It's time you went beyond data focused on events frozen in time (“a user clicked on a certain link at a certain moment during his/her customer journey on your site”) and traditional metrics (e.g. page views)! Time you dug deeper than the surface level of “which visitors clicked on which links?”!
It's time you turned all that massive load of raw data that you've collected so far into customer behavior patterns! Into actionable insights!
Reading and fully understanding your customers' digital behaviors will help you “influence” their next buying journeys on your website/app. This is both the beauty and the power of behavioral analytics!
A power too great not to use it for turning your first-time visitors into highly engaged customers! One enabling you to make the right offers to the right segment of your audience, at precisely the right time in their shopping journey on your website!
Let's detail now, shall we?
First Things First: What Is Behavioral Analytics?
A straightforward answer would be: “behavioral analytics is about focusing on the “why” and “how” a user ended up taking a certain action on your website (buying a product, leaving a web page right away, clicking a link etc.).”
A more “refined” answer would have to be: “behavioral analytics is analyzing your raw data in order to “extract” actionable information about your customers' digital behavior”.
And last, a much more “sophisticated” answer: “behavioral analytics is piecing out all the apparently unrelated data points and putting together your customer's buying story! A story including all those actions (or “chapters” if you want) that he/she took for achieving his final goal (making a booking, purchasing a product, subscribing to your newsletter etc.)"
Take behavioral analytics as your set of user behavior analyzing tools that help you go from generic questions such as “What action did visitor “X” take on my website?”, to questions like:
- "What precisely made him/her buy that specific item or click on that particular link (so you can then anticipate and even influence his/her future shopping decisions)?" Was it the offer itself, tailor-made to his personal preferences, or the fact that it included a “tempting” number of items?
- "What other items did he/she scanned through, compared to those that he actually purchased in the end?"
- "How does this user behavior data differ by traffic sources?"
Analyze user behavior data. Detect patterns. Take action!
Use the actionable insights you get to make the right adjustments and, obviously, to improve your conversions!
There's So Much Valuable Data Out There Still Waiting to Be Harnessed
“... that goes beyond the conventional page clicks, user purchases or traffic type of data”
So, why not go beyond the “obvious”? How about standing out from the crowd of e-commerce business owners who still consider that traffic and page clicks are the only actionable information they could possibly get their hands on?
Behavioral analytics is made of all non-conventional data just sitting there, waiting to be “capitalized”:
- social media data
- internal text data
You'd better start valuing this type of data, as well, if you want to remain relevant in this customer-centric “jungle”, which is the digital arena. This means getting your “hands dirty”:
- putting together holistic customer profiles
- segmenting customer bases
- organizing your observations into multiple groups of customers
And it's by analyzing all this “un-exploited” data left there, “in the dark”, that you'll get to understand your visitors' behaviors. What makes them connect with your brand or, on the contrary, reject it!
Identify The Issues First and Select the Data to Be Analyzed Accordingly
Rushing in and greedily collecting all the user behavior data you could possibly get, in a desperate need to read your customers' digital body languages, won't take you too far!
Take your time to clearly identify the specific issues that you need to solve on your e-commerce website/web app, first and foremost.
To “detect” all those particular “sore points” in your e-commerce business so you can build your behavioral analytics-based strategy accordingly!
If not, all the metrics out there, all the collected data and tests that you'll run will slowly, but surely lead you to “analysis paralysis”.
In other words: what type of conversion/traffic issues do you need to address with your data?
From Stats Pointing Out The Problems to Those Identifying The Causes
And this is precisely the key difference between event-based analytics and behavioral analytics:
- while the first type of stats point out to you the problems only
- the second gives you a deeper understanding of the causes (why was it that customer “X” clicked on that link or purchased that item over another one?)
If you want to “decipher” your users' digital behavior towards your website/web app, you'll just need to pay attention to the right kind of analytics!
Moreover, it requires that you:
- segment your customer base and “tailor” targeted offers for them
- analyze your customers' purchase history
- examine your customers' profiles as online shoppers on your e-commerce store
… so you should be able to predict their future behaviors as shoppers on your website and to use these results for your next marketing campaign.
"How Does Understanding Users' Digital Behavior Impact My Business Specifically?"
- it “empowers” you to turn your customer behaviors from unpredictable to predictable
- it enables you to actually shape your their customer journeys, their next decisions as customers on your website
… and this is what power, from any e-commerce business owner's standpoint, is all about!
Bottom line: behavioral analytics, when harnessed right, offers you precisely those actionable insights that will empower you to actively influence each one of your customer segments' decision journeys!
