How to understand user behavior to improve your website conversion rate

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

There’s a reason why mind reading is a superpower almost anyone would like to have.

In marketing (or in any aspect of a business, really), “understanding your customer” is an important key—to getting more sales, more leads, more signups, or any other business and conversion goals that you have.

How easier would that be if you can know exactly what your target customer is thinking?

While that’s sadly not possible, here’s the next best thing instead: user behavior data gathered through web analytics tools that help you understand how your customers engage with your website or webshop.

Whether you’re launching a newly developed site or looking for ways to improve conversions on your existing one, this lets you get an idea of what your users think (about your website, at least) and make smarter decisions powered by that insight.

There are four common ways to gather user behavior data: A/B or split testing, heatmapping, session recording and feedback surveys.

In this series, we’ll be dedicating separate articles for each of these methods, but you can often find them offered together in many analytics tools available in the market.

Here are some of the most popular ones that you can check out:

1. Crazy Egg – This tool provides visual reports like heatmaps and scrollmaps (more on these later) generated from aggregate data on your website visitors’ behavior.

It also records browsing sessions and lets you set up A/B tests ranging from text and color variants to re-arranged page layouts.

Crazy Egg offers a one-month free trial, then paid subscriptions that start at $29 per month (as of January 2020).

2. Hotjar – Hotjar also offers heatmaps and session recordings like Crazy Egg, but not the ability to run A/B tests.

However, this tool offers other interesting features that you can take advantage of—funnels, where you can track the pages your users visit on the path to conversion and identify where drop offs happen; and polls or surveys, where you can get direct feedback from your visitors right on the page they’re browsing.

Hotjar has a “free forever” limited plan that offers enough insights for small businesses; for premium options, subscription starts at $29 per month (as of January 2020).

3. Visual Web Optimizer (VWO) – VWO offers a complete suite of solutions for user behavior tracking, including heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys, and A/B testing.

You can choose among their three stacks—testing, insights, and engage—depending on your primary goal for your website, but you can also opt for all three and get the fullstack solution.

VWO is the most expensive tool in this list, with the cheapest plan at $99 per month for the engage stack, and $1999 per month for fullstack (as of January 2020).