And I’m back with MORE data for you to track.
By now you should be looking at Email Marketing Metrics and a few Key Sales Metrics, it’s time to take a look at customer behaviors. I know, I know, there are so many different things to look at, but remember, our focus is helping you have a holisitic view of what’s going on in your company.
We suggest spending a couple hours each week looking at the data of your website for the past week (we send reports on Mondays). It’s not always pertinent to write everything down, but it is really important for you to know. There are little crumbs of actionable details in data that can make huge differences, so pay attention to it!
What Are “Customer Behavior Metrics”?
“Customer behavior metrics” is a fancy pants terms that means “knowing what people are doing on your website.”
There are a lot of companies and applications out there that promise that they can help you improve your customer relationships. They do it by checking out this data first and making inferences about what could appeal to the people on your website better.
For simplicty’s sake, I’m going to include website visitor behavior tracking into this article too, because if you’re speaking with the right voice to the people on your site, they’re all potential customers.
Why is Customer Behavior Important?
Are you kidding me with this question? Sorry, I wrote it and that was the response in my head when I read it back. But I’m going to answer it anyways because everyone starts somewhere.
Research on your customer behavior is crucial. You need to know your customers inside and out in order to make their experience with your brand as lovely as possible.
You need to be able to answer questions about how they found you, what their lives are like, what types of content and imagery they’re drawn to, and what problem they have that you’re solving all the time.
Why?
Because when you know someone, you know how to sell them stuff.
Isn’t your goal to sell stuff to your ideal customer?
Best Practices for Tracking Customer Behavior Metrics
There are all sorts of way to grab qualitative and quantitative data about the people that visit your site. If you’re doing this stuff on your own, we suggest checking out your Google Analytics first. It’s free and honestly, it’s the best resource out there.
For some customer behavior metrics, I would suggest watching it every couple of months and for others I suggest making it part of your weekly reporting data. Yes, WEEKLY reporting.
In general, your overall customer persona – so things like their interest and demographics, shouldn’t change that much once you have an established “ideal” but you want to use that data to improve things like your churn rate, funnel behavior, and keyword searches.
The 9 Best Customer Behavior Metrics to Track
Yes, here we go. When you’re looking at customer data remember that unless you’re a life coach, and honestly even then, don’t expect people to change their behavior – it’s your job to meet them where they are.
1 – Landing Page
What page do they land on first? For our site it’s usually an article through organic search—that makes sense for us because I’m pretty good at SEO. Our organic search is the highest number of hits on our website – and that’s intentional. For you, it might be a product page or a page that you’re driving traffic to with ads.
Watch the pages that people enter your website on and optimize them into mini sales funnels for your products or services.
2 – Funnel Behavior
In particular, watch for major drop offs within your funnel and optimize to mitigate those.
Let’s say you have a three page sales funnel and you’re not getting as many sales as you would expect (this happens all the time), what do you do? A lot of people start by making changes to the sales page because that’s the page where people buy stuff.
But your funnel has three pages. It could be (and often is) that people drop off on the first or second page and never even get to the sales page.
Look at the data for the whole funnel, see where the drop off actually is, and improve that page to get your potential customer to the next step in the funnel.
Side note here, one of my favorite features from the hot jar v crazy egg article is that hot jar has a funnel tracker! You can see exactly where people fall off and what you need to optimize.
3 – Churn Rate
I talked about churn in the key sales metrics article so I won’t talk about it too much here.
Similar to watching the overall behavior of your funnel, watch where your customers tend to fall out.
So if you see a high repeat customer rate of people that purchase within a month from their first purchase but there is a significant drop off of people that don’t purchase again after one month, take steps to get ahead of that churn.
You can typically see this by studying your repeat customers’ buying habits directly… which you should be doing.
4 – Repeat Customers
Study them. Just watch what they do. This is a group of people that are loyal to you and you want them to tell their families and friends about you, because they’re probably friends with your ideal customers.
Who are these people? How did they find you? How do they use your product? What is the best benefit they get from you? How can you serve them better?
Literally ask them. Send them a survey.
5 – Keywords They Found You With
So this was a piece missing with Google Analytics up until pretty recently. They added “Search Console” as an option under “Acquisition” and it’s absolutely worth setting this up. Not only does it help you get found within the index, but it literally tells you what people are typing into google to find your website.
It GIVES you the keywords that you’re ranking for and how people are finding you. Start using those key phrases more often and incorporate the topics that you’re being found by into your content so that your ideal customer will keep showing up!
6 – LTV and AOV
These are, again, talked about in the sales metrics, but you need to know this stuff about your customers so that you can improve it over time.
LTV is your lifetime value and AOV is your average order value. You want to track these over time and establish a baseline so that you can utilize other customer behavior data to improve them.
7 – Interests
This is one of those things you can use to improve AOV, LTV, and loyalty to your brand. The visitor interest information is right in google analytics for you to watch—and it’s super underutilized because it’s qualitative.
Google literally tells you what your visitors are into, and they split it into two categories: Affinity and In-Market.
Affinity is what people like and In-Market is related to what people are looking to buy. Yep. Google will tell you if people like what you’re offering and if they’re ready to buy.
If your In-Market data is aligned with your website – good job. That’s exactly what you want. Keep optimizing your website until you see the sales.
Now, your Affinity is interesting. Check out what people on your page and in your demographic like – and shape some of your marketing around it. They like coffee shops? Your latest IG story has a cafe in it. Maybe they’re really into movies – you can feel free to make more pop culture references in your content. The sky is the limit here… just don’t be creepy.
8 – Demographics
Demographic information is interesting to me mostly as a way to speak to people. Though I typically err on the side of just being really authentic and the right people will come to you, some product lend themselves to age or gender quite a bit.
Natural menopause medicine or vitamins for men are examples I use a lot because they’re very specific to age and gender. Look into your demographics and make sure that you’re attracting the right people to your brand. If you’re not, it’s like you need to work towards upgrading your voice, content, and imagery.
9 – Traffic
Last but DEFINITELY not least, where are people coming from? How are they getting to your website? How many are getting to your website?
You have to know information about your traffic. If you’re not sure about your traffic you can’t tell important things like conversion rate or the right platform for your audience.
You always want to have a omni-channel presence, but it’s likely that your audience is heavily concentrated in one platform or another—so that’s where you want to focus your posting.
References
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/customer-behavior-analysis
https://www.omnikick.com/customer-behavior-analysis/
Photo: https://unsplash.com/photos/yeB9jDmHm6M
