Everything You Need to Know About Behavior Analytics

Nathan Mckinley
Product Coalition
Published in
8 min readJan 6, 2022

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(Source: Freepik)

The most important role of a product manager is to truly understand the customers and their problems. This entails gathering basic information about them as well as analyzing what they do and why they do it. Gaining a clear understanding of your customers’ needs, desires, preferences, and dislikes entails gathering detailed information.

It includes how customers react to your product, their actions in your store, their website navigation, and every other touchpoint along the customer journey. Understanding your customers is a goal.

The most successful brands use behavioral analytics to help their marketing, customer service, product, and operations teams drive incredible ROI for their companies. To understand what behavioral analytics is, we have to discuss behavior data.

What is behavioral data?

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The information generated as a result of a customer’s interaction with a company is known as behavioral data. These interactions can be page views or email sign-ups.

The sources of behavioral data are:

What is behavioral analytics?

The combination of big data analytics and artificial intelligence is known as behavioral analytics. It collects and analyzes quantitative and qualitative user data to figure out how and why people interact with your website and product. It also identifies the patterns, trends, anomalies, and other useful insights in user behavioral data so that appropriate actions can be taken.

Understanding user behavior is essential for increasing engagement, retention, lifetime value, conversion rates, and revenue.

Why is behavioral analytics beneficial for the company?

Conducting behavioral analytics has lots of advantages, especially in today’s online environment. behavioral analytics is critical for increasing conversion, engagement, and retention at the company. behavioral analytics helps you:

  • Examine what prevents users from taking action.
  • Recognize what users ignore pay attention to, and get sidetracked by.
  • Getting feedback from visitors.

Types of behavioral analytics

The following four examples are shown, where behavioral analytics can be used.

  1. „Retail and e-commerce” behavioral analytics: This type aids in the creation of product recommendations and future sales trends based on current consumer preferences.

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„App development” behavioral analytics: Businesses can forecast future trends by observing how people use an app. Companies will offer app upgrades based on Behavioral patterns, just as they do with online gaming analytics.

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„Security” behavioral analytics: Both government organizations and business companies utilize this type of analytics to detect compromised information by detecting anomalous activity all around the world.

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„Online gaming” behavioral analytics: This aids in forecasting usage patterns and preferences for future offerings. Gaming businesses are using behavioral analytics to target particular in-game upsells to their clients as they shift away from packaged products.

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What kind of actions can you track with Behavioral analytics?

By tracking user activity on your site or app and collecting feedback from real users, behavioral analytics gives you a complete picture of the user experience.

Tracking mouse movements

Mouse movements show how visitors navigate your website or app by moving their mouse around on the screen. Because users’ eyes tend to follow their cursor, mouse movements can reveal what catches their attention and what they ignore, which can be called eye-tracking.

Tracking mouse or eye movements is a good method for behavioral analytics because it shows:

  • What is ignored in a section of the website?
  • When users navigate the page or website in a different order than you planned
  • When users pay more attention to a single element on the page, such as a product image or description than to anything else.

With these insights, you can improve user experience and guide users’ attention to the most important elements of the site by recreating what works on different pages of your site or app — and removing or testing variations of sections that don’t work.

Scrolling

Scroll tracking shows you how far down your site or product’s users scrolled. This is a useful insight for behavioral analytics because it allows you to see if users get to the important parts of a page. With this knowledge, you can develop a solution, such as repositioning your CTA or placing it in multiple locations on the page.

Feedbacks

User feedback allows you to see into your users’ heads as they browse your site or use your product, and it can help you make better decisions about how to improve their experience. You can find out:

  • Why are visitors leaving your page?
  • What do they have to say about your product and how you can make it better?
  • Why are they focusing on one product, service, or feature while ignoring others?
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Behavioral analytics tools

Behavioral analytics can be tracked with session replays, A/B testings, heatmaps, or customer feedback, and voice-of-customer tools.

Session replay tools

Session replay tools display renderings of mouse movements, clicks, taps, and scrolling that real visitors make while browsing your site or app. Observing session recordings allows you to see behind your users’ backs as they interact with various pages, headlines, copy, images, and CTAs. You’ll be able to see where they get stuck, what they do before leaving your site or app, and what they pay attention to.

A/B testing tools

A/B testing tools allow you to compare two versions of your website or app to see which one performs better. A/B testing is useful for putting to the test a hypothesis you came up with based on other user data or insights.

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Feedback and voice of the customer tools

With feedback and voice of the customer (VoC) tools, customers can tell you why they’re abandoning their cart, leaving your site, or what’s stopping them from taking action. You can ask your users closed- or open-ended questions, and you can even ask for a rating with surveys, depending on the situation.

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Heatmap tools

Heatmap tools provide a visual, color-coded representation of which elements on a website or product page users interact with the most or least. You’ll be able to see whether reach important content, click on links and buttons, or become distracted by non-clickable elements.

What is the best way to conduct a behavioral analysis?

It’s essential to remember, that behavioral analysis is a continuous activity. You may change your strategy to ever-changing client ideas and behaviors by:

  • repeating the stages,
  • and assessing your results frequently.
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  1. Define your company’s and behavioral analytics goals.
  2. Conducting a behavioral analysis, like any strategic process, begins with your company’s goals and objectives. After this, choose which KPIs will determine the success of your analysis based on your objectives.
  3. Let’s say your goal is to increase revenue, the KPIs can be:

Boost customer retention among paying consumers,

convert more people through the checkout funnel,

or boost your onboarding conversions.

Determine who your target market is.

What are the most valuable customer segments for your company? Which ones have the most chance of increasing their spending, or becoming regular customers? Identifying these main parts allows you to concentrate on increasing your return on investment.

Behavioral analytics systems allow you to go beyond typical demographic variables like location, gender, and income. With behavioral analytics tools, you can segment based on important behaviors like product usage, purchase reasons, purchase timing, buyer’s journey stage, and more.

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Make a map that leads to your objectives.

A user’s critical path is a series of actions, that align with your product’s goal. Decide which paths are most important to your success in terms of your objectives. For example, the path for an e-commerce site might look like this:

Research🡪Browse🡪Compare🡪Add to cart🡪Pay🡪Checkout🡪 Order Confirmation

Choose your data sources.

You’ll have to figure out where your data comes from. Because the buyer’s journey spans numerous platforms (mobile, computer, in-store), you’ll need to figure out how to connect all of the data. Only a cross-platform behavioral analytics tool will provide you with a genuinely unified perspective of the consumer experience.

Perform your research.

It’s time to assess the information you’ve gathered. Compare and contrast qualitative and quantitative data. Look for patterns in your monitored events and important paths to success that highlight places for growth, friction points, or accomplishments that you can build on. With a full picture of your data, you need to ask these questions:

What are the most common ways for people to buy a product?

What are the most common methods of purchasing?

What are the effects of discounts and incentives on client retention?

Where are we losing clients and why are they leaving?

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Use what you’ve learned

Now that you’ve started to see the bigger picture, it’s time to put your newfound knowledge to the test. Implement your results with a new marketing campaign, product update, or service delivery adjustment. Before starting any new business, be sure you know what you’re testing and what you want to achieve.

Iterate and measure

Use your analysis to predict what customers will think and do as a result of the change as you roll out new initiatives. Compare their responses to your forecasts, and use the metrics you established in step 1 to assess the success of your changes. Don’t give up if the first iteration doesn’t yield the expected results; try another version.

Who should use behavioral analytics?

The new currency of modern business is data. Everyone in any industry should be able to use behavioral analytics to help them grow their company. When marketers, product managers, and data analysts use behavioral analysis tools, they can start to see their customers as people rather than data points.

Behavioral analytics and marketing

Marketers can use behavioral analytics to maximize campaign effectiveness, improve customer acquisition, and increase customer lifetime value (LTV). A marketing team must know which campaigns are increasing engagement and revenue.

Behavioral analytics and product management

Product managers can use behavioral analytics to create a product roadmap, improve user engagement, and develop new features. Using behavioral analytics, you can track and isolate users who use the new feature, as well as the process, that led them to use it. If the new feature fails, the product team may be able to identify points of friction that are preventing users from engaging with the new feature.

Conclusion

Anyone who owns a website should be familiar with behavioral analytics. You can learn why people visit your website, why they leave, and why they don’t make purchases by analyzing their behavior.

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I’m Business Development Manager at Cerdonis Technologies LLC - Mobile App Development Company in Chicago, USA. I do have accumulated knowledge of Latest Tech.