Using website data to improve customer experience

Yesterday I did a session on using website data to improve your online customer experience and it raised some really interesting questions.

Your website captures endless data about your users and customers, but how do you pick the most important?

Here's what you need to be tracking:

• Unique visitors to your site
• Engagement time
• Landing page
• Exit pages
• Bounce rate
• Internal search
• Cart/checkout abandonment rate
• Source/medium
• Goals

Internal search data is often overlooked but this is excellent for giving feedback on your user journeys and site navigation as well as what content is popular.

Why track your cart/checkout abandonment rate? It's so important to understand how many users you're losing on a checkout process. If it’s above-average you may have a UX issue.

Knowing where your users leave your site is just as important as knowing where they start. Using exit pages you can understand if your users are leaving before you'd like them to.

Why is it so important??

1. Know your customers and users – build personas and segments depending on what content they view and measure engagement. Build your customer journeys with this data.
2. Enhance the experience - making small improvements across your site will benefit your current users and attract new users.
3. Know your best content – by knowing what content is getting high engagement you can focus on this and grow it
4. Fix issues, errors, and bugs on your site – what’s stopping your user from doing something? Maybe it's slow speed on a page or broken links, fixing these proactively will improve the online experience for your customers.
5. Increase revenue, conversion rates and leads – by optimising your website based on the above you will ultimately increase revenue, sales, and conversion rates by making the journey easier for your customers and users to complete a goal or action.?

What's in your toolbox?

These are some of the top tools I like to use to capture the experience and behaviour of our members:

• Google Analytics
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Google Search Console
• Hotjar
• Screaming Frog

Using heatmaps to improve member and customer engagement?

Are members seeing important content? This content is what a user sees when they first land on your page, before any scrolling. Only 20% of users get to the last quarter of your page. Put important information at the top.

?Are they getting distracted?

Pay attention to how distributed their mouse activity, scrolling, or eye movements are. If users seem to be bouncing around your site or are spending time in areas without important content your site may be too busy.

You want your users to be able to smoothly flow from one important element of your site to another. If this isn’t the path visitors seem to be taking, you may want to rearrange or modify your layout to ensure better engagement.

?Quick wins

1. Make time to capture and report on your website data and user experience
2. Check your current website speed and top pages – make changes if they are slow e.g. compress images. Did you know if your website loads 1s-3s it increases the probability of bounce by 35%, if it's up to 5sc it’s 90%!
3. Capture your abandonment rate for your online checkout process you could be losing revenue
4. Test your top customer journeys – did you encounter any problems?
5. Review your call to actions - use heatmaps to see what elements users click
6. Test your login process - is it quick, easy and simple?
7. Use internal site search to understand how easy it is for a user to find information and share around the content that's being searched for
8. Find out how many users use a mobile – have you tested your site on a mobile, is it user friendly?
9. Add metadata into your CMS to help boost SEO
10. Try the 5-second test – get a colleague, friend or volunteer to look at a design or page for 5 seconds, then ask them some questions about what they remember about the design such as ‘what is the purpose of the page?’. Answers can flag any critical issues – this is great if you need to refresh a page or build a new page.
11. Survey your users – use a system like hotjar to add quick, informative pop-up surveys to help understand your user's needs and behaviour??