Without analyzing user behavior, you won't know what they like or dislike about your business. User experience analytics is how you take quantitative and qualitative data and turn it into powerful insights for your next marketing strategy.

According to a 2023 survey, marketing executives stated inconsistent and insufficient data to be some of the biggest barriers when crafting a personalized experience. If you're not consistently studying the way users interact or aren't receiving enough information across their entire customer journey, you're potentially leaving money on the table.

The good news? There are plenty of useful digital analytics tools to help you gather up quantitative data and qualitative data across all your different touchpoints. Even better, you can partner with an experienced marketing firm to transform user behavior into steady business and higher profit margins.

This guide will break down everything you need to know about user experience analytics and the impact they have on your bottom line. You'll walk away with deeper insight into the power of user interactions, pick up a few useful analytics tools, and be even closer to a winning marketing strategy.

Key Takeaways

• User experience analytics is a research process that studies user behavior across multiple digital or in-person touchpoints. It not only shows what people are doing, but why they're doing it.

• There are many useful analytics tools you can start using today, such as Google Analytics or built-in analytics tool straight from your website. These tools work best when combined with other user-focused tools, like customer relationship management platforms and customer data platforms.

• Marketing firms can help you sort massive amounts of data into actionable steps for your business. Rightpoint works with businesses across industries like healthcare, mobility, and retail to help them analyze data and connect with their target audiences.

What are User Experience Analytics?

A brand without a dependable user experience analytics strategy is like walking down a hiking trail without shoes on. You'll manage, but it'll be a slow and tedious journey without much reward.

User experience analytics comes in two categories: quantitative data and qualitative data.

Quantitative Data

This type of data involves hard numbers, telling you simple facts such as how many customers signed onto your newsletter or how many bought a product. You'll commonly sort this data into statistics, percentages, or tables to give you a simple overview.

For example, let's say you're a sustainable shoe brand with an e-commerce storefront. When you use a web analytics tool to analyze your recent web purchases, you may notice a certain product selling more than others.

Details like '15% more sales than last month' or '27 sales made today' are examples of quantitative data.

Qualitative Data

Once you know the 'what', it's time to dive into the 'why'. While quantitative data will give you a simple number, the qualitative data will give you insight into the customer's thoughts, feelings, or motives.

Let's use the same example from before. After you find out that you received 15% more sales than the month prior, qualitative data will give you insight as to why. You could prompt customers to leave more reviews or participate in a survey explaining why they favored a certain product over another.

Responses like 'I saw your recent Black Friday deal and wanted to save money on a new pair of shoes' or 'I want to purchase from more sustainable brands' are examples of qualitative data.

User Experience Analytics vs Digital Experience Analytics

While these categories are similar in that they both involve analyzing user behavior, there's one key difference. Digital experience analytics refers to exclusively digital interactions, while user experience analytics can still include in-person interactions.

User Experience Analytics vs User Interface

A user interface refers to any method of interacting with a device, such as a tablet screen or a keyboard with a personal computer. User experience analytics is the observation of user behavior while using these interfaces.

How User Experience Analytics Help Create Successful Businesses

If your customers aren't having a positive experience interacting with your brand and purchasing your products, they may not come back. According to a PwC study, 32% of customers will leave a brand for good after a single bad experience.

User experience analytics is how you reduce customer churn, increase repeat customers, and hone in on exactly what people want to see from you. Let's break down all the different information a consistent user experience analytics strategy will reveal to you and how they tie into business success.

How Efficiently Your Website Works

One of the simplest, yet most useful results from UX analytics tools is telling you how well your website works. When a mere two-second increase in a website's load time can increase the bounce rate by 32%, your website's performance needs to be silky smooth.

Google Analytics is an industry standard tool that provides steady reports on multiple functionalities such as page loading, user activity, and mobile traffic. Other user analytics tools include HubSpot, Hotjar, and Adobe Analytics.

All of these tools do a wonderful job of gathering up quantitative analytics, but what about the qualitative end of things?

Whether Or Not Customers Are Coming Back

Not only can you use UX analytics tools to dive into smaller details like how fast a page loads or how many people abandon a shopping cart, you can also use them to gather up feedback. Qualitative user input is essential for getting into the heads of your target audience and seeing your business through their eyes.

Steve Sacona, the founder of the lawyer comparison website Top 10 Lawyers, stresses the need for qualitative UX analytics, especially when it gets uncomfortable.

"The key is to obsess over real customer frustrations—dive deep into complaints, not just praises. Most businesses polish what’s already good, but the gold lies in fixing what’s broken. Look at your website or service through a lawyer’s eyes: where are the loopholes, the inefficiencies? That’s your competitive edge."

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research Methods: The Backbone of UX Analytics

Now that you've got a stronger understanding of different kinds of analytics data and what they teach you about user journeys, let's look at more methods. We've touched on tools like Google Analytics as well as the power of constructive feedback, but there are even more methods you can use.

Quantitative Methods

When you need to narrow down user interactions into simple datasets you can refer to time and time again, these methods will help you source and speed up your quantitative analysis.

A/B Testing

Sometimes you're not sure which element could influence a customer to take a specific action. With the help of A/B testing, you can experiment with two different versions of marketing collateral and narrow down the solution.

A/B testing is an industry-standard method for all kinds of marketing and design functions, ranging from e-mail to landing pages. They'll tell you valuable information such as higher click-through rates or more time spent on the page.

Web Analytics

As touched on above, web analytics is useful for studying when and how a customer interacts with your website. Alongside conversions, page load times and bounce rates, you can also learn about details such as referral sources or daily activity patterns.

Heatmaps are a popular form of web analytics that show which areas of the site have the most activity and which areas are lagging. You'll learn about what they click and don't click, where they linger, and where they appear confused.

Click Testing

Another method of analyzing how a user interacts with your site is click testing, an insightful tool that literally shows you the navigational patterns of each user. You'll narrow down how long a user takes to complete a task or where they seem to struggle on specific pages, a must-have for both user experience analytics and user experience design.

Qualitative Methods

Your customers are the backbone to your business. Without their insights, all the data in the world still won't be enough to capture their attention and earn their trust.

Surveys And Forms

Typeform and Surveymonkey are a few user experience analytics tools where customers can share their thoughts on your business performance. You can create simple forms with yes or no questions or offer longer forms where people can type in extensive thoughts.

Be careful not to ask loaded questions in your forms that could potentially influence their response. For example, if you want to hear about a customer's thought trying out your new brand of merino wool socks, keep your question to simple inquiries like:

• Do the socks keep your feet dry and warm? Why or why not?

• Would you buy these socks again?

• Would you recommend these socks to a friend or family member?

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews leave a powerful impression on your business, both for your brand strategy and for other customers. They not only tell you how well your customer experience is working out, but your target audience will use them to determine whether or not they want to buy from you.

According to a recent survey, around 75% of customers will put their trust into online reviews before committing to a purchasing decision.

UX Analytics Metrics

Your UX analytics strategy won't get far without metrics to measure your progress with. Just like email marketing campaigns use A/B testing and click-through rates to determine an email's success, the analytics below will be your guiding star.

Task Success Rate

This metric is one of the most simple yet quickly tells you whether or not your marketing or design is getting a customer to take an action. A task success rate tells you if a customer successfully completed a desired task like moving their cursor to the right button, making a purchase, or filling out a contact sheet.

Conversion Rates

This metric tells you how high or how low people are completing a conversion on your site. While conversion rates are similar to task success rates, they focus exclusively on any conversion you're aiming for.

Pages Per Session

Do you wonder which pages are most popular among your website's viewers? How about how long they spend on the page or which pages they navigate to next? Pages per session is a valuable metric for UX analytics because it tells you how engaged people are with your work.

It also gives you a natural guiding point in-between one point and the next. You'll learn a lot not only from popular pages, but which pages people like to progress to next.

Stickiness

It's one thing to have a customer visit your site...but do they come back? Even better, do they regularly interact with your website and take multiple actions? This repeated behavior is often a sign they find your brand engaging, resulting in the UX analytics metric known as stickiness.

Brands will encourage stickiness by using approaches such as gamification and loyalty programs to encourage customers to keep coming back.

Navigation vs Search Ratio

The more helpful you can be to your customers, the better. If you notice your customers are regularly searching for certain terms or features on your site, that could be a sign for you to rework some of your copy or UX design.

As such, your navigation vs search ratio will give you valuable insight into how you can help people on the user journey. The goal is to reduce the amount of clicks and searches needed to solve their problem or help them complete an action. Ideally, high navigation and lower search is better than low navigation and high search.

Rightpoint Will Turn Your User Experience Analytics into Business Growth

Turning your UX analysis into actionable insights doesn't have to be a chore. We offer the first-hand experience and diverse toolset you need to ensure you're never missing out on valuable information in the entire user journey.

We've helped transform businesses by tapping into user research, honing in on pain points, and delivering solutions that paid off. Bronson Vitamins, an ecommerce supplement brand, is a past client who needed help matching the evolving expectations of a growing customer base. The disparity between their high-quality products and unintuitive user experience led to frustrated customers and missed opportunities at repeat sales.

Thanks to a mixture of collecting user feedback and studying user journey mapping, we narrowed down solutions that helped them manage overseas sales more transparently. The result was doubled monthly sales and tripled company revenue.

This is just one example of the result we can offer you in your journey to understand user behavior. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you turn UX analytics into a brighter future for your brand.