Why is tracking User Behavior on the website very important for your business?

Nowadays many business owners miss important information and interesting ideas. This may cost them much time and money as they lose a great deal of website visitors and potential buyers. To avoid such mistakes and losses when developing your business, you should be always aware of the key thing – user behavior.

What Is User Behavior? Why Does It Matter for Your Business?

User behavior gives you an idea of how your website visitors act, think, and make decisions. To give you a better understanding of what user behavior is – you should imagine your website as a store, and your website’s visitors are the customers. They visit your store, opening and closing the doors. But what they are doing while their visit is their real behavior. And it matters a lot for you. You can track what signages attract customers attention, what aisles turn off shoppers and how to place or move the goods more effectively. The same happens on your website. User behavior shows the activities which website visitors do when they attend your site. This includes clicks, scrolling down pages, searching and reading blogs, signing up to updates, and so on. With the CRO (conversion rate optimization) tools, you can optimize your website for the needs of your customers.

User behavior depends totally on psychology – people behave according to what motivates and attracts them. Even such a simple thing as changing one phrase instead of another may influence user behavior. For example, you can check what phrase the web visitors will click more frequently. The phrase “Join today” has a more positive effect and is more pleasant as it doesn’t persuade you to act. A more practical example: some web visitors click the image or a phrase thinking they have a link, but they’re not hyperlinked.

Why Is It Important to Track User Behavior on Your Web Site?

If to believe the Pareto principle, 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts.

In other words, you need to optimize your website for 80% of your visitors rather than the 20% of chance-comers.

You can’t predict the behavior of every customer, you can’t guess all their wishes and preferences. But you can win the favour of the majority of them. So, first of all, you must know how the majority of the buyers behave. Tracking what most visitors do while they’re on the site will help you to adjust the processes and website elements, and also to make conjectures about the improvement of web design.

Main Points for Arrangement Tracking User Behavior on a Website

1. Watch how visitors use your site. User behavior reports will help to arrange that. These reports will give you an understanding of what people do while they’re on your website. You should pay special attention to clicking, scrolling, and form engagement. It’s important also to check referral sources, from where the majority of your traffic comes from. This is from where visitors come to your website. Learning that and improving this source, more visitors will use it and follow to your website. You may set user behavior reports for about two months period and wait until you collect the necessary info for making any analysis and decisions.

2. Analyze the collected information. When you have enough info about User Behavior on your website , you can check what things influence the customers negatively. For example, your visitors stop scrolling early on your blog pages, visitors come from a specific source, such as social, spend less time on your site than visitors from other referring sources. A possible list might look like this:
– Conflicting CTAs on the homepage get approximately equal clicks.
– Many people click on the author photo, which isn’t linked.
– More people click on blog headlines than on the CTAs.
Now when you have these notifications you can act.

3. Choose elements and processes for testing. Based on the analysis before notifications, you can decide what tests to apply and see how variations on the original might perform better among website visitors:
– Remove one CTA to focus the visitors’ attention on the most ideal next step.
– Link the author photo to the author biography page.
– Increase the size of the CTA on the blog (such as in the sidebar) to attract attention.

4. Set clear practical goals. You should set clear aims according to the problems which you analyzed before.

5. Determine the main metrics that are significant to your goals. The metrics you decide to track should be directly impacted by your goals. For example, some metrics to track include conversion rate by source and top pages. Top pages are your best-performing pages, so you’ll be eager to optimize them for conversions. Also, if you know which referral sources give you the highest conversions, you can focus on them more thoroughly. So, you should choose the metrics which are relevant to your current goal.

6. Set up your A/B tests. From the moment you started the process – beginning with data analysis, further definition of practical goals, proceeding with choosing the relevant metrics, the next step is setting up A/B tests for the pages you want to test. For instance, you might test an alternate CTA on your blog pages to see if it helps boost clicks.

7. Recordings. Recordings are beneficial due to their depth of information. They give you opportunities to watch how the visitors interact with certain pages on your website. This observation will help you to understand if your homepage design is effective enough for attracting customers.

8. Heatmaps. The traditional heatmap uses color temperature on the page to show you where visitors engage the most. The other user behavior reports can give you information about scrolling, referral sources, the percentage breakdown of clicks, and more.

9. A/B Testing. You should remember that user behavior reports come before A/B testing. While you can run A/B tests whenever you want, you’ll have more success if you set every variation on data collected from heatmaps and other user behavior reports. Run A/B tests for continuous optimization. Thus you’ll know exactly how the tested element impacts your KPIs.

Conclusion

Now it’s quite clear why it’s really important to track the user behavior on your website. For these aims, you can use CRO tools, but if you are not aware of what your visitors do when they are on website – you don’t control the process, you miss opportunities to improve your business after all.

First of all, start with user behavior reports. Heat maps, scroll maps, list reports, and others can help you pinpoint how traffic moves through your site and what customers do when they land on a certain page. Secondly, set up recordings, examine how visitors engage with elements on a particular page, where they click, if they revert to the same element multiple times. Finally, you will have a full understanding if your website is effective or what processes require optimization and improvement.

Thank you for your attention!
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Your Exceed Team.