User Behaviour Analysis: Importance of The Question “Why?”

Marketing is all about catering to your customers’ needs. In the real world, it is easier to lure in customers when you make good connections, establish trust and make long term relationships. But, in the digital space, consumers often behave and interact much differently to the way they would behave in real life. Analysing and understanding the behaviours of your customers and their preferences means you can change your marketing strategies accordingly. This is key to reaping smarter benefits.

What are user behaviour analytics?
User behaviour analytics includes collecting, combining and analysing both quantitative and qualitative data on how users interact with a brand’s touchpoints. This extends to the user journey and the way customers interact with a product.
User behaviour analytics not only focuses on how a customer behaves, but can also help to determine the reasons behind consumer behaviour. It is important to question why they like or dislike something and to use the data to improve their user experience for better interactions with your brand and your products.
User behaviour data is essential for maintaining your website, enabling it to best serve customers and maximise the potential of sales. Websites can look into data such as what customers click on, areas they stumble in, and the points in which they leave the website.
Tracking why and where users leave a site
The Behaviour Flow report in Google Analytics shows data such as the way a customer moves through your website, the length of time they spend on every page, and the final page they go to before leaving the site. These analytics can be useful for determining a number of different things. For example, the way a user moves through the website can show that they might be confused or troubled when finding what they want. The final page that customers visit before leaving a site can point out potential problems with certain pages of the website, especially if a high number of people are leaving the website from the same page.
If your analytics show that a particular pop-up is leading to customers leaving the website, consider communicating your message to them in an alternative way. Popular landing pages can identify what the biggest sources of traffic for your website are, and can help identify the sources that should be focused on in the future to improve website traffic. Taking into account user interaction, analytics can greatly improve consumers’ user experience with a website. Overall, this leads to increased interaction and ultimately, conversions.
Trending pages your audience tends to gravitate towards provides an important insight into the types of content that your audience wants to see. Use Event Tracking in Google Analytics to see what content users are sharing with others. Track your customers’ interest levels and cater to their interests by providing the content that they will engage with. Reviewing the way customers shop for a product such as data on product clicks, viewing of product details and return rates can provide valuable insight into the types of product features customers are looking for.
Improving user experience with behaviour analytics
You can also use the following user behaviour analytics tools to further improve user experience.
- Session recordings gives you renderings of real actions your customers take on your website including clicks, taps and scrolling.
- A heat map will give you ideas on where users spend most of their time engaging with CTAs, videos and other clickable assets.
- Funnel analysis will help you optimise where the biggest barrier in conversion lies. It tracks page by page till users complete their goals.
- An on-site survey will help with direct personal responses from users with things that are working and ones that are not.
- Feedback widgets help with incoming feedback by providing hyper-targeted visual feedback on specific pages.
Once you have completed your user behaviour analysis, you will be able to create a user persona and a customer journey map. You can use this to highlight some major customer pain points and areas for improvements. By addressing the behaviour of your customers, you can tailor their experience to be more satisfactory.
Breaking down search behaviours
Search behaviour has been included in Google Analytics since 2005. According to a report by Marketing Land, 10 million websites make use of Google Analytics, due to the fact that 80% of searchers use Google.
Whenever a user searches for something, their intent will be either navigational, informational or transactional. If a user particularly searches for a site like Twitter or Netflix, it is navigational, ie. searching to get to the site that they need to go to. With information at our fingertips, certain inquisitive users utilise Google to update themselves with knowledge. For example, to find out the best Oscar winning movie of 2018, or to take a deep dive on the lifecycle of Siberian tigers. Finally, when a user searches to purchase a product, this search action is transactional. That is, money is being exchanged.
Search behaviour will be determined by demographics as well. That includes age, gender, location, income and education. These factors all influence what and how an individual searches. For example, a young person is more likely to search for branded shoes like Nike, while a middle aged man might be more inclined to search for comfortable footwear. While this seems general (and this doesn’t mean an old person wouldn’t buy branded shoes, either) but distinct behaviour patterns emerge from trends in demographics.

Demographic search behaviour is influenced by technological advances. For example, voice search technology and the increase of mobile phone usage has led to an increase of simplified speech-style searches. Developments in language have seen conversational queries like, “Which is the best pizza house near me?” to become more widely used.

Users can range anywhere on the spectrum between three broad categories. There are “just browsing” users who may be only skimming through your website with no intention of making a purchase. Determined shoppers will get their hands on your product no matter what, while an undecided potential customer stays in a dilemma deciding whether to buy or not. It is up to you to focus on them and chase them up till they make a purchase.
Customer Behaviour with Google Analytics
Understand search intent and landing pages
Check out the overview in Google Analytics. Navigate: Google Analytics>Acquisition>Overview. You will gain insight into your users’ search intent.
In order to look at language, device, location, age range and gender of users navigate: Google Analytics>Audience>Overview. Here you can understand what interests each sub-category.

According to Neil Patel, it is found that organic search gives higher conversion rates. Explore yourself by navigating: Google Analytics>Acquisition>All traffic>Source medium. Finding the landing page will help you figure out which place users arrive at.
Once you understand which is the most popular landing page, survey your customers for psychographic data. It may include queries on their main reason for visiting your page, how they came to know about your website, or describing yourself in one sentence.

Create an outline of your users
Once you are done with user behaviour research, create a user persona including the following:
Demographics: age, location, marital status
Psychographics: interest, activities
Behaviour: search intent, device, language.
The Content Marketing Institute states that 37% of B2B marketers and 40% of B2C marketers make use of a written and visual content marketing strategy.
So, find out what’s holding back any transactions or conversions. It could be the way prices are displayed, wordings on product page, or perhaps a broken form at the checkout. Monitor problematic pages by navigating Behaviour>Site content>Exit pages. Make use of session recordings to see what users do before they leave your pages. Filter recordings by exit URL and see how bouncing happens differently. Heat maps can be utilised to find how people fail to follow important links, buttons and CTAs.
Add more to the user persona by finding what's the common hook. Make note of the strongest selling points of products, and the persuasive elements.
Strategic Surveys
Your customers are an important resource. You should always do a post-purchase survey on a thank you page, asking them what convinced them to buy. Email surveys can be used to ask customers about themselves, regarding decision making and what they liked, what would have stopped them, and ratings for their overall purchasing experience. Furthermore, you can sharpen your strategies using statistically significant numbers which you can use to identify commonalities.