10 Ways to Utilize User Experience Analytics to Improve Website Engagement

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Talent Garden

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What does the term user experience analytics mean? Why is it a useful tool? And how can you utilize it to improve website engagement? In a digital world where you can use a visual voicemail app to literally read out your voicemail to you, it is no wonder that we have the technology to gather information on just about anything. But user experience isn’t just anything—it is fundamental to business growth. This article will explain what user experience (UX) analytics are and how you can utilize this tool to improve website engagement, drive business growth, and improve customer retention.

What is User Experience Analytics?

UX analytics refers to analysing users’ behaviour on websites or apps by collecting and interpreting data. Effective UX analysis helps you understand how users experience your website, and therefore, how you can improve the user experience for them. In turn, you can increase website engagement and customer satisfaction. UX analysis can generally be split into two types of data:

Quantitative data: measurable metrics usually focused on numerical data. Think “How many?” “How much?” “How often?”.
Qualitative data: subjective and non numerical data such as opinions, attitudes, and beliefs.

It is important to gather and analyse both quantitative and qualitative data when conducting UX analysis. The two types of data complement each other to allow you to see the bigger picture and give you a more reliable set of data to support your findings. One way to focus on user experience is to use a SaaS Boilerplate to skip using repetitive coding leaving developers to focus on what makes their product unique. Some of the most popular SaaS examples using boilerplates are Gmail, Dropbox, and Microsoft office 365.

How Can You Utilize User Experience Analytics to Improve Website Engagement?

Many companies are investing in technologies such as browser calling to improve usability and increase productivity across their workforce. As well as improving experiences for your employees, you should be looking to improve the experience of your customers. To understand how to improve website engagement, you need to first understand how your customers interact with your website. That’s where UX analytics come in. Let’s take a look at 10 ways to utilize UX analytics to improve your website engagement.

1. Use a web analytics tool

Web analytics is the gathering of measurable, quantitative data to understand web usage. You can use a web analytics tool such as Google Analytics to gather information such as views, clicks, and active users. Many tools will also enable you to set your own metrics to gather the data you wish to analyse. This quantitative data is often presented in charts and can be extremely useful when looking to understand and optimise website engagement.

2. Conduct on-site surveys

On-site surveys can be used to collect quantitative data about user experience in real time. Acting almost like a mini customer review, you can collect ratings and feedback with closed-ended questions asking customers to rate their experience on a scale. For example:

How likely are you to recommend [company] to others (on a scale of 0-10)?
How easy did you find it to use our website today (on a scale of 1-5)?
How likely are you to return to our website in the future (on a scale of 1-5)?

This data helps you identify if there are any problems with user experience, although you need to gather more information to find out exactly what those problems are and how to fix them. This is where quantitative and qualitative data work together to give you the full picture.

3. Include user feedback widgets on your website

User feedback widgets can be used on your site to ask users to rate their experience. Similar to a pop-up AI chatbot, these widgets usually pop up on the side of your website and ask customers to complete a quick and simple rating. Often, a chatbot UI can be customizable and use emojis or colors, and quick reply options, to ensure they are as user-friendly as possible. For even more information gathering, you can ask users to add a short comment to explain their rating. This combination of quantitative and qualitative data will be extremely useful when it comes to informing changes going forward.

4. Conduct off-site surveys

Off-site surveys are conducted on a separate webpage and are designed to learn about user experience in more detail. You can ask a series of open-ended questions that require users to describe their experiences and opinions. The results give you detailed qualitative data to analyze alongside your quantitative data and give you a bigger picture of user experience and how to improve it.

5. Use heatmap analysis

Heatmap analysis involves gathering insights on user interaction and engagement on your website or app by tracking mouse actions such as scrolls and clicks. They can show which parts of your website are being clicked on most, as well as which parts are being completely ignored by users. Want to know how far your users scroll on your page? A heatmap can help with that! Want to know which parts of your website users appear to spend most time looking at? A heatmap can help with that too!

Data gathered from heatmaps can be hugely beneficial when conducting UX analysis, as they can help you deduce exactly how users interact with your webpage.

6. Conduct A/B testing

An A/B test gathers evidence on two versions of the same web page. So, your company might gather evidence that suggests that your webpage header isn’t attracting much engagement from your users. You could change the header and test the original version and the new version online to see which one gets the most engagement.

If you are trying to decide between two versions of your webpage, you could run A/B testing with your two versions and the data will tell you which version had the best conversion rate. A/B testing can also be particularly useful for digital marketers to assess how successful certain elements of a campaign are. For example, which images gain most interest or which slogan is more engaging. When looking at your data you can also analyze with an assessment that you have created yourself to monitor website engagement. With this type of analysis you can customize your assessments to measure exactly what you intend, without compromise.

7. Invest in lab usability testing

Lab usability testing records users as they engage with the webpage or app. Users complete tasks on the webpage and a trained moderator records their actions and makes observations about their behavior. Like the A/B test, lab usability testing can be very useful when comparing two versions of a web page or app. The data can give you valuable information about user experience that can allow you to optimize your website and increase website engagement. However, as the name suggests, this type of test is completed under lab settings and therefore may not reflect your real-life customers. This kind of testing is usually done before launching a new product or before a re-launch of your webpage.

8. Use session recording tools

Session recordings work in a similar way to lab usability testing but record the experience of your real-life users. This can track actions such as mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling. You can also determine how long users stay on a particular page, when they return to the previous page, or exit your page completely. While lab usability testing gives you lots of details and involves a trained moderator, the benefit of session recording is that you are gathering data from your real users. This can be done at regular intervals such as weekly or monthly to gain valuable UX analytics on customer experience.

9. Conduct focus groups with your customers

Focus groups involve asking a few users to gather together to discuss your product, web page, or app. You would have a moderator leading the discussion and asking questions which have been predetermined by you. Focus groups can be particularly useful to small businesses looking to gain insight into their customer base. Local companies may be using a Toronto-based business phone system to communicate with their customers, but meeting with a small group of customers in person will allow for even more depth of discussion. This can give you lots of valuable qualitative data, but only from a small number of users. Information gathered from focus groups should therefore be used alongside data from other sources too.

10. Use the collected data to improve website engagement

You can spend all the time in the world gathering and analyzing the data, but if you really want to improve user experience, then you must take action. In order to effectively use UX analytics to improve website engagement, you should:

Identify issues your users are having
Look for recurring issues
Prioritize bug fixes
Build and test new features

Is there something that customers would like to see on your website that doesn’t currently exist? Do they want the contracts stage of the process to be sped up - in which case you could look to add electronic signatures to your website and/or use template contracts so things can move ahead more quickly. It is important to note that making small and incremental changes is often more useful than a complete website overhaul. You want to be able to measure what change has had the most impact, and changing everything on your website at once will not give you a clear answer on that. One way to make improvements to your website and to improve the user experience could be to make sure that your SaaS landing page is optimized to grab user’s attention and engage them. Landing page SaaS examples include Cloudtalk, Readymag, and HiPeople. Finally, you must use quantitative data and qualitative data together to ensure you have a complete picture of user experience and how to improve it.

Importance of User Experience Analytics

If you want to improve website engagement, you simply cannot ignore user experience analytics. Regularly gathering data about your user’s experience and actively making changes to improve it will have a profound impact on website engagement and your business as a whole.

Article updated on: 09 August 2023

Written by

Talent Garden, Digital Skills Academy

10 Ways to Utilize User Experience Analytics to Improve Website Engagement

What is User Experience Analytics?