Since the turn of the standard century, innovative technology has completely transformed interactions between consumers and businesses.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in how we shop for our favorite products and services, with retail and e-commerce brands investing heavily into building that perfect customer experience (CX): personalized, hyper-relevant, and omnichannel.
Advances in software development, machine learning, and AI-driven algorithms have given retail brands “The Force” to intelligently target, attract, and engage customers – offline to online and vice versa – in ways not possible before.
It’s no wonder why top retailers in virtually every vertical have been focusing so greatly on the digital experience their target customers get to see at the end of the day: CX has become everything when it comes to converting web site visitors and ultimately driving revenue growth.
How critical will a strategic focus on customer experience be for businesses going forward? A study by research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan projects that by 2020, customer experience will surpass price and product as a key brand differentiator.
But this innovative and constantly evolving force can also be used by the the Dark Side in ways that have been (until recently) invisible to e-commerce companies.
Online journey hijacking: The cloak Force for ad injectors
How well do you know the powers of the Dark Side? Darth Vader had a wide-range of powers he could use to destroy his enemies — one of the most sinister being Force cloak.
Also known as Force camouflage, Force cloak enabled Vader to keep other Force-users like Jedi Knights from sensing his presence — perhaps most famously using this hidden power on Cloud City against Luke Skywalker, keeping him from sensing his presence before their fateful battle. As Luke discovered during that battle, you can’t protect against a Force you can’t see.
Until recently, a hidden power has been targeting and disrupting e-commerce customers, too: Backed by the growing and ever-evolving ad injection economy, online journey hijacking is a client-side problem where unauthorized ads are injected into consumers browsers.
These malware-driven injections are most commonly embedded into browser extensions and free software bundles (i.e. free PDF viewers or even antivirus programs), but can also be injected when users connect via WiFi routers. Upon making its way into the consumer’s web browser, this digital malware target online shoppers via disruptive product ads, pop-ups, banners, and in-text redirects when they visit a retailer’s website.
For ad injectors, the aim of these ads is as simple as it is dark: Drive the user away from the site they’re currently on and redirect them to another so that they collect a commission per click and transaction.
These unwanted distractions are especially harmful when keeping in mind today’s customers, who are often multi-tasking and on-the-go while browsing e-commerce sites. Their attention spans are short and their tolerance threshold even shorter for disruptions.
Whether their focus is diverted away from your homepage, promotion landing pages, product pages, or even the checkout stage — once they bounce, they often don’t come back.
Worse yet, many end up taking advantage of the competitor promotion that lured them away — and that’s exactly where they’ll return the next time they’re searching for a similar product.
Just how big is online journey hijacking? Depending on seasonality, between 15-25% of all online visitors encounter these ads while shopping online. Infection rates spike upwards to as high as 30% during peak shopping periods like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the winter holiday season.
The injected ads also don’t discriminate by organization or vertical – they target any business with an online sales funnel. According to analyst firm Gartner, “Any company selling online that relies on steady traffic in order to sell products should care about journey hijacking.”
A great disturbance in the customer journey
Stealing earned web traffic and sending customers to complete transactions on competitor sites? That’s a problem with a truly damaging dark side for e-commerce brands all over the globe.
Active web users and shoppers download these free services unaware that they’re granting digital malware access to their web browser and behavior data so that ads can be targeted based on their online browsing history to offer the most relevant alternative promotions.
But how have online businesses not been aware of such a widespread issue directly cutting into their revenue? By exploiting the client-side, ad injectors have kept their malware-driven injections stealth from server-side security solutions, leaving businesses with no visibility or control into the problem. Darth Maul would be proud of such crafty techniques — and laughing all the way to the bank!
If you’re shopping online, interruption at every stage of the journey with rival promotions and unsavory content isn’t what you expect when visiting an established brand’s website. For online businesses, even more unacceptable than this damage to brand equity is effectively leaking a fifth of your digital marketing spend — your customers — to other sites.
Customer hijacking prevention technology: e-commerce’s answer to cloak Force
Investment and resources devoted to removing friction and providing customers with the optimal journey are only worth it if they’re experiencing that journey the way you designed it.
Fortunately, disruptive innovations have handed digital commerce Jedis the Force Sight ability needed to protect their online customers’ experience. Analyzing web sessions from the server to the customer’s web browser, machine learning-based platforms can differentiate between legitimate and malicious patterns that negatively impact the intended user experience.
Just as with Force Sight, this self-learning technology allows us to see unauthorized injections cloaked within the client-side browser, and block them from running — and disrupting — the customer’s experience. Billions of web sessions are analyzed weekly — allowing us to stay ahead of the Dark Side and adapt to constantly evolving code injections.
Client-side Force is real and powerful. By preventing online journey hijacking, e-commerce brands are seeing a 2-5 percent overall conversion rate uplift.
Protecting customers and digital investments from the Dark Side helps e-commerce Jedis and Padawans ensure their CX efforts shine through by letting customers enjoy the optimal journey they’ve been striving to deliver all along.
