Far too many businesses have an unhealthy obsession with what is known in the trade as vanity metrics. Essentially, these are data points that indicate your business is gaining traction across your digital assets; however, in reality, although you are attracting a large number of users, they are not converting. Without turning your users into paying customers, you are not just leaving money on the table, but could be casting your company an inordinate amount of money from wasted ad spend and server costs. Instead, it’s crucial to place most of your focus and energy in not merely gaining users, but in turning them into loyal customers who will hopefully patronize your company for years to come. This post will cover a few ways in which you can make this a reality and boost your lifetime revenue per customer.
Why Understanding User Behaviour Matters
The way a user behaves, and the path they take through your website or application, can tell you an awful lot about their intent, any bottlenecks that might be costing you customers, and a myriad of other incredibly useful indicators. This might be from using Interactive Heatmaps that show you how a user is navigating your site, which we will discuss in a bit more detail later, through to where a user might be rage clicking out of sheer frustration, which can indicate you need to perform some updates to ensure a much smoother process. Because of the huge competition in the digital space (and really all forms of business these days), you can gain a significant edge by creating an experience that induces sales rather than hindering them.
The Three Types of Behavioral Data That Predict Conversions
When we’re talking about user behavior, there are many points you need to take notice of. But there are three significant ones that, if paid attention to and fixed if required, will ensure that they are more likely to convert into paying customers than not.
| Data type | What it shows | Conversion impact |
| Click maps | Where users actually click (or don’t) | Knowing where your users click or avoid can give you a good idea of what needs to be fixed. For instance, it could be that they are adding products to the art, but failing to move to the checkout stage because the button blends in with the background too much. |
| Heat maps | How far users scroll and where they move their cursor | Seeing how they move around your site can give you great information regarding where might be best to add CTAs or move existing elements to better meet where they are most likely to move to. |
| Rage and dead clicks | Frustration signals (repeated clicks, clicks on non-clickable elements) | The only thing worse than losing a customer because of poor UX is losing them because a button or CTA isn’t functional. Knowing where they’re rage clicking can help you to smooth out the buying process and fix any bottlenecks. |
How to Use Visual Behaviour Data to Improve Conversions
So now you know just how important visual data is, the next question is, how can you actually use it to improve your outcomes?
- Improve CTA placement: Ultimately, your main aim is to guide a user to some kind of action that will lead to a sale. Calls To Actions are the main driver of this, and when you get them set up just right, you can realize incredible gains. But you can’t just plop them down anywhere and hope for the best. You might get lucky, but without data and continual testing, you will never convert the maximum number of users into customers.
- Optimise forms: Although you want to increase revenue, not all user behaviors are specifically aimed at this goal. You might want a user to be able to fill out a form correctly or send you a message, and knowing how they navigate your forms will give you a good indication of whether you need to update them.
- Fix navigation issues: Aside from good UX and SEO reasons, a solid layout that ensures seamless navigation is simply good business. The more able users are to reach their devised end goal, the more likely it is that they will spend money or perform an action you want them to. In fact, without seamless navigation, you can actually lose customers and, in some instances, cause significant damage to your brand.
- Strengthen on-page content strategy: Regardless of the sort of content you are creating, understanding how a user interacts with it can give you insights that enable you to update it to match their intent.
Designing Conversion Experiments Using Behaviour Data
Even with all the data in the world, without using it in terms of experimentation, you will never be able to fully harness what it is telling you. Your goal is to turn this user behavior into actionable insights that help you turn your website into a driver of growth and revenue, and the best way to achieve this goal is via A/B testing.
What Is A/B testing?
A/B testing involves testing one variable against another to figure out which offers the best outcome. Once you have found a winner, you can keep testing it against new variables to continually improve the result. When it comes to which variables you can change, you have numerous options:
- Color: Color has a much larger impact on interaction than most people think. In some cases, it might be that an element is blending too much into the background, while in others, it could be that different colors simply elicit different responses.
- Placement: Where you place elements can often be the difference between a user clicking on it or ignoring it.
- Font: You may not believe it, but the font you use can actually alter user behavior in ways that you might not have planned for.
The idea is that by performing multiple tests, you can gain a greater understanding of how your users interact with your site and “nudge” them towards an outcome conducive to your business.
Knowing and understanding how a user to your website or digital asset interacts with it can give you a huge insight and help you to come up with ways to improve the user experience. Using any of the user behavioral tools on the market will give you amazing data that could help to give your company a leg up over your competition.