Gaining in-depth knowledge of your customers can help empower you to not only reach them effectively but also to serve them better. By leveraging customer behavior analysis tools, you can create products and services that genuinely cater to your customers’ needs, helping to drive success for both them and you.
Understanding Customer Behavior Analysis
Customer behavior analysis is studying and understanding how customers interact with your brand – online and offline – so that you can use those insights to enhance your marketing efforts and overall customer experience.
There are a variety of tools that can help you analyze customer behavior by offering valuable insights into your customers’ preferences, expectations, and motivations. Here are the seven I use in my business and with my clients through my marketing studio, Tote + Pears.
These tools are easily accessible, and many are free to use – making them good additions to your customer marketing analytics dashboard.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics can help to empower your business with insightful, data-driven decisions. This comprehensive tool not only uncovers the story behind the numbers, but also serves as a barometer for website visitor satisfaction. For instance, a product page with a high bounce rate may indicate that the page isn't living up to your visitors' expectations, urging you to revisit its design, content, or functionality. This free tool draws from your customers’ online journey to provide insights that can help your brand thrive, including key features like:
- Affinity data, which can help you understand customers' interests and passions to create personalized content that resonates with them.
- User demographics can help you gain insight into the age, gender, and location of your audience, fostering a sense of inclusivity and belonging.
- In-market segments that can help you identify your customers' purchase intent and align your marketing approach with their needs.
- Real-time reporting can help you monitor your website's performance and user interactions as they happen, adjusting your strategies as needed.
- Conversion tracking to help measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and discover growth opportunities.
2. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a customer behavior analytics tool that you can use to track and analyze how people engage with your digital products – your website, mobile apps and other digital platforms – by providing detailed customer behavior analytics.
At Tote + Pears, we use the tool to make data-driven decisions and track a wide range of activities, including clicks, form submissions, downloads, sign-ups, and purchases. This valuable data lets us measure user engagement, retention, and conversion rates and the overall user experience. A few popular features include:
- Real-time analytics, which can be incredibly useful for monitoring the performance of marketing campaigns, product launches, or other time-sensitive activities.
- Segmentation and funnel analysis, which allows you to segment your user base by various attributes, such as location, device type, or user behavior.
3. YouTube Analytics
If you're creating video content on YouTube, then you've got another stream of free and interesting data to work with.
One of my favorite user behavior analytics tools is YouTube Analytics. The tool provides details on demographic data, visitor duration, how people share your videos, and more – all great for customer behavior analysis and helping you to spot trends and identify at-risk customers. Some helpful features include:
- Watch time reports that let you gauge visitor duration to measure your content’s retention power.
- Sharing metrics that show how and where your videos are being shared.
- Audience engagement reports that allow you to explore likes, dislikes, comments, and shares to better understand your audience's reaction.
- Traffic source reports to help you determine how viewers discover your content and optimize your visibility accordingly.
YouTube Analytics also provides detailed data about which content creates a reaction among your audience. By learning what type of content doesn't work for your audience, you can focus on what does.
This data isn't just for your video creation, either. There's a good chance that if certain video content creates a strong reaction among your followers, the same theme or concept would probably work in a different medium, too.
4. Meta Audience Insights
Meta's consumer insight tool, Audience Insights, is similar to Google Analytics. It’s a free tool that provides in-depth demographic data, enabling you to understand the people engaging with your brand on Facebook and Instagram.
- Detailed demographic data helps you learn about the age, gender, and location of your audience to tailor your content and products accordingly.
- Consumer behavior analysis can be used to access data on estimated retail spending, purchase behavior, and more to predict your audience's future actions.
- Household information helps you gain knowledge about consumer lifestyle characteristics like the type of vehicle they may be shopping for or their living arrangements.
- Page likes and follows allow you to understand which other pages your followers like and follow on Facebook to expand your consumer knowledge base.
If you're trying to get a better handle on who your customers are, Meta’s Audience Insights could be a good place to start.
5. Amplitude
Amplitude is a customer analytics software platforms for small businesses. This self-service tool allows you to track analytics across differ digital platforms and experiment with different data to customer interactions into insights.
- Behavioral insights that allow you to explore user behavior trends, patterns and correlations. This helps in uncovering valuable insights that drive product improvements and strategic decision-making.
- Data visualization, which offers intuitive data visualization through charts, graphs and dashboards, making it easier for you to interpret complex data and communicate insights effectively.
- A/B testing integration, which enables you to test and compare different variations of their digital products to determine which ones yield the best user outcomes.
The data you glean from Amplitude can be used to develop a strong content marketing program or product development plan.
6. Google Trends
Google Trends is a customer behavior analysis tool that provides insights based on search criteria across Google Search, Google News and YouTube. We use it at Tote + Pears to gather insights by location and keep up with market trends.
Considering extending your product line and want to know what your local customers are searching for the most? Thinking about launching a back-to-school campaign and looking for insights into the latest fashion trends? Google Trends can provide all of that, with features such as:
- Trend analysis, which monitors the popularity of any Google query over time to gauge customer interest.
- Geographic distribution that allows you to learn where your search terms are most popular to strategize your regional marketing efforts.
- Related topics and queries that help you discover related searches and topics that can provide context to existing trends.
In addition, you can create targeted search criteria, set up alerts, and build workflows so your marketing team stays informed about what your customers and potential customers are thinking.
7. Hotjar
And last, but not least, is Hotjar, a customer behavior analytics tool that gives you deep insights into website visitor activity via heat maps and detailed reports. For most small-business owners, your website can be your most visited – and expensive – marketing asset, and having a seamless and easy user experience can be key to building conversations. And that’s where Hotjar comes in. We use it to identify areas of opportunity to improve our clients’ digital platforms (websites, products, etc.) and make adjustments as needed based on continuous insights. Key features include:
- Heatmaps, which allow you to visually represent user interactions on a website by using colors to indicate where users click, move their mouse, scroll and engage the most. Heatmaps help you identify which parts of a webpage are attracting the most attention and which elements might be overlooked.
- Visitor recordings, which provide a detailed view of user behavior, including mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling. By watching these replays of individual user sessions, you can understand how users navigate through your site and identify usability issues.
- Tester recruitment, a feature that helps with usability testing by asking users to participate in user testing sessions.
Enhance Your Customer Experience
By embracing customer behavior analysis tools, you can gain remarkable insights into your customers' demographics, needs, and desires. With this data, you’ll be empowered to create better marketing materials and improve your products and services, ultimately creating a better customer experience. A strategic approach to building that customer experience can be important for sustainable business growth, and it all begins with good, useful data.
A version of this article was originally published on January 05, 2018.
Photo: Getty Images
