Websites are the focal points for our messaging and the platforms that we use to get audiences to take actions that we can monetize.
It is a good thing, that these days, we really do not need a complete SEO team and marketing team to get the right data on how we should optimize our website or app.
In this article, UX Tools To Track User Behavior Online, we will be discussing several tools that can monitor user behavior well to get to our conversions goals.
This is the question that you might be asking: What is the importance of tracking the user behavior on your website or app?
We can explain fully the importance of user or people behavior by having Amazon as an example.
Amazon, as we are all well-aware of, is the world’s largest and most successful eCommerce product retailer. They have become a huge company simply because they were obsessed with testing their customer’s behaviors for a better usability and overall user experience.
They placed their attention on their customers, which enabled them to become who they are today, in which their current product success is a result of their success in fulfilling their customers’ desires for fast and effortless gratification.
How do you track user behavior?
With Amazon as an example, we can apply the same principle to our website or app.
There is are many ways you can monitor people behavior to have a better feedback and understanding of the goals and intentions of your visitors.
Analytics
One of the basic tools that you can utilize to monitor user behavior is the analytics tool.
Even with the simplest product tool available to you, like for example, the website analytics tool, you can get a lot of website visitors data on your website or product app. The same thing can be said with a social media analytics tool, where you can easily track the people behavior and use these feedback data to your advantage.
With analytics product tools, you can easily discover the types of content that your audience prefers. The content preference is one of the signals for user intent. You can also use site search data and used keywords to determine your user’s intent.
Surveys
Surveys are used to get the direct feedback of a customer about a specific element of the experience. Surveys can be collected after purchase or interaction.
When it comes to online surveys, this kind of survey is usually conducted to gauge customer satisfaction. The survey question on the site is usually in the form of short one to two questions about the product or website, that can be found within the site as the user navigates.
Surveys are designed to help companies understand their customers more, what they need, and to get a glimpse of their overall experience and feedback on the site or product.
User testing
This is conducted in a controlled environment, where the user tests on new products while being monitored.
User testing is used to better understand the customer and how the he or she engages with a product or web page through getting their feedback.
Tracking tools
There are a lot of available tools to monitor user behavior and feedback on the page. You can use testing tools to track and test clicks, mouse movements, scrolling activities, and more.
User experience UX tools to monitor user behavior
There are different kinds of user behavior. You can specify which user behavior and user feedback you like to track when you know your end goal.
Thus, you must know what you need to improve with your website or app to achieve good customer satisfaction.
Here are some examples of user behavior that you can track and test, along with the product tools you can use:
User experience
User experience UX is one of the broadest categories of user behavior. You may be overwhelmed or confused about what subcategory falls under user experience since all user behavior is impacted by it.
Additionally, user experience is difficult to track and measure as it sometimes requires collaboration and user feedback between designers, developers, and marketers.
Behaviors you can track:
Page clicks, mouse movements, scroll depth, users navigation patterns, visits, recordings, and site speed.
UX tools to use:
Google Analytics- this is a free web analytics tools by Google to helps monitor users acquisition data and users behavior
Lucky Orange- one of the best features of this tool is the live visual feedback and recording of your visitors to monitor user behavior
Crazy Egg- you can monitor users behavior and see visual feedback with the tool’s heatmaps, scroll maps, and click reports
Hotjar- this product tool also offers live recordings and heatmaps and you can also use users feedback and survey tools on your website
Analytics by Google is a good free tool to monitor user behavior and feedback on the site. But if you are looking for a more detailed user behavior report, then you can try the paid tools available to you: Lucky Orange, Crazy Egg, and Hotjar can record users behavior and can also offer extra features such as heatmaps.
There are a lot of features that you can utilize with these third-party tools beyond what Google Analytics can provide.
Advantages of tracking user experience data:
Retain visitors
Feed visitors the right content
Improve navigation to properly guide visitors to the right page
Content performance
Content is king, which is the fuel for marketing. This is one of the important factors why visitors come to the site.
Content is also what people engage with. It is the one factor why users spend hours on the site, make multiple site visits, visit the landing pages, and take certain actions for conversions.
Behaviors you can track:
Popularity, sharing, engagement, bounces & exits.
UX tools to utilize:
Google Analytics- can also be used to track comments, blog shares, and interactions
Adobe Analytics- If you are looking for more detailed analytics when it comes to testing users and their behavior with your content, then this tool is right for you
Analytics Google is also a good free tool to monitor and test usability and performance data. You can track pages, and know which ones are popular. You can also check which search terms are being searched, the frequency, repeat visits, and so on.
However, if you are looking for more detailed user data then you can check out Adobe Analytics, which is a great tool that you can fully maximize as it offers great tools to monitor and test content performance. This tool is created for marketers.
Advantages of monitoring content performance data:
Refines content for users
Helps in strategizing and easy management of the content calendar
Creates better content for marketing
Helps create evergreen content
Creates content that converts
Help sformat the content better
Helps layout the content with better design on the site
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Conversion rate optimization is what we define or what we want our visitors to do such as making purchases, fill up a form, or certain subsets of engagement goals.
These are all performances that we measure towards a goal that we want to achieve.
When it comes to optimizing conversions on your website, you need to optimize your website performance and design to achieve optimized traffic and conversions.
In addition to this, the path leading immediately up to conversion is important. This means that when you have visitors that can turn into buyers, you need to make sure that they have a smooth user experience. All the steps leading to the conversions need to be measured.
Behaviors you can monitor:
Funnel, checkout process, variable testing, form testing.
UX tools to utilize:
Analytics- you can use this tool to monitor conversions by browser and OS, conversions by mobile, conversions by site speed and browser speed on page and mobile, and so on
Lucky Orange- very similar to Google Analytics only that this tool provides an in-depth amount of information that you can get from their heat maps, live recordings, and real-time visit analysis
Optimizely- one of the best tools when it comes to A/B testing and you can easily change the design and usability variable to your website or mobile app with this tool
Mixpanel- just like Optimizely, this tool also provides you with A/B testing and it is automated for website and mobile app. You may also utilize their users feedback feature, which is another way to improve your conversions
Heap- this tool provides features that focus more on customer and visitor satisfaction. You can measure and improve the human experience by using their features such as creating a better customer journey on the site, grouping users for conversions, and other analytics of user data that can assist you improve the overall conversions rate of the site
Userpeek- this is a remote user testing tool that you can easily utilize for your website on desktop and mobile. It helps you understand how users interact on your website, it helps you conduct several tests for ideas, hypotheses, and design prototypes. It also maps the performance of the site among many others.
Utilizing these tools assist you gain insight into how people go through defined conversions funnels like checkout or form submission.
The paid tools certainly have more features that can assist you develop better CRO as these tools can perform variable A/B testing and see how different forms, content, and pages perform.
Advantages of monitoring CRO data:
Like what was explained, we define our CRO and with that, we have the power to improve and test it.
The importance of defining, monitoring, and improving our CRO is it ensures that we are maxing out our return on investment (ROI) in terms of marketing, website design and navigation, sending traffic to the site, and ensuring that every that we do is actually converting.
Web accessibility
Website accessibility has been an ongoing concern. Even though now we do have some laws and standards to follow, some website owners missed adhering to these laws and standards.
If you are one of the people who provide a hostile UX and who does not meet accessibility aides in your website navigation, you can lose more than just money. You may lose a large number of your earnings through lawsuits and litigation.
Behaviors you can monitor:
Testing and validation, live site tools
UX tools to utilize:
Lighthouse- it is one of Google Chrome’s dev free tools where you can use to help improve your pages. You can use this tool to run it against any website or web page, public, or requiring authentication.
BOIA- it provides full service to help you determine, see, resolve, and maintain website accessibility as specified under WCAG guidelines. It is a very easy tool if you want to cut your time processing everything from compliance, regulation, and logistics.
Dyno Mapper- it provides you with services and equal access required by law for websites. It ensures that the site is accessible by everyone, including users with disabilities.
Accessibility checklist- a very easy to use a checklist that is created by Jorrit van Hertum of Elsevier’s User Centered Design (UCD) and was updated to WCAG 2.1 by Jay Nemchik of Elsevier’s Digital Accessibility Team.
You can utilize the free Lighthouse tool and the free accessibility checklist or you can go all the way to using paid tools like for analyzing websites and how they meet and do not meet with WCAG and other required standards and laws.
Advantages of monitoring website accessibility data:
By referring to the free tools alone, you can avoid the risk of alienating site visitors and potential litigation. You can also seek legal advice in utilizing accessibility data and finding a suitable plan for your website.
Engagement
Not every traffic is a conversion. This is true for all websites since a visitor's journey requires multiple site visits before the visitor moves from research mode to buying mode.
And thus, we should always properly guide the visitor at each step on the site through engagement and a good UX.
Behaviors you can monitor:
Live chats, chatbots/AI
UX tools to utilize:
There are so many live chat tools that you can use to increase engagement. You can check out the following tools below:
Hubspot live chat software- it connects you to customers in real-time and helps you convert new leads, close deals, and provide better human support
Intercom- this chat tool uses a conversational approach that keeps the user engaged. This approach helps convert more web visitors to buyers.
Live Chat- it offers both human and chat bots to provide better human support. This tool can be integrated with several desktop and mobile apps and platforms as well such as Facebook messenger, Google Analytics, and TeamViewer.
The live chats and AI tools help us gain new lever of users data.
Other than just the specific page and in-pages analytics for FAQ and Help pages, we can engage with our website's visitors well with the use of tools like the examples above.
Advantages of tracking engagement data:
You can find FAQ and new information that may lead to a UX issue, content issue, conversation process issue, and more
Live chats are human to human interaction that provides an extra layer of data that analytics tools cannot provide
You can use the data gathered with these chats in your marketing and in improving the site
External data
These are data that go beyond what is happening on the site and landing page.
Behavior to monitor:
You can dig and get and see more information on what your real users want by providing them with surveys to answer.
UX tools to utilize:
SurveyMonkey- one of the most popular survey tools you see online. It offers great business plans for every type of business
SwagBucks- this tool is not really just a customer survey tool but also a customer loyal reward platform and content distribution platform, where brands can engage to customers using surveys and rewards
Advantages of tracking engagement data:
Surveys can be used to improve site performance and usability
Surveys can help you gain insights into customers regarding what they think and see of the brand or the online navigation
Conclusion
Does tracking users behavior matter? Yes! However, it is equally important that you know the specific users behavior you want to track and the right UX tools to monitor users behavior.
You cannot understand users behavior well without these two data in mind.
Focus on collecting as much information as you can to develop a better UX design and increasing conversions.
Proving a good UX and design is one of your priorities as it also affects your online conversions. Imagine this: if real users do not have a good users experience on your site or if they do not find what they need, then you lose them. It is as simple as that!
At the end of this all, you do have control over what happens. Designing a site for a better UX and design depends on your ability to track and monitor user behavior and make necessary changes based on the information that you have collected.
How do you get started? You can begin with users behavior reports. The tools that are mentioned here can help you pinpoint how traffic moves through your site and what your visitors do when they land on your pages
There are so many good tools available to you. Make use of them and once you have enough data, then there is no stopping you from controlling what happens after that. The result largely depends on how you monitor user behaviors on your website.
