What is user behavior analytics?
User behavior analytics is a process of tracking visitor behavior on a website. There are analytics programs that collect visitor data and allow visibility into their actions. Google Analytics is one such program. It allows you to see how a visitor first accesses your website, how long a visitor stays on a particular page, and if a visitor visits the page to contact your business.
Why is user behavior analytics important?
Visitor tracking analytics is an extremely important tool for understanding how a user interacts with your website. If you are not able to understand the patterns of how a visitor uses your website, you will not be able to effectively gauge whether your website design successfully guides a visitor towards the ultimate action.
That ultimate action may be to register for your service, buy a product, sign up for a newsletter or schedule an appointment with you. Over time, analytics helps you understand what is happening on your website and how you need to adjust your layout to improve the user experience.
3 Common User Behavior Analytics Problems & Solutions
A website is typically built and forgotten. Business owners think they simply need a website just to have one. Yours should be a money-making, conversion machine. How can you build a website like that? There are many elements that play into the equation. We discuss these extensively as part of our Optimal Package.
To actually understand if the remaining 5 components are helping generate leads, it’s important to configure analytics on your website. Read about 3 common user behavior analytics problems and solutions
Problem 1: Not having analytics configured
If your website does not have analytics configured, you do not know who is visiting your website and how one is interacting with the content. We recommend you configure the most popular analytics system – Google Analytics.
Solution 1: Configuring Google Analytics
It’s important to configure analytics in order to understand the data of who is visiting your website, how long they are staying on your website, and what actions they are taking on your website. This insight allows you to understand their behavior and improve the web design and user experience.
Set up Google Analytics at the following link.
Problem 2: Grouping all website visits together
We can categorize a website visit in many ways. An individual may be browsing on their laptop, tablet or mobile device. One can be visiting your website from a Google search or from a link on social media. Understanding a source of the visit may make that visit far more valuable.
Analytics are not simple to understand. You may be simply looking at all your visits as a number instead of qualitatively.
Solution 2: Segment quality of visits into categories
If a website has a conversion rate of 5%, this tells us one story. If we break that figure down, though, and see that the conversion rate is 10% for desktop users and only 1% for mobile users, that tells a different story, and gives a good indication of where we should focus our content development efforts.
Problem 3: Not generating actionable takeaways
Business owners may look at the total number of website visits and now know what to do with the data. Great, people are visiting my website! What would you like that individual to do? Simply look around and explore all the fun sections you have built?
Based on collected data, a business owner must generate actionable takeaways. One example is if a website page has received no visits, you may either need to promote it to your network or remove it because there is no demand.
Solution 3: Let analytics influence your website content strategy
Based on the statistics that we see, we must have actions in place that need to be taken. For example, if a page is not being visited by anyone or a small percentage of people, it may be a useless page and a page that is not worth updating in the future. You may also decide to get rid of that page. On the other hand, if a blog article that you wrote is extremely popular based on how many views it gains, you may want to write another blog article on the same topic to generate more traffic and interest.
Next steps
Analytics allow visibility into how your website is performing. If you do not have analytics installed, Optimal Pursuits can help install it for you.
If you already have analytics configured, but do not know how to generate actionable takeaways to improve you website conversions, request a complimentary analytics audit.
