When you start to unpick the visitor behavior on your website, one thing is apparent: Everyone has a limited amount of tolerance for frustration before they drop off.
Think of it like a bucket. As you browse a site, every error, poor choice of wording, confusing step or overlong form adds another splash of water. Eventually, the water spills out of the bucket and you give up.
Last week’s Masterclass with SessionCam and Subway—How to Convert Your Website Visitors into Customers—covers the optimization tactics that work to stop this bucket spilling over and maximize your conversion rates. Only 19.2% of webinar attendees are satisfied with their conversion rates, which highlights what a key challenge this is for marketers; 42.6% of attendees are dissatisfied with their conversion rates.
If you’re in the second group, here are six easy ways to increase your conversion rates using behavioral data.
Content produced in association with SessionCam.
1. Identify usability issues with session replay
Understanding your website visitors shouldn’t be a guessing game. With session replay, you can identify the sticking points in the visitor journey by looking at visitor clicks, movements and gestures in real time.
It’s like having a video camera on a visitor’s shoulder that enables you to see what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. You can save yourself time and money by fixing errors and user experience (UX) issues highlighted by session replay.
You can even use the technology for fraud detection purposes in a court of law, to validate where a visitor ticked a box, for instance.
2. Session replay goes great with Google Analytics
Web analytics tools like Google Analytics give you the quantitative data behind a visitor’s journey on your website so you can find out whatthey’re doing.
Adding this (Read more...) session replay insights gives you the context—or qualitative data—around this visitor’s experience on your website. With a simple integration, you can play back sessions that target a specific issue by segmenting your data.
3. Use the right metrics
The mix of behaviors that indicates a visitor is struggling on your website is complex. That’s why it’s important to measure the metrics that matter to your business and not the three so-called Unmarvelous Metrics: rage clicks, bird’s nest, and dwell time.
The truth is, rage clicks—bursts of clicks or tapping that don’t trigger a change—don’t actually happen very often. SessionCam data shows that out of 22,000 page views across 24 hours on a large retailer’s website, only 110 visitors showed evidence of rage clicks. From that behavior alone, you can’t conclude they were frustrated.
Bird’s nest—when you’re watching a session replay and see a visitor’s mouse trail scooting around the page—is the digital version of a customer wandering around a brick-and-mortar store, unable to find what they want. It’s an indicator of something, but you can’t be sure what by staring at that single aspect of behavior.
The last offender is dwell time, which may leave you with more questions than answers. For instance, many of your website visitors will be aiming to get something done quickly. In that case, a long dwell time shows you’ve failed. You haven’t made it easy for them to achieve what they came to do and are less likely to convert them from a visitor into a customer.
4. Apply the same focus to your A/B testing strategy
Chad Sanderson, Experience Optimization and Personalization Manager at Subway, applies the same thinking to A/B testing strategy. He says that finding the metrics that matter should be based on one metric that matters. You can define whether a test you have carried out is a winner or loser based on this clear original evaluation criteria.
It goes without saying that your tests must have enough data so that any changes you make to your website are based on robust statistics. Noting your findings over time is important to monitor the effects of your test.
During the webinar, Sanderson says that too many companies make changes to their original test before a clear winning result has been achieved. Positive tests can even turn out to be negative in the long-term. You may find the initial uplift of your original evaluation criteria eventually plateaus, for instance.
5. Don’t operate in silos
There are several areas that you need to focus on in order to improve your conversion rates, such as moving away from the “silo culture.” There needs to be collaboration and stakeholder involvement.
This is important for three reasons: generating ideas for tests, weeding out your own unmarvelous metrics and keeping stakeholders engaged with conversion rate optimization (CRO) activities.
Escaping this silo culture should be a priority. In fact, 28.4% of webinar attendees have someone in the business dedicated to CRO; an additional 35.8% have plans to appoint someone.
6. Use machine learning to understand visitor behavior
Reviewing session replays is undoubtedly a time-consuming exercise. Apply a layer of intelligence from a machine learning algorithm and you remove the need to manually trawl through data to discover why your website visitors become frustrated.
SessionCam’s Customer Struggle score does exactly that. It understands customer frustration and reveals the most valuable insights about your website visitor’s behavior. It also takes into account hundreds of different behavioral indicators including clicks, taps, scroll distance, scroll velocity, dwell time and time on page, as well as the influence of browser events and device types.
Think of the Customer Struggle score as a signpost to improving conversion rates. It’s an at-a-glance way of determining which areas you should focus your attention on and where changes will bear the most fruit.
Get the lowdown on the metrics that matter most when improving conversion. WatchMasterclass: How to Convert Your Website Visitors into Customers, produced in partnership with SessionCam, on-demand now.
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