It is all well and good studying analytics to see how many unique users are visiting your site, how long they stay on a particular page for, and how many choose to leave after consuming the content. But what are you doing with this information?

Some administrators’ prime concern will be boosting traffic numbers or increasing hits for a specific search term. Although this is understandable, you should be giving greater precedence to your audience’s browsing experience. After all, this will provide more lucrative rewards in the long term from Google and other search engines as well as your actual customers.

But in order to deliver greater personalisation, demographics such as geography and device type don’t provide much assistance. Therefore, you must delve a little deeper and start focusing on user behaviour instead.

How to study user behaviour

When presented with a plethora of numbers and graphs, it can be difficult to figure out the behaviour of users. You must somehow analyse the data in front of you to create different scenarios that relate to behavioural trends in real time.

Thankfully, there are several real-world examples of how this can be done. Follow these success stories and you can personalise each and every user’s visit, enhance their browsing experience, and achieve more conversions.

Adobe

For new users, Adobe has a fairly standard home page. However, when you browse for something specific like information on responsive websites and then return to the very same home page, Adobe shows you a different piece of content relating to your previous activity, in this case mobile devices.

Adobe’s website attempts to understand the interests of every user by monitoring their activity, such as browsing for specific topics or watching certain videos. As this example proves, you can enhance any individual’s experience by finding out whether they are on your site for a particular reason and then present a customised home page associated with the same motivation.

Amazon

It will probably come as no surprise to hear that Amazon also delivers personalised experiences by studying user behaviour through analytics. When visiting its home page, you are typically presented with a range of products that might be of interest, even if you have never search for these items before.

Amazon looks at browsing behaviour and previous purchases to identify products you might want to buy. While this seems like a fairly obvious thing to do for an online retailer, it is just one of the reasons why Amazon continues to reign supreme in terms of ecommerce.

American Express

A company like American Express already has the upper hand when it comes to understanding user behaviour thanks to detailed information about offline purchase history. However, its website still delivers an extremely personalised experience based solely on browsing activity.

Furthermore, American Express doesn’t try to sell products that will be of little interest to certain users either. If you are looking for travel insurance, it will concentrate on this vertical rather than other banking services such as credit card rewards.

The importance of monitoring user behaviour

Although you should still give attention to things like user profile information and referring sites, the importance of monitoring user behaviour through web analytics is something that requires a great deal of attentiveness.

By finding out what pages and products interest your users as well as what they are likely to buy and why they may not have completed a purchase in the past, you can deliver a truly personalised browsing experience that will reap more rewards than monitoring simple metrics like traffic numbers and page views.

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