How tracking user behavior on your website can improve customer experience

An ecommerce website doesn’t work like that. You can’t really see people as they wander through your site pages, and you can’t informally chat about their impressions during checkout. Your access to your users is limited, and you may have a hard time understanding user behavior or knowing what users want.

That’s where studying user behavior via user behavior analytics (UBA) comes in, giving you a window into the user experience you wouldn’t have otherwise.

What is user behavior?

User behavior encompasses all the actions visitors take on a website: where and what they click on, how they scroll down a page, where they stumble, and where they eventually drop off the page and leave.

Tracking user activity and conducting user behavior analysis gives you an inside look at how people interact with your site and what obstacles or hooks they experience in their journey as your customers.

What is user behavior analytics (UBA)?

User behavior analytics (UBA) is a method for collecting, combining, and analyzing quantitative and qualitative user data to understand how users interact with a product or website, and why.

When you want an answer to pressing business questions such as “Why are people coming to my website?” or “Why are they leaving?”, traditional analytics on its own can tell you what is happening, but can’t give you any of the ‘whys’. That's where user behavior analytics comes in, with tools that help you get a full picture of user needs and behavior.

User behavior analytics tools to understand and empathize with real users

Session recordings

Session recordings are video-like playbacks that show you exactly how real users navigate and engage with your site. They’re invaluable for customer behavior analysis because they provide vital context that’s missing from numbers alone, showing you why users took the actions they did.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are color-coded visualizations of where users click, tap, scroll, and move to on your page. They reveal which elements catch—or lose—customers’ attention, so you can see which buttons, calls to action (CTAs), videos, and other clickable assets perform best (and which ones to improve).

Surveys

On-site surveys ask your users specific questions, like “What convinced you to sign up today?” or “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?” (so you can calculate your Net Promoter Score®). These surveys can be targeted to specific pages or sent later via email, helping you collect personal responses from users about what’s working and what isn’t.

Feedback

Feedback widgets enable your website visitors to leave comments at any time and highlight specific parts of your page for context, so you can capture in-the-moment feedback at every stage of the user journey. Try placing them on each variant of your A/B tests to give you deeper insights about why the winning version came out on top.

3 benefits of tracking and analyzing user behavior on your website

Using website tracking to gather data for user behavior analysis gives product teams rich insights about the usability and functionality of their site, and lets you make data-driven decisions based on real user actions.

Here are three powerful benefits of user behavior analytics:

How to analyze user behavior in a simple 3-step framework

Now that you know which website tracking tools to use, you can start thinking about how you're going to use them.

To get a full picture of user behavior, you have to be strategic about the user behavior data you collect, and use it to understand three key things about your users:

• The drivers that bring them to your website

• The barriers that might stop them or make them leave

• The hooks that persuade them to convert

This is a three-step framework we use a lot at Hotjar, which relies on a combination of traditional analytics, behavior analytics, and user feedback. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: find out why people are coming to your website

To learn why users are coming to your site in the first place, you need to identify the drivers or triggers that motivate them to visit it.

Hotjar’s co-founder David Darmanin thinks there are three types of website users:

• Just-browsing wanderers: people who are just looking around and have no intention of buying your product

• Determined heroes: people who have arrived with the sole intent of buying your product, and will get to the end despite any obstacle they encounter

• Undecided explorers: people who may be on the fence about whether or not to buy from you

You’re unlikely to win over the just-browsing wanderers, and you’ve already secured the determined heroes. Who you really need to focus on understanding and catering to are the undecided explorers. And to do that, you need to really get inside their heads.

So how do you find that out? Ask them.

Use analytics and on-site surveys to learn user motivations

First, use Google Analytics to learn which channels bring in the most users. To do this, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium and investigate which channels have the highest conversion rates.

To discover which pages users from these high-converting channels frequently land on, click on your chosen channel (such as ‘google/organic’) and add ‘Landing Page’ as a secondary dimension.

Once you have a list of your most popular landing pages, embed a survey on them using Hotjar Surveys. Tailor the question to learn who your users are and why they’re visiting your site, and gather psychographic data on their attitudes, values, and desires.

Some examples of relevant questions to ask:

• What’s the main reason for your visit today?

• How did you hear about us?

• How often do you shop for [item that your business sells]?

• Which category best describes you? [List of options, e.g. for a sportswear company it might be ‘I’m a runner’, ‘I’m a weightlifter’, ‘I’m a swimmer’, ‘I do a bit of everything’]

Once you’ve gathered a significant amount of information, you can use the data to

• Create user personas that reflect your customers (follow our step-by-step guide to creating user personas)

• Analyze what makes these landing pages so successful and replicate these tactics on other pages to reduce bounce rate

• Follow up on juicy insights by watching their related recordings or inviting those respondents to a user interview

Step 2: find out what makes users leave your website

In our drivers/barriers/hook model above, barriers are the pain points that stop website visitors from becoming customers. That could be anything from the way prices are displayed to the wording on a product page to a broken form at checkout. User behavior analysis can help you understand why people are dropping out of the funnel, so you can plug those leaks and increase conversions.

Identify problem areas, then use recordings and heatmaps to investigate

Instead of performing user behavior analysis on every page of your website, focus on problematic pages first. You can identify them through Google Analytics by looking for pages with the largest exit rates, or by filtering your session recordings in Hotjar by exit page. Once you’ve identified the pages you want to investigate in GA or Hotjar, watch recordings to spot common problems or issues and see what users were doing before they jumped ship. 

You can also use heatmaps to quickly identify where users are spending time on your pages. For example, use an Engagement Zone map to get an overview of where people click, scroll, and move on your page, or use a rage click map to spot anger-inducing areas. Then, jump straight from your heatmap of choice to a session recording of the user behavior in action. 

After gathering enough information, you should be able to see exactly what users were doing, reading, looking at, or (eek) getting annoyed by before they decided to leave a page. From there, you can draw data-driven conclusions about the cause(s). Maybe your CTA is missing, or a link is broken, or your page is rendering incorrectly.

For Gogoprint, this process enabled them to solve a major bottleneck in the customer journey, decreasing the drop-off rate on a problematic page by 7%—and increasing conversions by 2%.

Step 3: discover what convinces users to convert

A powerful way to increase conversions is by investigating what happens when people do convert. This is one of the most overlooked factors in user behavior analysis, because when things are going right, we’re often so busy celebrating that we forget to learn from it and apply that takeaway elsewhere.

Knowing why people convert helps you

1. Pinpoint the strongest selling points of your product, which you can emphasize in your marketing messaging to connect with even more right-fit customers

2. Figure out the most persuasive elements of your website, like a compelling banner or CTA, so you can use them on key pages

3. Inform your user personas, by creating a clearer picture of your ideal customer that helps you improve satisfaction (and reduce customer churn)

In order to understand the ‘hooks’ that persuade certain users to complete the checkout process, you need to find out what these users themselves all have in common. What brought them to your website? What made them skirt the ‘barriers’ listed above?

Find out what went right by collecting feedback and interviewing users

In this case, too, the most effective way to learn about your customers is by asking them. You can do this in a few different ways:

• Set up a post-purchase survey on the thank-you page. Ask customers, “What convinced you to sign up/convert today?”

• Send email surveys to customers. Ask them questions about themselves and their decision-making process, like:

  • How would you rate your overall purchasing experience on a scale of 1 to 10?

  • Was there anything that almost stopped you from completing your purchase?

  • What made you choose us over a competitor?

• Interview people. Conduct user interviews with existing customers or members of your ideal customer profile using a user interview tool like Hotjar Engage. Get in-depth insights about what made (or would make) them convert, or use the sessions to run usability tests in which they walk through the checkout experience in real time and gauge their response at every stage.

Then, analyze the answers you’ve collected to home in on what went right and how you can maximize it throughout your site.

Start tracking user behavior right away

Tracking user behavior gives you a wealth of data that can be used to improve the customer experience in user-centric ways. With the right suite of user behavior analytics tools, it’s easy to identify opportunities, fix pitfalls, and make needle-moving changes that your users will love.