make the most out of the tool; carefully considering your segmentation and personalisation strategy and executing it effectively. That’s where we’ll come in.
We’d love to discuss how Umbraco Engage can support your website, get in touch today.
