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Imagine you’re running a brick-and-mortar store. From your perch at the counter, you can see and fix any issues the customers have as they move around the shop: if they have trouble navigating the aisles, you can make adjustments and help out; when they come up to the counter, you can strike up a conversation and learn who they are and what they’re looking for.
User researchBehavior analytics
Last updated
31 Jan 2024
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10
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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.
Table of contents
What is user behavior?
What is user behavior analytics (UBA)?
4 benefits of analyzing user behavior on your website
A 3-step framework for your user behavior analysis
What is user behavior?
User behavior encompassesall 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 activitygives you an inside look athow people interact with your site and what obstacles or hooks they experiencein their journey as your customers.
What is user behavior analytics (UBA)?
User behavior analytics (UBA) is a method forcollecting, combining, and analyzingquantitative and qualitativeuser datato understand how users interact with a product or website, and why.
Note: UBA is sometimes confused with UEBA (user and entity behavior analytics), which focuses more on cybersecurity and data protectionthanconversion optimization; and behavior analytics is sometimes confused with behavioral analytics, which focuses more on predicting user behavior than improving the user experience (UX).
When you want an answer to pressing business questions such as “Why are people coming to my website?” or “Why are they leaving?,”traditional analyticsalone can tell you that quantitative activity is happening, but can’t give you any of the ‘whys’. That's whereuser behavior analyticscomes in, with tools that help you get a full picture of user behavior:
Session recordings
A 2-minute long session recording on one of Hotjar's pages
Heat mapsshow you where on a page customers are spending the most time and where they are clicking, so you can see which buttons, calls to action (CTAs) videos, or other clickable assets get the most and least interactions
Two types of heatmap: scroll (left) and click (right)
On-site surveys can be targeted to specific pages and help you collect personal responses from users about what is working and what isn’t
Feedback widgets likeHotjar'slet you get hyper-targeted visual feedback on specific pages of your website
The feedback widget in action on one of our pages
4 benefits of tracking and analyzing user behavior on your website
Spending time and effort analyzing user behavior withwebsite trackinghelps you do for your website what a brick-and-mortar shop owner can do in her shop every day:
Get real, first-hand insight into what people are interested in, gravitating towards, or ignoring
Identify points in thecustomer journey where they get stuck, struggle, get confused, and leave
Investigate how specific pages and sections are performing
Understand what your customers want and care about
How to analyze user behavior in a simple 3-step framework
Now that you know whatwebsite tracking toolsyou'll have to use, you can start thinking abouthowyou'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 isa 3-step frameworkwe use a lot at Hotjar, which relies on a combination of traditional analytics,behavior analytics, and user feedback. Let me show you 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 CEO and co-founder David Darmanin thinks there arethree 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 + on-site surveys to learn user motivations
First, use Google Analytics to learn which channels bring in the most users. Log in and go toAcquisition> All Traffic> Source Medium.
You will see a list of your most fruitful sources. Let’s say, for example, you find that organic search has a higher conversion rate than social media. From here, you can infer motivation: the people coming in via search are more motivated to buy than those coming from social media. So you may want to expand your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts rather than your Facebook campaign.
You can further narrow your search to find out which landing pages organic search users frequently arrive at, by clicking on google/organic and choosingLanding Pageas asecondary dimensionof the report. This will further help you assess your users’ search motivation, but it will also help you figure out which pages to place surveys on.
Once you have a list of your most popular landing pages, place a survey on them. Tailor the question to learn who your users are and why they are visiting your site, and gatherpsychographic dataon their’ attitudes, values, and desires.
Relevant questions to ask:
What’s the main reason for your visit today?
How did you hear about us?
See AlsoUser Activity LogHow would you describe yourself in one sentence?
You can useHotjar’s on-site survey featureto target questions to a specific page of your site. From the Hotjar dashboard, list the pages you’d want the survey to show up on:
Once you’ve gathered a significant amount of information, you can use the data to create user personas that reflect your customers. A simple user persona should answer the following questions:
Who are you?
What’s your main goal?
What’s your main barrier to achieving this goal?
Use the answer to the questions you asked to draw conclusions and create short profiles of your ideal customer(s), which you can use to inform and improve your marketing and design efforts (if you want to know how to do it, here is astep-by-step guide to creating user personas).
Step 2: find out what makes users leave your website
In our DRIVERS/BARRIERS/HOOK model, 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 largestexit rates. Go toBehavior> Site Content> Exit Pages.
This will give you a list of the top pages that users view right before they leave your website. Once you have identified the pages you want to investigate, useSession Recordingsto see what users were doing before they jumped ship. Filter the recordings by exit URL to watch only users who bounced off the page in question.
Watch as many videos as you can, and take detailed notes on what exactly users did before leaving. Here’s an example of auser recordings analysis spreadsheet, used by Joel Klettke to analyze Divorce Online UK:
In addition to session recordings, set up heat maps to see user activity such as where users move, click, and drop off on each page. Look for evidence that people are failing to interact with important links, buttons, or CTAs.
See it in action: in the following heatmap on our careers page, you can see that while most users read about Hotjar’s culture, almost nobody scrolls down far enough to read the “What Is Hotjar?” section (the bit in blue at the bottom of the page). If that were essential to the message of our hiring page, then we would really need to move it up to a more prominent position.
TIP: check out our guide onheat map analysisanduser recording analysisfor an in-depth look at how to interpret the insight you get from each tool.
After gathering enough information, you should be able to see exactly what users were doing, reading, or looking at before they decided to leave a page. From there, you can draw conclusions about the cause(s). Maybe your CTA is missing, or a link is broken, or your page is rendering incorrectly.
For example, Zenprint, an online printing service provider,used recordings and heat mapsto look for specific issues that caused visitors to drop off of their product page. After discovering a design problem in their pricing table, they tested other designs, found and implemented one that was more conducive to sales, and eliminated that initial barrier.
Step 3: discover what convinces users to convert
A powerful way to increase conversions is by investigating what happens when peopledoconvert. This is one of the most overlooked factors in user behavior, because when things are going right, we tend to celebrate instead of learning from it and applying that takeaway elsewhere.
Knowing why people convert will help you:
Pinpoint the strongest selling points of your product, which you can play up even more
Figure out the most persuasive elements of your website, like a compelling banner or CTA, so you can use them on key pages
Inform your user personas (discussed above) by helping create a clearer picture of your ideal customer
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 user feedback
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 upa post-purchase survey on the thank-you page. Ask customers, “What convinced you to sign up/convert today?”
Send email surveys to customers and ask them questions about themselves and their decision-making process, including:
What was the obstacle in your mind that would have stopped you from using/buying [product]?
How would you rate your overall purchasing experience?
What almost stopped you from completing your purchase?
Interview people. Ask dedicated customers if you can call them, and have them talk you through the checkpoints of their buying experience. While you may not be able to speak to a statistically significant number of people, you should be able to identify commonalities from just a handful of interviews.
Then,analyze the answers you’ve collectedto home in on what went right and how you can maximize it throughout your site.
Start tracking user behavior right away
At Hotjar, we believe in obsessing over our customers. User behavior analysis gives you the tools to do the same by getting to know your users intimately. The best part is that it’s easy,protects user privacy, and gives you quick, usable results.
Are you convinced yet? Get started right now by signing up for Hotjar’s suite of userbehavior analytics tools.
FAQs about user behavior analytics
User behavior analytics (UBA) isa method of tracking, collecting, and analyzing quantitative and qualitative user datato understand how and why users interact with a product or website.
Analyzing user behavior includes monitoring actions visitors take on a website such as where they click, how they scroll, where they encounter blockers, and where they exit from. Tracking these behaviors gives you insight into how people interact with your pages and what they experience during their customer journey so you can make decisions about how to improve your site.
Traditionalwebsite analyticsanswers questions likehow many?orhow often?, and the answers are typically numerical, meaning the data can be measured.Tools like Google Analyticslet you track data to analyze site performance with metrics and KPIs like pageviews, average order value,exitsandbounce rates, andsession duration.
User behavior analytics (UBA)combines qualitative and quantitative data to answer some of the questions that are left unanswered by traditional analysis, likehowandwhyusers interact with your website the way they do. Userbehavior analytics tools likeheatmaps,session recordings,on-site surveys, andfeedback widgetsgive you a more complete picture of the user experience, which can help you pinpoint changes that need to be made to your site to give the user a better experience.
To track user behavior, usebehavior analyticsand feedback tools like:
Click, scroll and move heatmaps to see where and how customers are spending time on your website—including where they click and move, and how far they scroll down your pages—so you can see which elements of your site get the most (and least) interactions
Session recordings (aka session replays): to show you how real people interact with your site; watch renderings of actions taken by users across your pages, such as rage clicks u-turns, tapping, and scrolling
On-site surveys to hear from real users in their own words; on-site surveys can be targeted to specific pages so you can collect responses about what’s working (and what isn’t) on your site
Feedback widgets (likeIncoming Feedback):to get targeted visual feedback directly from users on specific pages and elements of your website so you can identify problem areas and opportunities to improve the user experience (UX)
To understand user behavior, collect and analyze data that gives you actionable insight into the customer journey from start to finish, such as:
Drivers that bring users to your site
Barriers or blockers they might encounter
Hooks that persuade them to convert
By pinpointing these key moments in the customer journey, you can notice trends or anomalies in user behavior, gain a better understanding of how and why people interact with your site, and optimize as needed.