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Looking Beyond Web Analytics to the Digital Customer Experience
When it comes to analytics, most webmasters focus on conversion metrics and look for actionable data that will improve their CTR and their conversion rate. While these metrics are indeed important, the end-user experience is about so much more than that.
The digital customer experience is something that covers more than just finding a product and making a purchase, and the best analytics experts look at a wide range of metrics. The keywords that the user searched for, the landing pages that they visited and the path they took through the site are just a few of the things that they consider. These classic analytics metrics are important, but they provide better insights when they are cross-referenced with other, more advanced data about user behaviour and their psychological profiles. Together, this data gives you an idea of how to give users the best possible experience - increasing conversions, profits and sales.
Building a Customer Profile
According to psychologist Dr Liraz Margalit, who specialises in web behaviours, there are six patterns of behaviour, and you can profile a person based on the patterns they exhibit while they are on your website. The amount of information you can collect through profiling is amazing. For example, you can determine the gender, age group and education level of the people who are coming to your website, and then work out what they are interested in - for example, whether they are ‘rational visitors’ who are interested in gathering information, wish-listers, who tend to add a lot of things to their cart but are unlikely to buy everything that they are looking at, brand-focused visitors, who are enthusiastic buyers, or hesitaters, who are likely to back out at the last second.
By identifying whether someone belongs to one of those categories, or to one of the other behaviour types, you can tailor your customer marketing efforts. Brand-oriented visitors respond well to aspirational messages. Wish-listers will be more likely to open their wallets and buy something if they are informed that it is on sale, and rational visitors need a lot of facts and figures to be willing to complete a purchase.
The psychology of analytics is something that often gets lost in the rush to find quantifiable metrics, but it is an important part of understanding your customers. The more you know about them, the easier it becomes to serve them well.
Tim
