In marketing terms, behaviour analysis (sometimes called the science of ‘behaviour analytics’) is closely studying how your website visitors interact with your site. Why do we do this? Because what a visitor does on your site can tell you a lot about both how your site is performing, and how a customer engages with your product.
Most of us are familiar with metrics such as cart abandonment and bounce rate. There are specific industry benchmarks for these — 70% for cart abandonment, and about 40% for bounce — but some might argue that this is way too simplistic. Without more context you don’t know why the visitor is abandoning your cart, or bouncing off your page. You don’t know what they did just before this, or even what was happening while they were filling the cart that might have made them suddenly change their mind. This is where a detailed Behaviour Analysis (‘BA’) can help.
A BA strategy can help you answer questions like:
· Is my visitor missing a key piece of info so they can take the next step in my funnel?
· Is my visitor confused by my landing page? Can they find what they’re looking for?
· How long do they really spend there before they leave?
· What do they actually look at, and what do they ignore? Is this what I intended?
Without really understanding the answers to these questions, any changes you make to your website, for e.g. making the CTA button orange, adding a bright pop-up, adding some scarcity to your text (“ONLY TEN LEFT IN STOCK!!!”) — is just trying to fix a problem with glue and sticky tape, and not dealing with the root cause. The goal should always be to make our site as ‘user-centric’ as possible.
Here are some particular insights which you could look at:
Understanding the current user experience
Sounds simple but this really is your first step. Consider using a (free) tool such as Crazy Egg which heat-maps your site and shows you where your visitor clicks in and out.
Look closely at what your user pays attention to i.e. where their mouse lingers.
Look at how easily or not they move between pages or products.
Pay particular attention to what they do before they exit.
Pro-tip: use your heat mapping tool alongside Google Analytics. If GA is telling you that a particular page has very few visitors, look at your heat mapping tool and see what visitors do on this page if anything.
Check for any friction points in your visitor experience
Look for things such as repeated clicks in the same spot which could indicate a bad link.
See how many times the CTA is clicked in proportion to the amount of visitors on your site. If the numbers are disproportionate, it might indicate that the user wasn’t interested enough to scroll that far in which case you could rethink your site’s overall look and content.
Check for broken buttons and, on an e-commerce site, products just completely being ignored or overlooked. Check how many of these products you actually sell. If no one is looking at them, and nor are you selling any, you may wish to consider if you should be stocking them at all.
Pro-tip: check your site in a different browser to the one you normally view in. You might be surprised at how different it looks and behaves.
Think about your users’ goals
Follow your user journey from the moment they click on your site right the way through to booking or checking-out. Ask yourself these questions:
Why did the visitor come to my website today? What were they looking for? What experience were they after?
Did any of the issues which I found in above steps hinder that experience? For e.g. if they were trying to view a particular room in my B&B, were they easily able to do this? If they wanted to know if my restaurant offers vegan alternatives, can they easily find this out?
Is the user journey seamless and self-explanatory?
There is absolutely no substitute for user feedback. If you haven’t’ already, consider putting a ‘happy box’ on your website which is a simple little pop up asking your user to click to say how they found your site. Good feedback allows you to prioritise what your user considers important (as opposed to what you or your web designer think the user thinks is important!), and fix any glitches that might be getting in the way of a sale.
Now use what you’ve learned to re-set your ‘user-centric’ goals
Once you’ve properly focussed on your user’s goals and site experience, the fantastic user-centric experience your website offers should start to be reflected in longer visits and, ultimately, more sales.
But — a word of warning — in some ways this is a never-ending task! Websites are dynamic ‘living’ things that require constant checking and tweaking. Ideally, you could think about putting aside some time each month to do this.
Long term a user-centric approach to your website, and marketing generally, will increase customer satisfaction and an all-round positive user experience. The better and easier you make the user experience, the more likely this will translate into increased sales and business success. Understanding your behaviour analytics is a process that allows you continually learn from your customers so you can help them reach their goals, so you can reach yours.
