Today, your digital presence directly influences your business by increasing brand awareness and conversions. While some businesses perform exceptionally well online, others need help to improve their visibility. User behavior analytics plays a major role in understanding how users interact with your website. It lets you know what your customers dislike and improve your strategies to engage more potential customers.
This article covers behavior analytics and advanced user behavior analytics tools to help you.
What is User Behavior?
User behavior refers to any action the user takes on your website. It might range from scrolling down a web page to clicking on a CTA or even bouncing. Heat map testing is an important element of user behavior analysis that helps you see which parts of your site irritate the user. So, you can work on these elements through the acquired data to ensure your customers enjoy a pleasant experience.
What is User Behavior Analytics?
User behavior analytics means using the data to analyze the user’s behavior and interaction with your product. Data from Google Analytics and other marketing analysis tools give you metrics like page views, session duration, and bounce rates. While these stats help understand what happens, user behavior analysis shows why it happens.
User behavior algorithms focus on sign-ups, in-app purchases, retention rates, etc. Analyzing the behaviors helps you make data-driven decisions instead of eyeballing the issues.
User Behavior Analysis Elements
You can analyze user behavior by tracking what the user is doing on your website. Some key elements that can help understand user behavior include:
Mouse Navigation
Mouse navigation is generally used to see if the users like the content on the website. It is specifically helpful for product pages and blogs to see what attracts the customers more. At times, you might observe that the users navigate the page in an order different from what you expect. You can use these metrics to remove sections that the users skip altogether.
Scrolling
Scrolling is the most popular user analytic detail that shows which part of the page the users mostly stop at. Moreover, it also helps you analyze if the users are reaching the crucial elements of a page.
Clicks
Following the clicks on your page gives you data on the most interactive elements on your site. Mostly, you will find users clicking on CTAs or internal links on the page. At the same time, rage-clicking (continuous clicking) represents a linking issue; sometimes, the user might click on plain text due to font style or color confusion.
User Feedback
Who can offer you better feedback than the users themselves? Get feedback from the users on what elements on your website they like the most and least. You can also ask why they abandoned their carts or about features your website or product lacks.
How to Analyze User Behavior?
Focus on Long-term
Businesses widely use Google Analytics data to drive organic traffic to the website and increase conversions. Though these are important momentarily, user behavior analytics algorithms must be focused on long-term benefits. Find out the problematic areas in user experience and find solutions to improve your website and product overall.
Collect and Streamline Data
When you focus on collecting data to analyze it and make improvements, creating a streamlined process is important. Every business and product might have a different method that depends entirely on the requirements and results you’re looking for.
Understand the Issues
To find the right solutions, understand the problematic areas with a customer journey that leads to abandonment. While it plays a significant role in helping e-commerce businesses, analyzing the root causes through user behavior analytics benefits all businesses. You can use the following to find out the issues:
- Heatmap tools
- A/B Testing
- Voice of Customer tools
Fix the Problems
The last part of analyzing user behavior is to fix the issues you found. Whether you need to change images, CTAs, headlines, or remove content pieces, it’s important to ensure you offer what the customers like.
User Behavior Analytics Metrics
User behavior data focused on retaining customers can differ in marketing metrics and factors. Some of the most important metrics for user behavior analysis include:
Feature Usage
It allows you to see which features are users’ favorites and which are the least used. So, you can add or remove them over time to improve customer experience.
Clicks and Interactions
While placing interactive CTAs is vital to your business, analyzing clicks plays a major role in understanding user behavior. It helps you see which placement/ font/ text/ features perform better than others.
User Sessions
User sessions are one of the most important metrics for analyzing the users’ interest in your product. Staying for longer shows that they like what they see, and you might not need to make many changes. Otherwise, you must find and fix the issues.
Stickiness Ratio
The stickiness ratio in user behavior analytics details the user’s interest or satisfaction with the product. A higher stickiness ratio shows that the customers are returning to the product.
Churn Rate
The churn rate in advanced user behavior analytics represents the percentage of users you lose over time. It won’t be zero typically, but you can reduce it by improving the customer experience.
Referral Rate
The referral rate shows how many people refer your product to others. It helps you analyze how happy the users are with your product that they would tell others about it.
Benefits of User Behavior Analytics
Today, data is the most important element when acquiring and retaining customers. Correctly analyzed data enables you to provide unmatched service to your customers.
Some benefits of analyzing user behavior include:
Innovation
Understanding what your customers do not appreciate about your website or digital product can help you find innovative solutions. These solutions may act as a differentiator between you and your competitors.
Save Money
Sometimes, brands spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on adding new features or elements to their websites, apps, and businesses. However, you cannot estimate their success until you know your customer. Advanced user behavior analytics ensure you offer what the customer needs.
Better Conversion and Retention
Leveraging user behaviors allows businesses to test features without launching them for everyone. You can see what helps conversions and retentions and provide the same to the users. Many brands have improved their retention and conversion rates with user behavior analytics.
Common User Behavioral Analytics Mistakes
Analyzing user behavior can be immensely helpful to your business, but only when you do it rightly. Some common mistakes user behavior analysis professionals make are:
Introducing Too Many Features
You might want to share all the amazing features with the users right away, but it can be a mess when you want to study user behavior. It is best to launch one or two features at one time. It makes it easy for users to adapt to new features, offering better success.
Analyzing Too Many Events
Sometimes, businesses try to analyze numerous events simultaneously, which can be challenging. Instead, focus on the main 20 to 30 events in the initial pass and add more gradually.
Using Auto-Tracking
Analyzing user behavior through auto-tracking and marketing tools can be helpful in modifying marketing strategies but not product experience. On the other hand, user analytic tools can help you understand user behavior and journey for better understanding.
Focusing Revenue
Though the primary business objective is to make money, keeping it as the key metric cannot be helpful. You must focus on metrics that show the user’s interaction with the product and the improvements required.
User Behavior Analytics Examples
Netflix is one of the most common examples of leveraging user behavior analytics to improve business. The user’s home page is filled with movies they have shown interest in or similar to those. The user behavior analytics algorithms study the users’ engagement on the platform and show what they want to see, including genre, region, and others.
Intertop is another example that leveraged advanced user behavior analytics to see where users clicked more. Being an e-commerce store allowed them to help visitors find in-demand products faster.
Furthermore, Intelliquip used behavior analytics to analyze bugs in their system while switching users to a new portal. It helped them find the issues like language problems and fix them to facilitate the process.
Why is User Behavior Analytics Important?
User behavior analysis is critical to business growth and success. User analysis data helps you understand user’s behavior patterns on the site and the problematic elements. So, you can pinpoint the problematic areas to engage existing customers and attract new ones. It helps you identify if the problem lies in page loading, unclickable elements, or requires content optimization. Providing customers with a better, seamless experience gives you an edge over competitors.
Analyzing the behaviors gives you insights into user behaviors and what stops them from taking action. Furthermore, it shows what the users like more on your website so you can incorporate more similar elements. You can also leverage this data to facilitate future interactions and convert potential customers.
UEBA data can also help you protect your systems by analyzing crashes and bugs. Ultimately, it allows you to prevent these issues repeatedly, offering a better journey to the users.
Are You Analyzing User Data to Improve the Experience?
As you know the benefits of user data analytics, ignoring them may lead you to miss scaling opportunities. If you are not focusing on leveraging advanced user behavior analytics to improve the customer’s experience, a digital marketing agency like Kubico specializing in user behavior can help. Get in touch with our experts to know how analyzing user data can help boost engagements and conversions.