Your website visitors are anonymous until they become a customer. Until this point, you are limited in how you can engage with visitors who are ‘just looking’. You can’t ask them about their experience of using your website; what they like, what they don’t like. You also don’t know why they leave. If you had a brick-and-mortar store, you would easily be able to figure this out.
You would be able to ask questions and immediately fix any issues your customers had as they moved around your store. You can strike up a conversation and help them find what they’re looking for. You can offer any additional information – when required.
Despite not being able to interact with your customers in this way, you can still improve the experience your website visitors have with your company online.
Start by tracking the behaviour of visitors, this will help you build a picture of what they like about your site, where they go (or leave) and what you can do to enhance their customer experience.
What does user behaviour tell us?
By tracking user behaviour you can find out how users interact with your site: what they click on, how they scroll down your pages, where they encounter problems and where they are when they leave the site.
How do you track user behaviour?
You can find out how users are interacting with your site through User Behaviour Analytics (UBA). Google Analytics can tell you which channels bring the most users to your site. It might be social media accounts, search engines or other websites. You will be able to identify which marketing medium is helping to drive traffic to your website, and conversely the highest converting traffic sources.
Analytics will also tell you on which landing pages search users enter the site.
Who are the users that convert and why did they?
As with any area of sales or marketing, it’s important to find out what works. Essentially, you need to know what makes users convert so that you can use their motivations and persona to target other visitors.
Having some background on why users convert will help you further develop the areas of your website that are working. What are the best USPs of your products? Which parts of the website are more successful at persuading users to convert? Who is your ideal customer?
How do you find out all of this information? Through structured, comprehensive feedback. You can:
- Create a post-purchase survey that pops up upon completion of an order
- Send a survey to customers asking them questions about their purchase
- Ask customers if they’d take part in a telephone survey and maybe offer an incentive for their time
How do you find out why users left your website without converting?
Google Analytics will tell you which of your pages have the highest exit rates. You will be presented with a list of the top pages that users were on when they bounced from the site. Google Analytics session recordings can then be viewed to see what bounced users were doing before they left.
Compiling this data and conducting comparisons across many users will illustrate where and why people are dropping off your website. You might find there are problems with your call to action (CTA), broken links or page latency which can be easily corrected.
Get in touch
Code Galaxy is a website and software development agency. We work with our clients to create and develop their online impact. Contact us to find out how we can help you track the behaviour of your visitors to create a better user experience.
