If you’re a business owner in today’s digital world, it may not sound new to you when we say that standing out in a supersaturated market isn’t always easy. The road of a visitor becoming an actual customer is not an easy one, but we’ve got you covered. Read on for all the ways we have listed to help you make your webshop more user-friendly, thus making your site perform better.
Why analytic tools help improve a website
As a website owner, it’s only natural that you see the results of your work from a different perspective than your customers. However, it’s useful to get an insight into what your visitors think of your business, how they behave on your site. One of the best ways of highlighting a webshop’s strengths and weaknesses is to use analytic tools. These programs and applications enable you to see what you’ve done right and what needs a little boost.
Quantitative data (number of visitors in a period of time, average time spent on a site, etc.), tells you what happens on your site. For example, the visitor leaves the cart full of products behind without actually making the purchase. That is what traditional web analytics tools can help you with.
In some cases, that might be enough for you, but other times you will want to look deeper. This way you can understand the motives why you lost a potential buyer at a given point in the sales process. Did they think an item is clickable and when it isn’t they left disappointed? Did they spend a lot of time searching for information that isn’t displayed? Behavior analytics tools such as different kinds of heatmaps or session replays can give you these hints so your webshop can be more appealing to your visitors.
What makes a website user-friendly?
Before taking the characteristics of a good online shop into consideration, let’s take a look at what makes a website user-friendly.
- usability
- accessibility
- speed
- responsive design
- relevant, structured content
- easy navigation
- feedback
- be trustworthy
Usability. One of the crucial user experience design elements is usability. It is the measure of to what extent your website is easy to use. To achieve a good level of it, an outstanding design and great, informative content are necessary but definitely not enough.
Accessibility. It’s easy to overlook the importance of accessibility when designing a webpage. However, this is the attribute that ensures that people living with disabilities e.g. visual impairments can use your website as well.
Speed. Once your website is both usable and accessible, here are some other things that you should look out for, starting with how fast it actually loads.
An optimal average loading speed is key to maintain because no one likes a lagging site. This can affect not only your customers’ satisfaction level but also the number of visitors itself. Approximately 40 percent of potential users leave the site without even doing anything on your webpage if it doesn’t load in under 3 seconds.
That doesn’t seem like much time, so you may be surprised that according to studies, 2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. Moreover, a quick loading speed flatters your website’s rank on the SERP as well. You can monitor your website’s loading speed by e.g. using Google’s Test My Site feature.
Responsive design. Statistics show that as of this year, more than half of world wide web traffic is arriving from mobile devices, so not keeping an eye on improving your site’s responsive web design is a luxury you cannot afford. Try to think of times when you are a customer as well: isn’t it frustrating when you search for a webshop on your mobile, and the font size is so tiny you can’t make out the words?
Relevant, greatly structured content. Keeping a site’s content as relevant to the search terms as possible is beneficial to both parties: saves you a ton of money on search advertising, and spares your potential customer a great deal of unnecessary effort trying to find what they’ve been searching for. This can result, of course, in a better conversion rate – a satisfied user is more likely to watch more pages on your site, and even stay longer, making more action.
Make browsing and navigation easy. Include a search bar on your website: you’d be stunned how much this actually simplifies the buying process from the customers’ perspective! The same goes for product categories. The more structured, logical the hierarchy of product lines are, the more satisfied the user, thus, more success for you.
Feedback. Provide your users with the possibility of giving feedback. Whether it’s a problem they want to let you know, or a question they’d like to ask – dedicate a platform they can communicate with you on. Contact information, such as email address, physical address, phone number, social media, and/or a message page should be available for this purpose. It’s really important that this info is always up-to-date and that your customers get the reaction they seek: an answer to a question or a solution to a problem within a reasonable time frame.
Building trust. Other than listing comments, feedback on our site, securing the payment process itself is of great importance, especially if we’re talking about an online shop. For a higher level of safety, apply a third-party verification (TPV) with payments. This way a part of customer complaints becomes evitable. Try to include multiple payment methods, so that those who still are dubious about paying with their debit card can also become your customers: PayPal or cash on delivery should work fine as well.
When it comes to shipment, always communicate fees very clearly, and partner with reliable delivery companies, but also affordable depending on your revenue. If anything goes wrong in the whole buying process, try to compensate the customer because WOM works negatively as well.
How can you monitor the results of your efforts?
So you’ve selected your goals for improving your website – based on the aspects listed above –, made some modifications, changed up the design elements, the CTAs, maybe even the dominant colors. But how can you know if the performance of your webshop increases and which factors have done the trick for you? Here’s when website analytics tools play an important role.
What are these tools and how can they help you improve your site?
When we talk about web analytics tools, we can put those into two major categories. For one, there are the so-called traditional web analytics tools that show you data in quantities. You can measure and track your traffic by using tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Hubspot, or Statcounter. Depending on your needs, you can analyze your data for free, or for a price that is also tailored to your requests.
Using them, you’ll have data about your website’s traffic like the number of visitors, how many sites they’ve viewed, average time spent on a site and from what source the traffic arrives to you.
Behavior analytics tools and how to use them for your advantage
The other group (from this perspective) is the category of behavior analytics tools. These kinds of tools help you understand your visitors more and make changes on the site accordingly so that it is more likely for them to become actual customers. They can help you answer your questions starting with why. Here’s to mention
- different kinds of heatmaps
- session replays
- A/B testing
- and feedback tools.
Heatmaps
Actions speak louder than words, they often say. It is particularly true when it comes to your site’s visitors. Heatmaps are visualizations of the actions that users do on your site, so turning these tools to your benefit can get you an insight of those behaviors.
Analytics tools like Capturly include different kinds of heatmaps that you can apply to your website. You can make use of
- click heatmaps
- move heatmaps
- scroll heatmaps
- segment heatmaps
In a nutshell, click heatmaps show you where visitors click – this way you can reveal whether your site contains misleading elements, like an item that looks like a button yet isn’t clickable, thus making visitors think that something’s off.
With the help of move heatmaps, you can track the movement of users’ cursors. As it is generally true that the visitors’ attention is where their mouse is hovering, this type of heatmap may give you the kind of insight you’re looking for.
You can monitor the behavior of different user groups by using segment heatmaps. These groups, like in marketing, are based on aspects like what source they arrived from or what device they’re using when browsing your site.
Scroll heatmaps show what sections of your site the visitors actually view, e.g. if they make it to the footer or lose interest somewhere just below the fold.
Are you ready to use these tips to your business’s advantage?
