Why Seeing Customer Activity Step-by-Step Is Essential for Thriving Businesses

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Learn how to understand and track customers’ activity 
• Understand why the customers’ activity is no longer linear  
• Discover the hidden cost of flying blind

“Focusing on the customer makes a company more resilient”

Jeff Bezos (The founder of Amazon and Blue Origin)

Every visit, click, and scroll tells a story about why customers visited, what they like, what makes them confused, why they leave, etc. Businesses that realize the importance of checking customer behavior and activity usually succeed. But those that don’t usually depend on guesswork about what works and what doesn’t. 

Result? Lead to missed sales, unhappy customers, etc, but this can be changed with simply tracking customers’ activity. This can help businesses see the pattern, track problems early, and make quick changes to improve customers’ experience. Which is great because 86% of customers say they’ll pay more for a better experience. Let’s continue with the article to understand this deeply. 

Understanding Customer Activity

Before attempting to convince you of the positive aspects of why you ought to place important resources at this point, it’s a great idea to quickly take a look at what we generally mean by customer activity and the steps you must take to get to grips with it. 

Most businesses that are concerned about tracking user actions throughout their portals will go for a high-quality Heatmap Platform that informs them how it is being used by customers in the real scenario, rather than how you imagine they are using it. 

There are other tools and data points to examine, of course, but as with all things connected to user interaction, a mixture will offer up the most data.

What It Means To Track Customer Behavior

So what exactly does tracking customer behavior mean in practice? Well, in practical terms, it means many things. Moreover, for the most effective results in terms of lowering spend and getting the most bang for your buck, you may want to reduce vanity metrics that probably look amazing on paper, but don’t really move the needle in the context of revenue. For brevity, we will take a closer look at a few of the more general data points you should be well aware of:

• Navigation paths: The way that your buyers take says an awful lot about whether your site is giving them a way to what they want. You can get an exact picture of any fixes or updates you may have to take to enhance the visitor experience.
• Time spent: While time spent on site may not give you a full analysis of how a user is engaging with your pages, it can provide you with an idea of whether your marketing campaign is working. For example, if you see a high bounce rate, it could mean that you are reaching the wrong demographics, etc.
• Hovering or mouse-movement patterns: A heatmap can inform you how a user is getting around a specific page. This offers you to confirm if they are using it in the manner you want them to and, if not, an understanding of how to correct it.
• Scrolling depth and patterns: As with time invested on site, this won’t provide you with a total image of things, but can help you to observe where they are dropping off and allow you to come up with fresh ideas to keep them occupied for a longer duration.
• Video plays, pauses, and drop-off points: If your uploaded material includes videos, these data points will inform you if your videos are being played, for how long, and if they are being shared.
• Product views or repeated product checks: If your users are constantly visiting a product portal but not taking any steps, this might mean that they want the time but are not sure how to proceed with it.

Why The Customer Journey Is No Longer Linear

Current engagement is extremely different from how it used to be, even just 10 years ago. Back in the day, you could rely on your users taking a fairly linear path towards an end target. 

Nowadays, with the wide range of ways to interact online, it’s critical to understand how to adjust to the new methods. What appears to happen these days is that customers will jump from one site or platform to another, which can generate some metrics to become skewed. 

Because these interactions happen in small, distributed moments, businesses now need far more detailed visibility to understand what truly motivates engagement and revenue growth.

The Hidden Costs Of Flying Blind

As we pointed out in the introduction, flying blind is a horrible idea for all sorts of reasons, not just due to an inflated ad expense that doesn’t give any results. 

Leakage

There will always be some leakage, no matter how much you try to correct it, but not knowing why something is happening is exceptionally exasperating. For example, you may be seeing a high rate of cart abandonment, and without any clues as to why, this will stay unresolved.

Misplaced Blame

If you have a big team of employees in different departments, not understanding how a customer uses your platform can lead to blame and eventually low morale. For example, the digital team might accuse the product team of not making decibel products or vice versa.

Slow Decision Processes

Simply put, if you are unsure about what’s happening, you will have to spend more time analyzing, forming, and executing a plan to correct it.

Frustration

If your users are not able to use your site or take the steps to what they want, they may become increasingly disappointed. Over time, this can cause significant loss of profit and even brand harm.

Brand Damage Over Time

If you fail to plug holes in your portal or modify the areas that are creating the most pain for your users, you will probably find that your brand either falls out of the spotlight and users move to your competitors, or, in more severe cases, it could end up in your brand becoming unhelpful in the eyes of those who once thought themselves to be loyal customers. 

There are far too many motives for knowing how your users engage with your site than can be explained in this post, but suffice to say, it is rewarding to get to know them as deeply as possible. Fortunately, there are loads of tools that you can use to complete this goal and make a user experience that feels great for everyone.

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