2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Explorer
This year’s Digital Experience Benchmark includes an interactive explorer which puts the most relevant benchmarks for digital customer experience (CX) in your hands.
Select your industry to see how you stack up against your peers—and leverage the learnings to be better armed for digital growth in the year ahead.
200
Billion
Page views
43
Billion
Site visits
3590
Websites
30
Countries
10
Industries
At a glance
Brands are paying more and more for fewer and fewer visits. 2023 saw a significant drop in overall traffic alongside a rise in ad spend. Together, the cost per visit was up +9.4%.
What’s more, much of that spend was squandered, with user frustration rising, engagement dropping, and (predictably) conversion rates declined.
Changes in digital experience KPIs, YoY
1.
Frustration
Frustration can have a terrible effect on quality of experience. Cumulatively, frustration factors increase bounces and reduce engagement, combining to cut visit value by -15.0%. (Read ‘The impact of frustration’ section in the 2024 Digital Experience Benchmark Report to find out how.)
2. Traffic and visitor segmentation
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Frustration compromises more than 1 in 3 visits
Obstacles and points of friction in the customer experience cause frustration, and frustration flared up in 2023. Well over a third (39.6%) of sessions last year caused users to feel frustrated.
No industry felt the effects of frustration more keenly than Travel & Hospitality, with more than half of visits to T&H sites marred by its impact.
The many faces of frustration
Javascript errors were the leading frustration factor last year, while slow load times continued to delay and exasperate visitors.
However, there were some encouraging signs of success in the fight against frustration, with both slow load times and rage clicks (a key symptom of frustration) falling slightly, YoY.
Focus on... Core Web Vitals
Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWVs) provide an objective set of site performance standards for sites—and far too many sites are still failing to meet the mark for the legacy measures of LCP and CLS.
Concerningly, more than 4 in 5 sites are failing to measure up to the latest CWV, the newly-introduced Interaction to Next Paint.
What do we mean by ‘frustration’?
Frustration includes the specific moments of friction observed during the on-site experience, including:- Javascript error rate: Javascript code produces an error
- Slow page load: Page loads that exceed 3 seconds
- Rage click: An element was clicked at least 3 times in less than 2 seconds
- Multiple button click: A button was clicked at least 3 times
- Multiple field click: A field was clicked at least 3 times
- Multiple use target: An element was clicked at least 3 times
- Low page activity: A visitor doesn’t click or tap on the page.
2.
Traffic and visitor segmentation
2023’s decline in traffic was felt (almost) across the board, with only two industries bucking the trend.
As for the makeup of that traffic, mobile continued to increase its share and there was a marked shift towards paid sources, driving up acquisition costs.
3. Visit engagement
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Traffic declines, making every visit more valuable
55% of sites saw less traffic this year than last. Only Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs) and Travel & Hospitality were insulated from the trend for declining traffic.
With digital reliant on traffic gains to spur growth, the decline in the number of visits seen by most industries in 2023 should serve as the call-to-action to make the most of every visit.
More movement to mobile
Mobile comfortably dominated traffic to B2C sites in 2023, with over 70% traffic share in several B2C industries.
But with desktop accounting for around half of traffic to most B2B sites, B2B industries can by no means discount the importance of the full screen experience.
Ultimately, despite the decline of desktop, both B2C and B2B sites need to be optimized for different devices and the different contexts on each.
The maturing marketing mix
In 2023, digital continued to rely on similar channels to previous years, although there was some share-swapping from owned channels to paid.
Paid social, one of only two channels to drive net traffic gains this year, continued its steady rise towards becoming a top channel.
But with no new breakout channel emerging, turning the tide of traffic declines will likely come down to investing more in existing channels.
Paid sources take more traffic share
Paid sources drove 1 in 3 visits in Q4, a +5% increase YoY that shifts visits away from owned and organic channels.
And with the platforms that deliver paid (Meta and Google) innovating their ad products, expect to see this trend towards paid traffic continue.
The starting point for segmentation
The 50/50 split of new v. returning traffic should motivate brands to segment (and personalize) traffic by visitor type.
And today’s technology is providing them with ample tools to achieve this. Despite the changing cookie tracking landscape, advances in identity resolution and AI offer brands a golden opportunity to inject relevance from the first moment a visitor lands on-site.
3.
Visit engagement
Consumption—which combines pages viewed and time spent—is one of the best metrics to measure user engagement, especially when tracking how it changes over time.
Broadly speaking, consumption dropped in 2023, but a look at industry performance across a variety of engagement measures reveals variation and volatility.
4. Visit outcomes
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Consumption drops (but not in all industries)
58% of sites saw session consumption drop last year.
Industries focused on physical goods, like Retail and CPG, saw severe declines, while consumer-based services and experiences (like Travel & Hospitality and Financial Services) enjoyed consumption growth.
Sessions remain deeper on desktop
Session depth ticked down only slightly, falling only 1.4%, which works out to only a fraction of a page less.
Mobile’s consumption deficit is clear, with the typical desktop session earning an additional 1.5 pages on average when compared to the typical mobile session.
Scrolls shorten
With rates hovering near 50% on both devices (and falling) the decline in scroll rate should direct digital teams to prioritize the best and most relevant content above-the-fold.
Reserving great content for a lower page position ignores the fact that half of the average page is going unseen.
For time spent per session, there’s a device deficit
Mobile sessions are 60% shorter than on desktop, and that shorter session time is spent across only 27% fewer page views.
This fact should dictate a smarter approach to mobile optimization. Mobile visitors graze (making more numerous, but shorter visits) and the mobile experience needs to steer into this consumption pattern.
4.
Visit outcomes
Every good results-driven digital team has the outcome metrics—conversion and bounce—memorized. In isolation, however, these metrics tell only part of the story.
Looking deeper reveals a fuller picture of not only what’s happening, but what can be optimized to improve outcomes.
5. Country KPIs
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Bounces claim nearly half of all traffic
And that figure stretches higher on B2B industry sites.
Some of those bounces can be avoided with improvements to site speed, but the variance we see between industries shows another way in which brands can reduce those dreaded one-and-done visits.
Lower-bouncing B2C-leaning industries tend to have more ‘snackable’ architectures—that is, more pages strewn across broader navigation structures. This approach might just help tease visitors into consuming more content, and help sites slash bounce rates.
Bounces fell on desktop but rose on mobile
While bounce rates thankfully stabilized this year, nudging up <1% after registering an increase of +4% in the prior YoY period, there is still cause for concern when we break bounce rates down by device.
Overall bounce was saved by improved rates on desktop, which helped dampen mobile’s increase of 1.2 percentage points.
However, with mobile taking up more and more traffic share, the growth of mobile bounce rates is a worrying trend.
Bounce rates increase for paid channels
Paying for bounces is a budgetary sin, which should provide brands with plenty of motivation to test channel-specific entry pages.
As paid bounce visits offer low-to-no benefit for businesses, eliminating frustration on these pages is a simple and pragmatic approach to boosting effective session count.
Mobile lags behind on conversion
While visitor intent on mobile is likely lower, the significant difference in conversion rates begs for a different approach to mobile optimization.
Plus—as we can see from the stark differences between mobile and desktop traffic when it comes to session depth and duration—it is the mobile journey, not just the page, where more work is needed.
Growing channels are also low converting
Conversion rates are the result of everything that comes before the convert button. Traffic source, device types, and of course consumption all tilt conversion. And with a marketing and device mix tilting towards lower converting channels—such as paid social on mobile—sharing only top-level conversion will be a dashboard blunder.
5.
Country KPIs
This year’s benchmark includes country-level insights to provide a relevant look into how your site stacks up to your geographic peers for the most important digital experience KPIs
Traffic change by country
Traffic fell in most geographies, with a few positive exceptions: Japan, Australia, and Netherlands, where visits increased in 2023.
Consumption change by country
Although consumption fell globally, there were significant geographic variances. Australian and Canadian visitors led the way with consumption gains, while German and Dutch visitors condensed their visits—and the latter two negated the aforementioned traffic gains.
In each country tracked, more than 1 in 3 sessions included frustration, with Canadian visitors experiencing it most acutely—with a whopping 1 out of every 2 sessions featuring some sort of friction.
Bounces are an unfortunate outcome for sites across the globe, and bounce rates got no better than in the UK, where the bounce rate was 42.7%. American and Japanese visitors proved to be the most likely to bounce, each breaching 50% bounce rate.
Conversion depends on so many factors within a session, including traffic source, bounce, frustration and consumption, to name a few. Visitors in the UK, Germany and the US were most likely to reward sites with conversion.
Key takeaways
Reacting to a turbulent year in digital, digital teams are searching for ways to reignite growth. This benchmark shines the light on three areas along the customer journey that can spur a recovery.
Fix frustration
Two of every five (39.6%) sessions were marred by frustration in 2023, up +3.9% And frustration is no mere inconvenience. Together, slow-loading pages, lagging response to visitor interactions and confusing customer experiences reduce visit value by -15.0%.
Change the channel
A key contributor to traffic's slide of -3.6% is a stale marketing mix, which is increasingly reliant on paid channels. The +9.4% increase in cost per visit is not sustainable, and digital leaders must freshen their sources and reawaken contributions from owned marketing channels.
Inject intelligence
With consumption contracting by -3.0% — fewer page views and less time spent — digital leaders should inject more intelligence in the journey. AI promises to unlock relevance with more curated journeys that will expose visitors to the right content within their ever-condensing visits.
Methodology
The Digital Experience Benchmark is a set of aggregated and anonymized insights into digital performance. Strict aggregation measures are employed to ensure anonymity. These measures include requirements on analysis set size, diversity, and consistency, to present credible and reliable information that is insulated from concentration risk.
To qualify for inclusion in the year-over-year analysis, each site must have operated throughout the entire analysis period, in this case, October 2022 through December 2023. Frustration analyses are calculated for October 2023. All year-over-year analyses are Q4 2023 / Q4 2022. All other analyses represent Q4 2023. Additional data hygiene factors are applied to ensure accurate metric calculation.
This edition of the Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed more than 43 billion sessions and 200 billion page views across 3590 websites.
Data may not be exact due to rounding.
Data footnotes are noted throughout the report to provide additional clarity on analysis.
The Digital Experience Benchmark is not directly indicative of the operational performance of Contentsquare or its reported financial metrics. The performance metrics shared within this report are calculated based on the analysis set, and should not be taken as a guarantee of site performance.