Data-informed decision-making https://creabl.com/service/session-recording has been around for a long time. Nevertheless, taking this approach to work can be challenging, even for bigger, developed companies.
Especially when day-to-day operations don’t leave much room for implementing new solutions, it seems easier to just carry on without changing perspective.
However, consider that such investments can provide you with substantial benefits and increase the efficiency of your operations.
This is also true in terms of user behavior. To learn more about what is influencing your performance, you need to read the underlying statistics like time spent on your website and conversion rate. In these cases, you need to dig a little deeper than just looking at the numbers. The real answer will lie in user behavior, or how people interact with your website.
How do you measure the engagement between your website or mobile application and its users?
If you rely mainly on assumptions and lucky gusses, it’s time to implement user behavior analytics. In this article, we’ll explain what that is, why it’s worth your time, and guide you through a few steps to help you succeed.
What is user behavior analytics?
At its core, user behavior analytics is about collecting and making sense of data that shows how your users behave or interact with your website or mobile app. There are many ways to view user behavior, from viewing session recordings and analyzing heat maps to tracking events and funnels. Each of these methods will give you a different level of insight and granularity.
User behavior analytics can help you find the root causes of changes in your general behavioral metrics such as user engagement, retention, and conversion rate. Instead of making guesses, you can rely on detailed and relevant information.
Even if you use different metrics like session duration or daily active users, they won’t give you critical information about what’s causing the incident, how users are interacting with your products, and potential problems. All of those answers are hidden within the context, and you need behavior analytics to find them.
Why should you analyze user behavior?
Introducing a new type of analytics can create initial uncertainty, especially when it requires additional effort from your team. They may question the business sense of observing the behavior of actual users, especially if you’ve only worked from prior assumptions.
The most important reason for implementing user behavior analytics is that you will learn what your users actually do and how they interact with your website or app. Without analyzing user behavior, you can only rely on your opinion or their behavior. Both of these options are much less reliable than real analytics and can lead to wrong decisions.
The first important mistake is thinking that you understand your users enough without talking to them or analyzing their behavior. Sometimes this perception can be attributed to not having the time or knowledge to learn more about your users. In other cases, you may perform one analysis and continue working on that old data indefinitely. Your audience is constantly evolving with your products and market trends, so you need to try to stay abreast of their needs.
What’s more, you’ll notice differences between declarative behavior data – or what your users say they’re doing – and what they’re actually doing. When discussing various UX research methods, the Nielsen Norman Group recommends relying on behavioral data to assess the usability of a design. Understanding the extent of such discrepancies can be surprising, yet they are deeply rooted in human psychology and can only be discerned by observing real-life behaviour.