As a business owner, it’s important to collect every bit of data you can on how your customers interact with your website. If there’s an issue on your website, you can use this data to indicate where the issue lies. If users interact well with a page on your website, then you can also look into why this is and how you can make your other pages equally as popular.
User behaviour data benefits every single industry, as it essentially gives a window into what people think about your products and services, your website and how it is built. Most business owners will have the means to examine the user data, but without any real understanding of what it all means, there is no way to use it to increase conversions.
Understanding user behaviour analytics
Google Analytics, if used correctly, can be one of the most powerful tools that a website owner has. This gives an insight into how much traffic is entering a website, which channels the traffic is coming from (organic, direct, social media and referral) and also how the users behave once they visit your website. The user data that gives us a real understanding of how the users are interacting with a website are the bounce rate, the average session duration and the average pages per session. The bounce rate indicates how many users are clicking onto you website, only to click back off again.
Analytics calculates the overall average figures, so it’s important to do a little bit of digging to find some more information regarding user behaviour. If you want to look a little bit further, it’s important to explore the landing pages on your website. For example, your homepage may actually have great user statistics, with a low bounce rate, users are clicking through an average of over 2 pages (which is positive) and a long average session duration. This indicates that users are interacting well with the content of the homepage.
However, you may find that one of your service pages has really poor user behaviour stats, with a really high bounce rate and really low engagement. The average bounce rate for a website is between 45-55%, so anything above this is too high and anything below is excellent. If you find that some pages perform really poorly in terms of generating conversions and have really low user stats, it’s important to have a further look into the page.
If a lot of people are clicking off one page in particular, then there could be a number of different reasons why this is. First of all, it’s important to check the speed of your website or an individual landing page. If the page is slow loading, then a lot of website users will not be prepared to wait around. Using Google’s pagespeed insights tool can help you to get a better understanding on how well your website performs in terms of speed.
If a website is slow, it’s usually because the images or other media on the website have not been optimised, or this could be a development issue. Pagespeed insights will list all of the things that you need to fix in order to have a quicker loading website.
Another reason why users may click straight off you website is because of how it looks, if you have an outdated looking website, then users may deem this as being spammy. A new standard for websites has been set for website quality and most users will expect fast loading, modernised, clean websites as these are the most trustworthy sites. Understanding how users behave on individual subpages will give you a better understanding as to why your website isn’t converting.
Understanding the conversion rate
Again, the conversion rate is based on an average, so in order to gain a better understanding of the individual users, it’s important to look into the different channels and how users are behaving from there. Organic traffic consists of the users who have found your website through searching for keywords. For SEO purposes, this is the main channel for traffic, so if you are monitoring how successful your SEO campaign is, then you will need to look into this channel.
If you have a low conversion rate from your organic traffic, this either indicates that the keywords that you have optimised your website with, are either not relevant (which will also often be linked to a higher bounce rate for organic traffic etc.), or that the website layout is not simplistic enough for people to user and make purchases from.
If your keywords are too broad, then the traffic that is directed to your website will not always be the right kind of traffic. For example, if you sell flight compression socks, then optimising your page for “socks” would be too broad and could direct users who want other kinds of socks to your website.If you are confident that the keywords that you have optimised your website with are relevant and that your page is aesthetically pleasing, as well as informative, then there’s a possibility that users aren’t converting because the website isn’t set up for quick conversions or enquires.
If your website is enquiry based, then it’s important to make sure that you have contact forms set up on your individual service pages, as well as your contact page. This will ensure that you are maximising your chances of getting enquiries and therefore conversions in the long term. It’s important to make these really easy and simple to use from both a mobile and desktop device so that nobody is excluded.
If your website is set up for conversions, then it’s important to ensure that you have minimal steps to the payment. Users will often lose interest if you make them jump through hoops in order to make a purchase, this also gives them the opportunity to change their minds about buying your product or service. Amazon, for example, has a 1-click to conversion option, making this the ideal example to work towards.
User testing
For event further understanding of how your users behave and what they think of your website, there are different things that you can consider. For example, user testing is great, as you can get real people to give honest answers, based on questions and tasks you set for them to do on their website. Even better than this, you can also get a screen recording of them navigating through your website and commenting as they go.
This is great as it gives you a better insight into what users are actually thinking and more often than not, what you think looks great, isn’t well received by your website users. It’s important to remember that your website isn’t built for you, but instead, it’s built for the user to navigate and enjoy. Making simple changes to your website, based on real life suggestions and comment could help to increase your conversion rate.
User behavior data on a multi-channel scale
As well as looking into user behavior from a website interaction point, it’s also a good idea to look into your users who fall into the “almost convert” category. So, if someone has abandoned their cart at the checkout, it’s important to try one last time, as these are high-conversion people.
So, if you have somebody who abandons the cart, then it’s always a smart idea to send them a follow-up email offering free delivery, or discount to complete their purchase. This may not work for everybody, but it’s worth doing as this will certainly be persuasion enough.
This method can also be used for social media. If you have paid social advertising set up and a pixel installed, this means that you can collect the user data for those who interact with your social campaigns, but also how they behave on your website. If they make purchases or abandon the cart, then you can create campaigns that directly target them.
There are lots of ways to manipulate user behaviour, but understanding the red flags, when they appear on your website, is the key to increasing your conversion rate. Always take the time to look through your monthly data and see if there are any improvements that can be made to your website because of this.
Alice Porter works closely with the Immigration Lawyers to better inform business owners on how to increase their conversions and how to become more successful.
