A Guide to Visitor Behavior Analysis

Visitor behavior analysis is the process of understanding why users on your website make purchases, browse certain content, or click away. In essence, it’s examining every part of the user experience from the user’s perspective to find out what’s good about your website and what needs improvement.

Other than just understanding what customers are doing, behavior analysis has some significant benefits that your company should use. These include a better understanding of your website, your customers, and ultimately more conversions.

We’ve collected information about visitor behavior analysis in today’s guide so that you can get started using this concept to improve your website.

What is Visitor Behavior?

Visitor behavior in this context refers to how users interact with your website. When evaluating how well your website is performing and how much users like it, you’ll need to be aware of some essential information like:

• How users find your website.
• How long users stay on your website.
• What users are doing while they’re on your website.
• How often users return to your website.
• What parts of your website are most popular among users.

There are a few ways to keep track of this information. In the following sections, we’ll go over these ways, as well as some details about how to analyze this behavior.

Visitor Behavior Analysis Explained

Now that you know what we mean by visitor behavior, we can talk about what it means to analyze it.

As with all evaluations within your company, measuring your website’s performance is best done through multiple perspectives.

Quantitative data like pageviews, clicks, content engagement, conversions, and other metrics are beneficial for uncovering shortcomings and what you’re doing right. However, they don’t paint a complete picture. Metrics don’t tell a story on their own, and they require additional context to determine root causes. This is where qualitative analysis, such as analysis of the user experience of your website, comes in.

The opposite of the quantitative approach would be a qualitative one, where the quality of the experience of a hypothetical user is measured directly. Visitor behavior analysis is like putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. By shifting the role and experiencing your company from an outsider’s perspective, you can better grasp how your website succeeds and where improvements need to be made.

Why Does Visitor Behavior Analysis Matter?

You can uncover some vital information through analysis of your visitor’s behavior.

Track Your Website’s Performance in Depth

You may already know how long users spend on your website before they click away. But is there something about your website causing them to click away? A holistic user experience analysis could reveal this for you.

Visitor behavior analysis is best at uncovering the user experience. Once you don the customer role and try your website out, you could quickly realize that some process or prompt is off-putting to customers or that your most popular products aren’t being recommended to shoppers the way they should be.

You could also discover more profound flaws like the usability of your website—i.e., loading times, aesthetics, and completeness.

Identify the Audience You Want

You may have multiple different audiences who appreciate the different products you offer. In this case, it’s helpful to know which potential customers will be the most valuable so you can funnel them into your sales pages or collect their information for follow-up.

On the other hand, you may have users who never buy anything and only come for the content. It’s essential to know the distinction between these two types of users, so you don’t waste time trying to sell to someone who isn’t buying.

By acting as either of these hypothetical types of customers, you can optimize your website and funnel the best prospects toward the products they might be interested in.

Understanding Your Best Customers Better

On the topic of your best customers, these are the people you need to know better than anyone else.

Tracking and analyzing the behavior of your best customers will reveal two important things:

• What they do on your website.
• Why they love your product(s).

These key pieces of information will help you create more of these kinds of customers and keep the ones you already have coming back for more.

Optimize Your Advertisements

You need to know which of your ads were most effective and on which users. This way, you’re not spending money on ads for the wrong platform, targeting the wrong audience, or promoting irrelevant products to people who don’t need them.

By tracking where users find your website and where they’re going when they get there, you can glean information on the effectiveness of your advertising content and platforms.

How to Analyze Visitor Behavior

Ultimately, visitor behavior analysis is a broad subject with countless legitimate methods. A good visitor behavior analysis should focus on things like time spent, clicks, mouse movements, and what kind of content is consumed.

Here are some ideas on how to begin analyzing visitor behavior:

Track Website Flow

You want to know how a user finds your website, where they start out, and where they go after they get there.

Users flow through your website through a natural progression of clicks and navigation. If you can identify the ideal flow to get customers to want your product more, then you’ve just performed valuable visitor behavior analysis.

Use Session Recording and Heatmaps

A session recording and heatmap is an excellent combination of quantitative and qualitative data that can paint a complete picture of the user experience.

With this data, you can track the user experience directly from beginning to end.

• Are users receiving a consistent, quality experience?
• Are they being prompted with the right messages at the right times?
• Is your website’s flow natural and easy to follow for customers?

All of these questions and more can be answered with some high-quality heatmaps and session recordings.

Make Direct Inquiries

One direct way to measure how much users enjoy your website is just to ask them.

You can’t predict what kinds of responses you’ll get, so it’s important that you design questions that directly address what you want to know (such as: “Did you find what you were looking for?”), in addition to more general questions (like “how was your experience overall?”).

Use a Content Optimization Platform Like Hushly

One straightforward way to analyze your visitor behavior is to let Hushly do it for you.

Our end-to-end user experience platform keeps track of important quantitative data like lead conversions, pageviews, and bounce rates. It combines that with professional qualitative analyses that we’ve tested and proven across multiple industries.

We can then take this information and craft an improved customer content experience.

Know Your Website Better to Improve the Customer Experience

Customers will associate every experience they have with your company with their holistic user experience. A smooth, easy-to-navigate website is excellent, but if you aren’t directing customers to conversion opportunities or presenting value to them at the right time, all your investment in that great-looking website will be for nothing. By implementing the tips above, you can avoid this fate.

Want to learn more about how Hushly can take over your user experience optimization? Request your demo today!