Earlier this year The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) launched to create a standard for managing certain types of website data found on ecommerce platforms. The global body made up of more than two dozen tech firms and ecommerce operators, including IBM, Google, Adobe and Best Buy are determined to simplify the process of rolling out new marketing, analytics and personalisation technologies across websites worldwide.
Why standardising data is important
At the moment, every technology ingests and outputs information about website visitors in a dizzying array of different formats. Every time a site owner wants to deploy a new customer experience technology such as web analytics, remarketing or web apps, overstretched development teams have to build a bespoke set of data interfaces to make it work, meaning site owners can’t focus on what’s important. The W3C’s data standard will remove this unnecessary complexity. By unifying the language that marketing, analytics and personalisation tools all use, the deployment of new technologies should become more of a plug and play affair.
The benefits: Time and money
The benefits of adopting the data layer will be significant. Latest figures from our research team has revealed that the W3C’s data standard could generate cost savings of $3bn each year for the global web industry. This saving, equivalent to 0.1% of the global internet economy, is due to the increased efficiency in data handling as a result of the standard’s implementation.
The standard will have the most impact in territories with higher labour costs. In the US market - the biggest internet economy in the world - the savings would total just over $1.4billion, whilst in the UK savings would reach $263 million (£169 million). China has almost 1.5x more ecommerce businesses than the UK, but it only saves $99 million due to lower labour costs in this market. These figures represent significant savings for individual companies, with the average web business in the US saving $32k a year; in the UK $23k; and in China $6k.
Furthermore, time that is currently spent doing manual labour and the laborious editing of scraps of javascript will be able to be spent in other ways. Instead of spending a great deal of time creating custom solutions, site owners have the opportunity to set their developers working on optimising their conversion rates by improving the experience of their customers.
Privacy and personalisation
As our world continues to become more digitalised Constellation Research’s Chairman Ray Wang believes that standards play a key role in how we can manage the balance between privacy and personalisation. The W3C’s standard therefore marks the first step towards developing a foundation for this process. Implementation of the standard is a one-time effort and, once its in place, the benefits and savings will be significant.
By Graham Cooke, CEO of Qubit.
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