Beginner’s Guide to Behavioral Analytics

March 15, 2023 | Merchants | Guest Post

By Evelin Racz, Content Marketing Manager, Capturly –

Have you ever heard of website analytics? Are you interested in e-commerce trends and web development? Make yourself comfortable and get to know the basics of behavioral analytics. This might be the next step to get your business booming.

In this comprehensive guide to behavioral analytics, you can learn more about the following:

1. What is behavioral analytics?
2. What industries use behavioral analytics?
3. How to start using behavioral analytics?
4. Event Paths
5. Identifying your customers
6. Using the results of behavioral analytics
7. Endgame

What is Behavioral Analytics?

Shortly, data analytics is a tool based on raw event data. To understand it more, first, let’s say a few words about behavioral data. Whenever a user engages your business online, the process creates raw event data. This engagement can be a simple swipe, click, or navigation to and from your page and other user actions.

These actions are stored as events tied to users and other details like device, location, etc. Teams can use session replay, heatmaps, or other qualitative web analytics tools that suit their goals the best.

This data can be collected as a whole to give the relevant team a picture of the users’ behavior. The process gives us a better understanding of our users by looking at user flows and actions.

What Industries Use Behavioral Analytics?

Behavioral analytics is commonly used for understanding customers and increasing engagement, revenue, and conversion rates. A good example is Amazon. Its homepage is always customized based on previous searches and actions.

Whatever business it is, this type of data is used by analysts and marketers. When summarizing and reporting, it is up to management on how to utilize the output.

How To Start Using Behavioral Analytics?

First of all, you need to have a clear vision of your goals. To determine these goals, you also have to select different metrics that specify your progress.

For instance, if you have an online game application, one of these metrics can be the growth of registered users. Having this KPI (key performance indicator) allows you to set your next goal, which is to increase the number of registered users. The same would apply if your goal was to increase in-game purchases.

You also need to know who you want to sell your product or service to. Being conscious of your target audience is the first step towards understanding their online behavior.

Event Paths

Now that you have your KPIs, goals, and customer segments, it is time to classify the events within your e-commerce website or application. The events, as mentioned before, are actions and properties like “Open website”, “Registration”, “Add to Cart”, etc.

These events form a chain or path that you can track and analyze. Staying with the gaming app example, here is a path of events that contributes to your goal: Download App – Registration – Playing for the first time – Watching an Ad – Receiving the first achievement – Leveling up – In-app purchase – Receiving next achievement. There are multiple options like the one above. You can modify or break down the events if you want more specifics.

Identifying Your Customers

Having all your customers anonymous would be very challenging if you were to use behavioral analytics. Therefore an identification is necessary to differentiate your users from one another.

Assigning each customer with a unique identifier will help you get the right results. This identifier can be an email address, user ID, or simply a log-in with a social media account.

When talking about website analytics, results are often measured with qualitative data. The type of metrics you use depends on your business and market strategy. It can be revenue, conversion, page views, bounce rate, and so on. Using this data is quite helpful, but it does not focus on user behavior. At some point, you will probably need customer-specific data to make your business website more engaging. This information is provided with qualitative values. It is rich in detail and will help you understand your users. There are several software tools on the market that provide different types of customer-specific data. They all focus on the same thing: logging events. You can obtain visualized data such as heatmaps or session replay tools.

You can use these to capture the events happening on your site. It helps you to understand why your landing page is not attractive enough. Also, you can check if a website re-design is working and get an overall sight of your users’ online behavior.

After collecting all the information necessary, you are able to begin enforcing your analytics. It is recommended to use a test environment for the first time before you go live with your new methods. You can filter minor errors and discover new events to analyze on the way. Using the analytics in an artificial situation will help you determine your expectations before the real implementation.

Using The Results of Behavioral Analytics

A good way to start is to segment your customers based on event data. Based on obvious behavioral differences, you can easily separate customer groups.

When having a game application, you can, for example, use some of the following groups: Once a day users, Regularly purchasing users, Free content-only users and so on. There are a lot of combinations to create customer segments. This way of creating user profiles will give you a helping hand for your upcoming marketing campaigns.

Endgame

Now you have the how, but what is behavioral analytics good for? It unites event and user interactions. Using it will give your business detailed insights into your users’ behavior. You can differentiate your customers and provide them with tailored campaigns. Behavioral analytics will help to direct the customer towards a product.

It also gives a boost to the users so they engage more with products. There are a lot of advantages of using behavioral analytics. But remember, it requires thorough planning and research beforehand. Like every other marketing tool, analytics can go wrong and result in confusing data if you rush into it. Careful planning and event tracking will provide you with the right results. Then it is all up to you to determine what your high risk business does with these analytics.