This sparked a transformation in Dell’s approach, incorporating customer feedback to improve.

Today, Dell utilizes surveys extensively, soliciting feedback on innovation and content relevance. This has solidified Dell’s position as one of the top computer brands driven by customer feedback.

Surveys aren’t merely checkboxes; they’re essential tools for growth-focused brands. 

With VWO Insights – Web,  you can harness surveys to understand customer needs. 

This blog explores how to create surveys efficiently to drive innovation and customer-centric improvements. 

Keep reading to learn more.

So, what exactly are on-page surveys?

Surveys are excellent for gathering customer feedback across industries and formats. 

On-page surveys are those that are shown on a website. They are qualitative research tools for collecting feedback from visitors while they browse websites. They come in various formats, such as pop-ups or embedded forms, and use different question types like multiple-choice or rating scales to gather insights and improve visitor experience.

What are some benefits of using on-page surveys?

Some argue that surveys can be intrusive, and it’s tough to sift through responses. With VWO’s help, you can tackle these challenges and enjoy numerous benefits. Let’s explore the benefits of using on-page surveys.

Get to know your visitors

By understanding who your visitors are, where they come from, and what brought them to your website, you can tailor your content and offerings to better meet their needs. Analyzing visitor demographics, such as age, location, and interests, helps you create targeted marketing campaigns and personalized experiences.

Discover what they love (and what they don’t)

You learn what visitors love and where you can improve your website through survey responses. Understanding why visitors like or dislike something enables you to make informed decisions about website design, content strategy, promotional offers, and more. 

Watch how you can use website surveys to gather insights, address challenges, and meet customer satisfaction.

Spot the problem areas

Survey responses offer insights into product or page performance.  You can inquire if visitors are satisfied with their experience on a particular page or if they have benefited from any recent product updates. Alongside tracking metrics like bounce rate and session duration,  survey responses add depth and clarity, guiding your next steps effectively.

Enhance customer engagement

Understanding your visitors’ preferences allows you to create personalized experiences that enhance engagement, foster loyalty, and build trust. Ultimately, this solidifies their long-term relationship with your brand, turning them into your brand advocates.

Improve upon customer experience

Net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) surveys show how customers feel about your brand, helping you stay focused on their satisfaction. Use this feedback to fix issues and keep customers happy and loyal. Sometimes, it’s not just about marketing. You might need to improve customer service, streamline operations, or create better feedback mechanisms.

How to conduct a successful on-page survey quickly (Yes, it’s possible with VWO)

Setting up a survey might seem like a daunting task – you have to decide on the questions and time it just right. But with VWO, it’s simpler than you think. Let us guide you on how to smoothly conduct your on-page survey while leveraging all the advanced features in our survey capability.

1. Target questions to specific visitor segments

Tailoring surveys to specific segments ensures that the feedback obtained is more accurate and reflective of the needs and expectations of a particular segment.

With VWO, you can target surveys using predefined visitor segments like landing page URLs, new vs. returning visitors, browsers, and more. Further, you can create custom segments by adding attributes.

Let’s say, as an eCommerce conversion expert, you notice most of the traffic comes from mobile users, and you’d want to enhance the mobile experience on the website. You can customize surveys for mobile users, asking questions like ‘Was it easy to find what you wanted?’ to address issues and enhance mobile browsing.

Pro-tip – How do you decide which page to run your survey on? Prioritize pages with underperforming metrics by leveraging web analytics tools. For example, if your SaaS pricing page shows high bounce rates, you can consider setting up a survey to understand visitor feedback and reasons for drop-offs. 

2. Trigger surveys at the right time for maximum impact

Timing surveys ensures they don’t interrupt what visitors are doing, making it more likely for them to actually answer. For instance, if a visitor has spent more than two minutes on a product page, it may be an opportune moment to trigger a survey to gather feedback on their browsing experience or purchase intent. 

Or if a user scrolls to at least 75% of an article, it could be a suitable time to prompt a survey to gauge their interest in the topic or gather opinions on the content quality. 

VWO lets you choose triggers and show on-page surveys at the precise moment. See some standard triggers it offers in the image below. 

See how Bodyguardz, a retail company, gathered qualitative insights through surveys. Achieving a near 54% revenue increase in one year proves the impact of adding surveys to their CRO program.

3. Get AI-generated questions based on your goal

Every survey you implement has a specific goal to achieve, whether it’s to improve customer experience, reduce bounce rate, measure satisfaction, or address pain points. 

With VWO, you can not only choose a goal for your survey but also get AI-generated questions based on that goal. If your survey goal is not listed, you can enter a custom goal to receive tailored questions.

This feature helps you overcome any sort of mental block when creating relevant survey questions. 

Let’s say you’re running a SaaS website and you’re curious about how your customers are feeling about your latest feature update. Instead of spending hours brainstorming survey questions, you can rely on AI in VWO Surveys.

You can just enter your goal, for example, experience evaluation, and the AI generates a bunch of questions tailored specifically for your goal. If you’re not happy with the questions, you can keep regenerating them until they’re right.

4. Ask questions in various formats

Based on the questions you select, you can choose the format for displaying them. 

Use single-line text boxes for open-ended questions, allowing respondents to provide detailed feedback in their own words. Opt for formats like radio buttons for single-choice responses and checkboxes for selecting multiple-choice options. With VWO, you can choose from a variety of formats to suit your survey needs.

In one of the VWO webinars, Ali Good, Global Head of Strategy & Product Marketing at Quiziz, suggested adding a variety of question types to prevent ‘survey fatigue’. By mixing open-ended and closed-ended questions, you can gather both detailed feedback and specific data without overwhelming participants.

Find out how Britannica surveyed visitors to understand their interests, then developed accordion features containing top Q&A for each article. Over 23% of visitors clicked to view answers and delve into additional content. Take a free trial and see how you can get started with our surveys to meet your goals. 

5. Organize the flow of your survey questions

Open-ended questions reveal detailed visitor feedback, while follow-up questions are even more effective for clarifying their responses. When executed tactfully, this approach helps unearth valuable insights without overwhelming visitors.

VWO Surveys’ survey logic feature helps you set up follow-up questions systematically, choosing sequential or conditional displays based on earlier responses.

Let’s understand with an example. As a product manager at a travel company, imagine implementing a survey with a question like: ‘Are you planning your first international trip?’ You may want to ask about the expectations only to visitors who responded ‘YES’ to the question. 

If respondents mention that they are looking for cheap deals and easy booking, show them specific questions related to their answers. Something like: ‘Have you checked our latest discount offers?’ However, if their concern revolves around something your company can’t address, like discounted flight fare, you can conclude the survey.

Such a feature certainly gives you better control over how you want to ask questions to your website visitors and in what order. 

Check out more about survey logic in our article. 

6. Decide the appearance of your survey

To appear more authentic and trustworthy, design your survey according to your brand guidelines. 

Choose from prebuilt themes in VWO or create a custom theme to match your website. Additionally, decide where to display the survey—lower left-hand or right-hand corner of your landing page—to maximize responses.

Additionally, you can show your survey in any preferred language.

Consider a global health organization wanting to understand healthcare access in Latin American countries like Brazil. By creating a survey in Portuguese, they can better connect with the Portuguese-speaking population, uncovering their unique healthcare needs.

This way, multilingual surveys ensure that respondents who speak different languages can participate, making the survey more inclusive. 

7. Streamline survey analysis with AI-generated summaries

Sorting through hundreds of survey responses to identify patterns or gain a unified understanding of visitor behavior is taxing and time-consuming. Simplifying response analysis would undoubtedly save time. 

That’s why we’ve incorporated AI to provide summarized survey insights, helping you make informed decisions. With just a click, you can get summaries, key insights, and actionable steps. 

Let’s say you surveyed visitors on your OTT platform. The AI-generated summary shows key insights like viewers expressing a desire to download their favorite shows. Further, the summary reveals that only 10-15% of viewers would recommend shows. And the majority haven’t even noticed the share button.

Based on these findings, you would also be shown actionable steps to take, such as displaying a download option to meet viewer preferences. To encourage viewers to share shows with friends and family, they could be offered a free 30-day top-up on their current subscription. Moreover, making the share option more prominent could improve user engagement with the feature.

8. Efficiently filter and analyze survey responses

Sometimes, you may want to dive into responses by specific segments instead of just an overview of all responses. As we mentioned earlier, responses from a specific segment can provide personalization opportunities, and interesting insights may emerge during the process.

Yes, it’s possible with VWO Insights for Web!

Let’s continue with the OTT example. Imagine you discover that viewers from the UK have shared the most positive reviews and are most likely to recommend shows within their network. Now, you can tailor your marketing strategies like partnering with UK influencers for promotions, extended free trials, and exclusive content access to engage this segment. 

In VWO, you will have various segments such as traffic source, device, browser, visitor type, location, and language to filter your responses. If you don’t find a specific segment you want to filter responses for, you can create your filters using custom attributes.

Pro-tip: Combining surveys with tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and form analytics helps understand what visitors don’t share but end up doing anyway. Observing what they don’t say is vital. Read our article on visitor behavior analytics for collecting deeper insights.

Watch Arjun Kunnath talk about how you can convert visitor insights into effective results for your website. 

Way forward

So, are you impressed with all that on-page surveys can do for you? 

But remember, surveys are only as effective as the effort you invest in them. If you craft a subpar survey without proper planning, it will fail to deliver the desired results.

With VWO, you will never create a shoddy survey. And when your surveys hit the mark, you’ll never doubt their effectiveness again.  From effortless setup to cutting-edge AI features, we’ve got you covered. 

Now that you’ve read about them in this blog, are you ready to see them in action? Sign up for a free trial today!

While they may follow similar paths, the journeys and experiences they have are entirely unique for each of them.

This makes it all the more difficult for businesses to build a website experience that not only caters to the unique needs and wants of their target audience but also helps them seamlessly achieve the desired goal. 

Although the challenge is difficult to overcome, it is not impossible, especially with the help of customer journey maps.

A customer journey map is basically a graph or map that provides a visual representation of the experience that a customer or buyer persona has with your business.   

The purpose of creating this map is to understand the various stages of a customer’s journey and also to gain insights into their interactions with your brand at each of these stages.

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at how you can create a customer journey map, and also understand how you can use behavioral analytics to enhance this process and optimize visitor experiences. 

Why is it important to map the customer journey of your website?

Mapping the customer journey offers a wide range of benefits, especially when it comes to improving the overall customer experience.

However, the most important reason why you should map the customer journey is that it gives you a clear representation of how a typical visitor or buyer persona navigates through your website.

Marketers and business owners are often unaware of how the actual visitor interacts with a website. While we all want the visitor to reach the final stage of conversion as easily as possible, the journey is often more complex and layered. 

For example, when new visitors land on your website, they would typically want to know more about your brand, offerings, strengths, and benefits. 

However, whether or not visitors will take the desired action depends on various other factors such as their intent, motivation, awareness level, and the stage of their buying process.

With the customer journey map, you can segregate your visitors into different stages and address their specific challenges and motivations at each level.

This not only allows you to optimize each stage, but it also allows you to identify potential roadblocks that prevent them from moving ahead in the buying journey.          

How to make a customer journey map?

Creating a customer journey map involves a lot of research, analysis, and iterations. 

The goal of this process is to visualize how visitors or customers experience your website, allowing you to optimize and improve every stage of their journey.

While there are a lot of different ways to go about it, here is a simple process that will help you get started and create a comprehensive customer journey map.

1. Establish clear goals for your customer journey map

Just like any other business strategy, mapping a customer journey requires a certain level of research and collaboration between different teams in the organization.   

With the amount of effort that goes into creating a customer journey map, you must be clear about what you want to accomplish with it.

Do you want visitors to sign up for a free demo? 

Are you trying to optimize a conversion funnel? 

Do you want to target a specific buyer persona? 

Setting clear goals will help you build a solid customer journey map that is effective, and reliable and also gives you an accurate representation of a customer’s journey.

2. Identify the most important buyer personas

Once you’ve established clear goals for the customer journey map, the next step is to create buyer personas and identify the most important ones.

Most businesses define their buyer personas based on demographics or specific market segments. 

However, an ideal buyer persona should also be based on qualitative factors like motivation, mindset, and challenges faced by a segment of visitors or customers. 

With this approach, you get a deeper understanding of what drives visitor behavior, how they like to make decisions, and also what prevents them from converting into customers.    

To create effective buyer personas, you need to talk to your potential and existing customers through methods like surveys, or questionnaires. 

Implementing A/B testing is also a great way to understand how your audience reacts to changes on the website, giving you insights into their behaviors and preferences.

By defining the buyer personas, you can identify the most common or important ones and start tracking their journey on your website. This will help you to focus on a limited number of personas at a time and track their experience more accurately on the map.

3. List down the touchpoints for each persona

Visitors and customers interact with your business at different points during their entire buying journey and even after that. 

These points of interaction are known as touchpoints, and it is crucial to identify every touchpoint so that you don’t miss out on any aspect of a customer’s experience.

Also, by listing down the touchpoints of your key buyer personas, you can optimize every interaction and build an experience that matches their goals, challenges, and needs.

4. Map the journey of the selected buyer personas

As soon as you’ve identified the key touchpoints, you can list them down on a graph or timeline to visualize their journey from the first point of contact till they become paying customers.

On this customer journey map, you should also define their motivations and emotions at every touchpoint. This gives you a clear overview of how these buyer personas proceed through a conversion funnel and allows you to optimize them with a data-driven approach.

Also, once you’ve prepared the customer journey map, your next action should be to take this journey yourself and analyze whether the customer’s needs and requirements are being satisfied at each touchpoint.

This approach will also help you identify previously unknown roadblocks or challenges that visitors face on your website, giving you a chance to optimize these areas and build a seamless experience.

5. Refine and optimize the customer journey map

Once you’ve created the map, you can start optimizing the customer experience to make it more seamless and effective. 

Since this is an ongoing process, you will have to refine and optimize the customer journey map according to the evolving behavior and preferences of your visitors and customers.

This will not only help you stay on top of the customer journey, but it will also help you discover new ways to optimize their experience and improve customer satisfaction.

Using behavioral analysis to improve customer journey mapping

The customer journey map provides a visual representation of how visitors interact with your website, however, you still need to analyze every touchpoint to identify the common trends and patterns that drive user behavior. 

Although quantitative data like time spent on the page, bounce rate and session duration do give you an indication of how users are interacting with a page, they fail to provide deeper insights about the ‘why’ behind each visitor action.

This is where visitor behavior analysis comes into the picture.

At its core, behavioral analysis is the practice of tracking visitor interactions on your website to gain valuable insights into the behaviors, challenges, roadblocks, and preferences of every visitor.

With the use of powerful analytics tools like website heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and form analytics, you can closely observe how users interact with different elements of your website and use these insights to optimize their experience. 

Let’s take a look at how your business can leverage the power of behavior analytics to optimize the customer journey map.

Identify roadblocks and pain points at various touchpoints

One of the major benefits of behavior analytics tools like heatmaps and session recordings is that they allow you to pinpoint specific areas where visitors encounter difficulties or frustrations. 

For instance, let’s say that a user arrives on your website after clicking on a Google Ad. Now, the next touchpoint for this visitor is the landing page of your website where the primary CTA is the “Start a free trial” button. 

However, you notice that the bounce rate of the landing page is quite high even though data shows that visitors are spending a considerable amount of time on it.

This indicates that users engage with the page but do not feel confident enough to click on the CTA. Here, the quantitative data shows you that a potential friction point exists within the landing page, but it does not reveal the cause behind it.

In this scenario, you can opt for behavior analysis and analyze the heatmap of this landing page. During this analysis, you notice a lot of activity in the pricing section, which is located at the bottom of the page.

The heatmap also shows that the features & capabilities section does not receive high interaction. 

These insights show that visitors are interested in knowing more about the pricing details, and it also indicates that they might be facing some issues with the features section.

Based on these insights gathered from heatmaps, you can make certain changes like improving accessibility to the pricing section and also optimizing the other important sections.

With behavior analytics, you can gain in-depth insights into visitor behavior at every touchpoint on the customer journey map, allowing you to guide visitors more effectively through their journey.

Understand customer intent at different stages of the journey

A customer journey map shows you the different stages that a customer goes through during the buying process. 

Understanding the user intent at each of these stages can help you deliver optimized experiences that match their motivations and goals. 

With behavior analytics tools, you can not only track visitor interactions but also identify common engagement patterns to understand user intent better.

For example, let’s consider that you are creating a customer journey map for a fashion eCommerce website. During one of these stages, visitors browse through different products and categories as they try to find the perfect item.

However, data shows that a lot of visitors are dropping off after browsing through various product pages. This is a major concern as it indicates that visitors are interested in your offerings, but are not proceeding to the next stage for some reason.

Here, you can opt for behavior analysis to further understand this issue. A good way to do this is to run on-page surveys and to learn more about their hesitation to proceed further.

One of the questions that you can ask in this survey is “What additional information would you need to purchase this product?” 

Moreover, with VWO’s on-page surveys, you can use the power of AI to generate relevant, engaging questions that align with the goals of each survey. 

With this approach, you can discover the challenges your visitors are facing, and more importantly, you can also build a strong connection with them by showing a willingness to understand their problems and improve their experience.

Discover trends and patterns in customer behavior

The goals, motivations, and preferences of your visitors and customers change at every stage of the buying journey. 

Understanding these changing behaviors and trends is key to building a seamless, optimized experience. 

Here, the best strategy you can follow is to analyze visitor behavior at every touchpoint and identify recurring trends, patterns, or shifts in their interactions.

For example, a banking website can use session recordings to analyze visitor behavior on key conversion points such as the loan application form or the investment calculator page.

Here, they can watch recordings of how visitors interact with these pages and look for common drop-off or abandonment patterns. 

Based on this behavioral analysis, the banking website can make the necessary changes to align the website experience with emerging behavioral trends.

With this approach, you can analyze every customer touchpoint, gain deeper insights into their behavior, and optimize the entire buying journey.

Boost retention and customer loyalty

The customer journey doesn’t end after a purchase. 

It continues to grow and evolve as the customer interacts with the business, makes more purchases, and expects the business to know everything about their preferences and buying behaviors.

The post-purchase experience is equally important as it determines whether the customer will remain loyal to your brand or switch to your competitor.

At this stage, you need to leverage all the data and insights you’ve gathered so far to further improve their experience and provide a personalized touch to every interaction. 

This phase is crucial for fostering customer satisfaction, building loyalty, and encouraging repeat purchases. 

To do so, you can opt for on-page surveys or feedback forms to understand how you can continuously improve the overall customer experience.

This is crucial as it helps you build a strong connection with existing customers and it also encourages them to speak positively about your business. 

For example, let’s say you wish to improve the cross-selling aspect of your eCommerce business. To do so, you analyze the buying behaviors of existing customers and use the data to recommend similar products when they reach the checkout page. 

Here, you observe the heatmap of this page to understand how customers interact with the recommended products section. During this analysis, you notice that the section does not receive enough engagement as compared to the other sections.   

To further understand this problem, you watch the session recordings of these customers and realize that the images in the recommended products section are not loading quickly.

This is probably why customers are skipping this section entirely and just going ahead with their regular purchases. Based on this crucial insight, you can now optimize this section and ensure that customers can easily view the recommendations.

By continuously monitoring customer behavior and gathering feedback, you can identify areas for improvement and implement iterative changes to streamline the customer journey. 

This ensures that the customer experience remains aligned with evolving customer needs, resulting in long-term loyalty and customer retention.

Types and examples of customer journey maps

As you prepare to build a customer journey map, it is important to choose a map type that matches your business requirements and customer goals. Here are a few of the commonly used customer journey maps.

1. Experience maps

This is the simplest form of a customer journey map as it visualizes the experience, emotions, and needs of different buyer personas and predicts the actions they might take at each stage.

Using an experience map is a great way to start the customer journey mapping process as it gives you a general overview of how typical visitors or buyer personas interact with your website at different stages.

2. Day in the Life

One of the most popular customer journey maps is the ‘Day in the Life’ map. This map visualizes a broader set of actions that a person performs in his daily life, even if it does not involve your brand. 

The goal is to discover the thoughts, feelings, and pain points that potential customers experience and identify the touchpoints where they might interact with your brand. 

3. Current state

Unlike the previous type, the ‘Current state’ map deals with the journey that visitors and customers currently have on your website. 

It helps you to identify the varying levels of awareness and emotions that your customers experience while interacting with your brand. 

4. Future state

As the name suggests, the ‘Future state’ map visualizes how customers will interact with your brand in the future. This is done by analyzing their current behaviors and understanding where they might need your business later on.

5. Service blueprint

This type of customer journey map provides a layered and detailed view of every interaction that a customer has with your business. Moreover, the map also highlights the teams or functions that are responsible for each interaction, giving you more clarity on how you can align the customer journey with your business goals.

Final thoughts – How to use VWO Insights – Web to optimize customer experiences

Building a customer journey map is only half the battle. The other half begins when you try to analyze visitor interactions, observe their behaviors, and identify potential friction points at each stage of their journey.

VWO Insights – Web should be your ideal companion when it comes to boosting the customer journey maps with qualitative data and analyzing the behaviors and patterns of every visitor. 

With powerful behavioral analytics features like website heatmaps and session recordings, you can analyze visitor behavior at every stage and discover previously unknown roadblocks that impact their experience.

Moreover, the platform also helps you conduct AI-powered surveys to gather feedback and insights from your visitors and customers at crucial touchpoints. 

The form analytics feature allows you to perform a field-level analysis of key conversion forms, giving you a clear picture of where your visitors are struggling and helping you identify the reason behind abandonment.

By using these behavioral analytics features, you can enhance the quality of your customer journey maps and also make informed decisions to improve the overall experience of visitors on your website.

Take a free trial of VWO Insights – Web to try out these crucial features and discover in-depth insights about your customers at every stage of their journey.

How? 

Let me explain. 

You’ve carefully crafted and arranged the content of your webpage but tucked away some golden nuggets of value at the bottom. 

The idea is that visitors will effortlessly glide down the page, soaking in every detail. But in reality, visitors don’t always follow this script. 

Are visitors even diving deep enough to find them? Why would they care to scroll down your webpage? Do they wish they found information at their first few glances? 

Finding answers to these questions makes tracking scroll-depth in your webpage so important. 

In this blog, we’ll explore how tracking scroll-depth can improve visitor experiences and boost conversion rates, helping you make informed decisions about your website’s layout and content.

What is scroll-depth?

Scroll depth tells you how far down a webpage a visitor scrolls before they bounce off or take some other action, like clicking a button or visiting the next page. It is usually measured as a percentage of the page length or in pixels. 

Interpreting scroll depth as a percentage of the page length means that we’re measuring how far down the page a visitor has scrolled relative to the entire page length. For example, if a visitor scrolls three-fourth down a page, then it is 75%. 

We can measure scroll depth in pixels, which directly refers to the distance a visitor has scrolled down the page in terms of the number of pixels from the top of the page. For example, if a visitor scrolls 512 pixels down a page, the scroll depth would be 500 pixels as these values are rounded. 

What is a good scroll-depth?

Determining what identifies as a good scroll-depth depends on a couple of factors. Let’s try to understand them:

Set clear objectives

Ask yourself what you want visitors to accomplish when they visit your site. Your web page’s scroll-depth should complement these objectives. 

Consider a SaaS homepage featuring a lead-gen form above the fold. In this case, a lower scroll depth may suffice, especially if the rate of form submissions meets your satisfaction and the page’s drop-off rate remains manageable. 

Now imagine you’re managing an eCommerce website selling sporting goods. If your primary objective is to drive conversions, you’ll want visitors to scroll far enough to view essential product details and ultimately add products to the cart. To encourage visitors to act promptly, you might want to reduce the need for extensive scrolling and enable quick access to CTAs. Hence, a low scroll-depth is desirable.

On the other hand, if your objective is to increase engagement, you’d rather visitors scroll through the entire product description, browse through customer reviews, and interact with multimedia content like product videos or image galleries. In this case, a higher scroll depth would indicate deeper engagement with the content. 

This holds true when your page is delivering information or insight through the content. For example,  if your blog page features lengthy articles, you’d want visitors to scroll down enough to engage with valuable information. In this scenario, a scroll depth above 50% is considered good, while exceeding 75% is fantastic. 

Analyze industry benchmarks

Achieving a 100% scroll depth would be the gold standard, but let’s be realistic. Visitors often don’t scroll all the way down the page due to distractions or shifting priorities. They might get sidetracked by social media, notifications, or simply lose interest. Instead of fixating on pushing visitors to the bottom of the page, it’s more practical to understand the average scroll-depth in your industry.

Knowing where you stand compared to industry norms is key. By benchmarking your own scroll-depth against industry averages, you can gain valuable insights. This understanding helps you develop strategies to improve if your scroll-depth is below or at par. These strategies could include tweaking content placement, refining navigation, or crafting better CTAs to encourage deeper engagement with your webpage.

How do you measure scroll-depth?

By now, you’ve likely recognized that scroll depth is a valuable indicator of visitor engagement on your website. 

But how exactly do you analyze or determine scroll-depth? 

Studying scroll maps provides invaluable insights into visitor behavior, helping you understand how far visitors scroll down your webpages.

Many folks confuse heatmaps with scrollmaps, but here’s the lowdown: while all scrollmaps are a type of heatmap, not all heatmaps are scroll maps. 

Scroll maps highlight the most viewed sections of a page using colors, creating a vertical rainbow effect. It’s a bit different from traditional heatmaps, which typically focus on clicked or tapped elements through a similar color scheme.

While Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics can help track scroll-depth, for an in-depth analysis, they may need integration with other tools. To get the complete picture of your visitor behavior, count on VWO that assists you with its comprehensive robust features. 

Heatmaps of VWO Insights – Web lets you track scroll levels on your webpage as well. The scrollmap report highlights the most scrolled sections of your webpage with brighter colors. It shows the number of views and the percentage of visitors scrolling down your webpage. 

And what’s even more advantageous? VWO provides a plethora of other behavior analytics tools, enabling you to get a comprehensive view of visitor behavior. With this approach, there’s no need to hop from one tool to another, piecing together insights. You can seamlessly obtain a complete picture in one platform. To watch them in action, take a free trial now. 

How do scrollmaps meet the needs of different user personas?

Given their importance in understanding visitor behavior, scrollmaps are becoming a must-have in most companies’ martech stack. Let’s understand how different professionals may find scrollmaps helpful in the context of respective use cases. 

CRO marketers

Imagine you work as a marketer for a travel website. You check your analytics and see that bookings haven’t increased lately, and more people are leaving the site from the checkout page. You want to address the issue, so you turn to behavior analytics to understand what’s wrong.

You focus on scrollmaps to confirm a hypothesis: the checkout button’s placement below the fold, coupled with additional information, might be hindering easy access to the button, affecting bookings. The scrollmap confirms this suspicion as it shows less scrolling below the fold, indicated by cool colors, unlike hotter ones above it.

You realize that bringing the checkout button above the fold is the first low-hanging fruit you must catch. Next, you can make other changes, such as making the button more prominent and removing unnecessary information. This way, even if the scroll-depth isn’t great, tweaking the CTA button placement can still help increase sales and prevent high bounce rates.

Product managers

Suppose you’re a product manager at a B2B consulting company. You recently introduced a feature to allow visitors to create custom bundle service plans and receive personalized prices on the pricing plans page. 

However, your analytics tool indicates that the exit rate on that page remains high, as it was before. This is surprising because you anticipated that giving more power to visitors to customize their services would make the page more engaging and conversion-friendly. 

With the help of a scrollmap, you observe that visitors are not scrolling past the typical pricing plans with set offerings. The bundling option is buried deep within the page, so they may not realize it’s there. Now, you understand that it’s important to change the position of the bundling services feature to get more visitors to interact with it. 

UX researchers

Consider you’re a UX researcher at a gaming company that has just launched an online gaming website. At present, your company’s main objective is to grow a community around this game. They aim to organically spread awareness far and wide, prioritizing audience engagement without resorting to overly aggressive tactics to drive revenue right now. This is why researching visitor experience plays a monumental role for the company. 

It gives you a chance to comprehensively understand how visitors navigate the interface and interact with different elements. This will help you resolve UX issues proactively.

During your regular analysis of visitor behavior, you notice in the scrollmaps that visitors aren’t scrolling down enough on the home page. The cool blue colors toward the bottom of the page suggest they’re not reaching the area where social media share buttons are located. 

You realize that it’s crucial to make these social media share buttons more visible to visitors, as sharing these games on social media can significantly contribute to building a community.  Based on these insights, you might want to bring up the placement of the social media icons and improve visitor flow to them.

Top ways you can use VWO for scroll-depth tracking

Visitors often miss out on valuable content and experiences when they stick to the surface of a webpage. No matter how much we encourage them to explore further, they tend to follow their own instincts rather than our prescribed navigation paths.

The key realization? Visitors bring their own mental models of navigation to the table. Our task isn’t to force them into our navigation schemes but to adapt our designs to match their existing expectations. Now let’s understand how VWO Insights – Web helps you in this journey.

Leverage the collective power of behavior analytics

Yes, scrollmaps help you see how far visitors scroll on your website. But you should also use other tools to get a comprehensive view of visitor behavior. 

Let’s consider another type of heatmap – Clickmaps. They provide clear insights into which areas of your website receive how many clicks. Moreover, you can compare the clicks on two different areas. Unlike full-screen scrollmaps, typical heatmaps offer a detailed view of visitor interactions with different elements.

Additionally, session recordings show you exactly where visitors click and move around the page. Which element are they clicking the most? Are they clicking any non-clickable elements? They help you find these nitty-gritties. 

Let’s say you observe that visitors aren’t scrolling down and hence can’t see a form at the bottom of your page. Just moving it up might not be enough if there are usability issues within the form itself. This is where form analytics becomes valuable for field-level analysis. 

Further, surveys allow you to directly gather feedback from visitors on how to improve their experience. Using these insights, you can make more holistically informed decisions about content arrangement on your web pages.

And you guessed it right, VWO has all these features that simply make your visitor behavior research a well-connected exercise, saving you a lot of time and giving you ample insights.

Decide a strategic placement of key information

When armed with a reliable scrollmap report from VWO, you can strategically organize your page content based on its importance and the desired visitor actions.

For instance, if scrollmap reports reveal that visitors are not engaging with sign-up buttons below the fold, consider placing these CTAs prominently at the top of the page. Alternatively, arrange the content in a logical sequence that addresses visitors’ primary needs and inquiries first, with supplementary details presented further down the page.

Similarly, if a poor scrolling pattern is observed on your product page, prioritize showcasing product details and images above the fold, followed by testimonials. Visitors often seek reviews after examining the product closely. By placing testimonials within immediate view, you can ensure visitor engagement without the need for scrolling. Adopting such strategies across all your webpages can enhance visitor experience and drive desired actions.

Ensure content quality and relevance

Every piece of content on your website should add value for visitors. If scrollmaps show visitors scrolling past content you thought was valuable, it’s a sign your copy needs to deliver more value. This is especially important if you notice more visitors bouncing from that page.

Do you know what copies are turn-offs? Talking about your company instead of focusing on solving visitors’ problems. For instance, if you run a family-owned agency and have a home page with self-centered details like ‘We’ve been in business for over 50 years’ – save that for your ‘About Us’ page maybe. On the homepage, you should focus on addressing how you’ve been meeting visitors’ needs and highlight the benefits they’ll gain from your services. 

Quality content and relevance are paramount in keeping visitors engaged and interested in exploring further, encouraging them to continue scrolling and discover more about your offerings. Scrollmaps help you understand the pulse of your visitors by revealing whether they are connecting with your content through colored patterns.

Understand the placement of visual cues

Visitors often think they’ve reached the end of a webpage and leave, missing out on more content—a ‘false bottom’ effect. VWO can help spot these tricky areas with cooler colors.

Based on the insights gathered, you can place visual cues to encourage visitors to keep scrolling. You can do this by adding subtle animations or arrow icons to indicate more content below. Parallax scrolling effects can also create an engaging experience. 

Break up your content with appealing section dividers or progress indicators to show visitors their progress. Use vibrant images and graphics to capture curiosity and keep visitors exploring. Consider scroll-triggered animations or pop-ups to maintain engagement. 

For instance, on a fashion website, scrolling is preferable to switching pages for browsing apparel. To encourage prolonged scrolling, you could add a “load more” button after visitors have scrolled and viewed numerous products.

Additionally, ensure swift page load speed to prevent visitors from prematurely leaving due to slow loading times, mistakenly believing there’s no content left to explore.

Brands that have benefited from using scrollmaps

Scrollmaps benefit brands across various industries. We have selected three brands that utilized our scrollmaps to delve into behavior insights for shaping their optimization plans.

Elegant Steps improved conversions by 200%

Elegant Steps, a UK-based shoe retailer, observed low conversion rates on its mobile website. To address this issue, its digital marketing agency conducted a thorough investigation using data from Google Analytics, along with heuristics and VWO’s scrollmaps and heatmaps solutions, to uncover key insights. They found:

1. Limited engagement with the “Shop by Brand” section on the homepage suggested low visibility or interest.
2. Key USPs, like free shipping, were not prominently featured above the fold on mobile, along with text readability issues due to image overlay.

Based on these findings, adjustments were made, increasing conversions by 200%.

Therefore, we see that scrollmap analysis provided insights into visitor behavior, indicating areas of limited engagement and visibility on Elegant Steps’ mobile website. Accordingly, the team made adjustments that improved experiences and ultimately resulted in a significant increase in conversions.

Ubisoft increased sign-ups by 12%

Ubisoft Entertainment, a prominent French video game publisher, is known for managing successful franchises like Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, Far Cry, and For Honor. To improve lead generation and conversions on the Buy Now page of their website, they started with an in-depth analysis of visitor behavior. 

By leveraging insights from scrollmaps, they hypothesized that streamlining the purchasing process and minimizing vertical scrolling would enhance visitor engagement, addressing a current issue identified in scrollmap analysis. Subsequently, a test aligning with this hypothesis yielded a notable 12% increase in sign-ups.

Sometimes, we think that to increase lead flow, we need to make significant changes, such as redesigning the entire website, launching a new marketing campaign, or offering substantial discounts. Yet, just by enhancing the scrolling experience based on scrollmap insights, along with a few other tweaks, they managed to increase sign-ups.

Bandwidth increased visit-to-lead conversion rate by 12%

Bandwidth, a company based in North Carolina, is a leader in Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS).  They noticed that the SMS API page on their website wasn’t performing well in turning visitors into leads. This insight came from studying heatmaps and scrollmaps provided by VWO, showing low engagement and scrolling on the page.

Their hypothesis centered on enhancing the above-the-fold experience, optimizing information architecture, and refining value proposition messaging to drive overall conversion rate improvement. Implementing these changes resulted in a noteworthy 12% increase in visit-to-lead conversion rate for the product page.

As you can understand, leveraging insights gleaned from scrollmaps, the company strategically tailored their web content to better meet the needs and preferences of their audience, ultimately driving higher engagement and conversion rates.

Conclusion

Businesses sometimes use the ‘Guess and Check’ method to validate visitor problems they believe exist, but it may not always be effective.

They keep delaying research thinking they need to start perfect, with all the tools and expertise at their disposal. Well, you may start with something simple yet effective, like analyzing scrollmaps. If needed, you can complement them with more advanced behavior analytics tools later. 

VWO offers a range of behavior analytics tools to assist you. The key is to get started and tap into these valuable reservoirs of visitor behavior insights. Because if you don’t do it now, your competitors will get miles ahead of you. 

If you’re interested in exploring all the features of VWO Insights – Web, you can take a free trial and prepare to uncover intriguing details in your site’s scrollmaps.

The above case study proves that behavior analysis is the cornerstone of conversion rate optimization, anchoring your efforts in data rather than guesswork. It’s the bedrock upon which successful experimentation is built, providing invaluable insights that drive measurable improvements in conversion rates. Thus, it is an inevitable part of a comprehensive CRO strategy.

However, does behavior analysis come with its fair share of challenges? Absolutely.

Behavior analysis can be time-consuming and arduous, particularly when dealing with vast amounts of sampled traffic. This labor-intensive aspect often compels many functions to scale back on behavior analysis due to bandwidth constraints—a silent struggle faced by many organizations.

But why is it so taxing? Let’s delve deeper into this aspect.

Diving in: The tedious aspect of behavior analysis

Let’s try to understand the challenge through a scenario, where a business’s website suddenly hits a snag in its conversion rates. The CRO team gets on high alert, eager to unearth the underlying cause using their trusty behavior analytics tool. But in the process of behavior analysis, here’s what it has to undergo:

a. Sift through each session recording

After pinpointing the consideration funnel stage, the CRO team delves into reviewing session recordings of those pages. Here’s a glimpse of the session recordings list it needs to scrutinize:

Reviewing such a comprehensive list to uncover mouse flow and click patterns demands a significant amount of time for CRO team members. They often find themselves rewatching sessions to ensure accurate conclusions.

It’s important to note that if the CRO identified multiple funnel stages, the task would become even more laborious. All of this complexity may increase the likelihood of missing crucial insights, impacting the later stages of the CRO campaign.

b. Read each survey response

In their quest to diagnose the issue, the team also implemented surveys to gather feedback from visitors about their experiences and areas of difficulty. Now that the responses are in, the team member responsible for surveys must sift through each response, particularly the open-ended questions, to identify common pain points or glean insights for future action.

However, this process became incredibly burdensome as the responses flooded in, numbering in the hundreds. The CRO team member found juggling this task alongside the regular workload, making it all a bit challenging to manage effectively.

c. Perform the arduous task of periodic behavior analysis

Customer behavior is inherently dynamic, evolving over time. What was once a standout feature or website element may become outdated as user preferences shift. To stay abreast of these changes, the CRO team conducts quarterly audits, meticulously analyzing multiple pages at each sales funnel step to detect any shifts in mouse flow patterns.

This means delving into session recordings, heatmap reports, and form analytics for every stage of the funnel. Moreover, if there’s a new feature adoption or a significant overhaul in the current user experience, the team must once again undertake this exhaustive process or pinpoint underperforming pages through web analytics. 

So you see, behavior analysis is a relentless cycle that demands constant vigilance to ensure continued optimization and alignment with evolving user behavior. But, is there a way to streamline this process and simultaneously stay attuned to evolving user behavior?

With the VWO Insights Dashboard, this dilemma becomes a thing of the past.

Solving the challenge with VWO’s Insights Dashboard

VWO Insights Dashboard consolidates all visitor behavior data into one convenient location, eliminating the need to analyze individual pages, funnel stages, or sift through countless session recordings.

But how?

Quantifying behavior analysis

The Insights Dashboard employs a unique approach by quantifying behavior analysis through an experience score, graded on a scale of 0 to 100, where 100 signifies an optimal experience. This score is derived from various visitor interactions, such as dead clicks and rage clicks, providing a comprehensive overview of each page’s performance.

How does this help?

This feature eliminates the need to tediously sift through each page report, analyze them individually, and draw insights. Instead, you’re presented with a curated list of pages flagged with poor experience scores. This targeted approach allows you to focus your attention solely on pages that require optimization efforts, streamlining your workflow and maximizing efficiency.

Adding to its capabilities, the feature also provides segment-level experience scores. For instance, if segments consisting of returning mobile visitors exhibit poor experience scores, you can dive into those specific session recordings for deeper insights. This strategic approach streamlines session recording analysis, allowing you to focus on areas that require immediate attention, rather than sifting through all recordings indiscriminately.

Furthermore, this quantification fosters internal clarity within your business communication. You can establish a percentage goal to enhance the user experience or present the numbers to senior management to illustrate the comparative quality of experiences across different pages.

Additionally, you can consistently monitor the user experience through the experience score graph, enabling instant identification of any declines. This facilitates precise analysis without the need for laborious periodic audits, making the process significantly less tedious.

But wait there’s more.

Making survey analysis a breeze

The Insights Dashboard allows you to see the performance of your two recent surveys. On the survey reports, you get a concise summary of the open-ended questions and responses with a word cloud and response list to identify patterns in them easily. 

Therefore, there’s no need for a back-and-forth analysis of survey responses; everything is accessible from the same dashboard. You can also view the form analysis of the two recent forms on the dashboard. 

So you see, VWO’s Insights Dashboard becomes a central hub for swiftly grasping visitor behavior nuances. Should there be any deviations, you can delve deeper into specific pages rather than analyzing everything, pinpointing areas for improvement more effectively and swiftly. 

If you believe this could substantially enhance your visitor experience analysis, seize the opportunity to access a 30-day full-featured trial and witness its impact firsthand.

[Note: The Insights Dashboard is evolving to make behavior analysis more easy and swift. Stay tuned here for upcoming updates.]

To conclude

Behavior analysis stands as a pivotal component of conversion rate optimization, yet its labor-intensive nature often presents challenges for organizations with limited bandwidth.

Fortunately, VWO’s Insights Dashboard revolutionizes this process by centralizing all visitor behavior data, offering a streamlined approach to optimization. By consolidating data into one accessible platform, teams can efficiently identify areas for improvement and focus efforts where they are most needed.

Moreover, the dashboard’s innovative experience score quantification provides a holistic view of page performance, enabling organizations to adapt to evolving user behavior and drive tangible enhancements in conversion rates.

That’s probably the mission statement of every single streaming platform we have today. 

Whether it is Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, Peacock, or any other OTT player, each of them is involved in a never-ending race to attract more viewers and retain existing subscribers. 

However, what started as a unique form of content consumption has now turned into a highly competitive market as these platforms struggle to keep their viewers hooked while also dealing with problems like user churn, lack of customer engagement, and loss of revenue. 

While there might be different reasons for each of these problems, a large part of it can be attributed to the quality of experience that users are offered on these platforms.

Improving the user experience at every stage of interaction is the best way to counter these challenges and stay ahead of the competition.

But, how do you go about it? 

Understanding the importance of behavioral analysis

Be it award-winning documentaries, viral TV shows, or the latest star-studded action flick, viewers are bombarded with every possible content right from the moment they arrive on a platform.

On the other hand, Netflix, which is currently the largest streaming platform, lost close to one million subscribers in a single quarter of 2022.   

This shows how platforms are struggling to retain subscribers, which makes it all the more important for them to continuously improve user experiences.

Understanding how these users interact with your platform, observing the kind of actions they take, and identifying friction points in their journey are key to building an optimized experience.

This is what behavioral analysis is all about. 

For example, let’s consider that an OTT platform displays a section called ‘Watch More Like This’ whenever a user has finished watching any content. However, data from their analytics tool shows that the section is not receiving enough clicks.

This is quite concerning as it indicates that users are probably not interested in the recommendations being shown and as a result, they are just leaving the website immediately after finishing an episode or movie. 

While this may not seem like a major issue, getting a viewer to binge-watch as much content as possible is something that OTT platforms thrive upon. 

To overcome this challenge, the platform can adopt behavioral analysis to track how these users are interacting with the ‘Watch More Like This’ section. 

For starters, they can observe the heatmap of this page to identify the areas that receive the most attention, while they can also watch the session recordings to see what actions users take after they’ve finished watching something. 

Based on these insights, the platform can then discover different ways to engage users at this stage and optimize this particular section. 

Leveraging customer behavior insights at every step of a user’s journey

While the primary goal of users on an OTT platform is to stream content, not all of them have the same preferences, challenges, and mindset. 

Some are new to the platform and are just trying to figure out how it works, while others might be regular users who know exactly what they want to watch. 

Building an optimized experience for every type of user is a challenge that every business has to deal with consistently. This is why you must have a robust strategy in place to leverage behavioral analysis and get deeper insights into user behavior. 

One of the key strategies is to define the important stages of the user journey on an OTT platform and implement behavioral analysis according to the specific goals and challenges of users at these stages.

1. Discovering the platform

In the initial stage of the user journey users arrive on your website to not only explore the platform but also to get an idea about the content you are offering. Based on what they see and experience, these new users will decide whether or not they want to become paying customers.

Here, businesses can closely analyze the behavior of new users to understand their perception of the platform and discover important patterns or trends in their decision-making process.

For example, new visitors who arrive on an OTT platform are often trying to find one specific movie or show, and they just want to know whether the platform has it or not. 

Suppose Gary, a new visitor, arrives on a streaming platform looking for a popular crime-thriller show called ‘Mindhunter’. 

If the show is available, Gary will most likely convert and become a paid subscriber. However, if he cannot find this show, he will just leave the page and move on to another platform. 

This is a lost opportunity for the business and can lead to even more drop-offs in similar cases. 

To prevent this from happening, the streaming platform can opt for behavioral analytics tools like session recordings to see how visitors like Gary interact with the platform once they realize that it does not have their preferred show or movie.

Do visitors immediately leave the page? 

Do they stop and explore the other shows or movie recommendations? 

How far do they scroll on this page?

Through session recordings, the platform can find answers to all of these questions and can also discover interesting insights about visitor interactions at this stage of their journey.

Based on these insights and observations, the platform can then improve its content recommendation algorithm and also make sure that its best content is displayed within the area that receives the most attention on this page.     

By fine-tuning these crucial aspects based on visitor behavior, you can significantly impact the decision-making process, enticing users to move from consideration to subscription.

2. The consideration stage

Another crucial aspect of a visitor’s journey is the consideration stage. Here, the visitors are convinced of the platform’s offering but are still trying to learn more about it before they become customers. 

When it comes to streaming services, visitors want to experience the platform before they even convert into paid subscribers. This is why most streaming platforms offer a free trial period where users can access most of the available content for a limited period.

For instance, let’s assume that a streaming platform offers a 14-day free trial to new visitors. However, there has been no growth in this number and it has remained within the same range for the past 6-8 months. 

The platform then decides to conduct a thorough analysis using website heatmaps and starts to observe visitor behavior on its home page. 

During this analysis, they realized that even though the home page displays a wide range of shows, movies, and documentaries, new visitors hardly interacted. 

Also, since there was no clear CTA on the home page, a lot of visitors were clicking on the navigation bar to probably get more information about the platform. 

So, based on these crucial website heatmap observations, the company can now either optimize its home page to guide new visitors or display relevant information about the pricing, benefits, and other important FAQs. 

Also, instead of displaying all the available content at once, the platform can instead promote only its most popular shows and movies to new visitors. 

This is how businesses can leverage website heatmaps to gather actionable insights and use these observations to guide changes and improvements on important pages.

3. Onboarding new visitors

Now that the visitor has finally become a paid subscriber, the onboarding process sets the tone for the entire relationship. 

Crafting a user-friendly interface and recommending relevant content that aligns with their preferences is a great way to improve the onboarding journey. 

Additionally, analyzing customer behavior becomes all the more important as the business now has the opportunity to learn more about the user’s preferences, likes, dislikes, interests, and so on.

For example, let’s say that a user has just become a paid subscriber and is ready to explore the platform and watch all their favorite content. 

However, as we saw in the previous example, users often feel overwhelmed when there are many options to choose from. To avoid this problem you can opt for a crucial part of behavior analytics – on-page surveys. 

When a new customer is about to explore the platform, you can prompt a survey with questions about their favorite genres, categories, formats, or preferences.

As soon as the user shares their answers, you can recommend content that aligns with the preferences they just shared. Also, based on these survey responses, you can predict content formats or genres that they might like and optimize their recommendations accordingly. 

By doing so, you create a continuous cycle of content recommendations that perfectly match the user’s taste and liking.

Moreover, you can also use these on-page surveys at different stages to understand whether or not the users are enjoying their experience and also ask for feedback and suggestions to make further improvements.  

4. Engagement and content consumption

As users continue to watch content and interact even more with your platform, you need to focus on improving user engagement and ensuring they remain satisfied with the available offerings. 

Again, behavioral analysis is a great way to achieve this and learn more about important aspects such as watch patterns, consumption trends, and viewer preferences.

Ever wondered why certain shows or movies become binge-worthy favorites? 

Apart from a lot of social media promotions, streaming platforms heavily recommend these shows to their existing customers based on their watch patterns and viewing trends. 

Also, they analyze various behaviors such as whether users prefer shorter episodes over lengthy ones, or whether they prefer movies over TV shows. 

All of this research and behavioral analysis gives them valuable insights into viewer preferences, based on which these streaming platforms try to promote relevant content. 

One of the best ways to do this is by analyzing heatmaps of different pages and understanding how users interact with important sections. 

For example, a streaming platform can use website heatmaps to observe the ‘What Others Are Watching’ section and identify the areas that receive the highest clicks and interaction. 

Based on these insights, the platform can then strategically place popular shows or new releases in these areas, ensuring that users are drawn to their best content effortlessly.

As we saw in one of the previous examples, streaming platforms can opt for session recordings to observe user behavior and identify potential friction points in the recommendations section. 

These insights can help refine their algorithms, and can also enable businesses to offer more accurate and appealing content suggestions, ensuring that users stay engaged throughout their time on the platform.

5. Burnout and retention

Be it eCommerce, B2B, or even on-demand streaming, retaining customers is the key to the success and growth of any business.

Using a combination of different behavior analytics tools, you can develop a strategy to avoid customer burnout and find effective ways to retain outgoing customers.

For example, you can look at your analytics tool to identify users who have been using the platform less frequently. These users might be potential churners who are no longer interested in the streaming platform for some reason. 

To make sure that they continue to use the platform, the business can prompt pop-up surveys whenever these users interact with the website and either offer plan extensions or try to understand why they are not as active anymore.

Moreover, some streaming platforms also offer breaks to customers where they can stop their subscription temporarily and join back after a few months for no extra cost.

By understanding the intention of your customers through on-page surveys, you can implement either of these strategies to show empathy and offer assistance at different points to your customers. 

Another key strategy is to analyze user behavior on account exit pages.

For example, if users wish to deactivate their account, streaming platforms usually prompt personalized offers or benefits to prevent them from taking this action. 

You can take this a step further by watching the session recordings on this page and understanding how users are interacting with these offerings. Also, you can analyze the heatmaps to identify click patterns on this page.

This should be an ongoing activity where you gather actionable insights from these pages and use them to optimize the content and placement of your offerings. 

By monitoring watch history, survey responses, heatmaps, and session recordings, streaming services can optimize their content libraries, introduce loyalty programs, and offer exclusive previews to keep viewers hooked and invested in the platform.

Discover the ‘why’ behind every user action with VWO Insights – Web

User expectations are at an all-time high. 

No matter what industry you belong to, users expect you to provide an optimized experience that not only matches their needs, and preferences but also offers innovative solutions to their problems. 

This is where VWO Insights – Web comes into the picture. 

Unlike the traditional analytics tools that only offer data about what actions a user is taking, VWO Insights – Web provides the tools that are necessary to discover the reason behind these actions.

Be it AI-powered surveys that help you understand the customer’s voice better or advanced form analytics that help you identify friction points in crucial lead generation forms, VWO Insights – Web offers everything you need to optimize roadblocks and improve the overall website experience.

Moreover, VWO’s website heatmaps and session recordings help you to see exactly how visitors interact with every page on your platform, enabling you to uncover actionable insights and optimize every stage of a user’s journey. 

Take a free trial of VWO Insights – Web to experience all of these features in action and discover in-depth insights to boost your website’s performance.

There could be many reasons for decreasing conversions and low click-through rates. In this blog, we’ll concentrate on three common scenarios that might be causing issues, regardless of your industry.

i. Form flow woes: You have a multi-field form to generate leads, but it’s not performing well and falling short of achieving the business objective of lead generation.

ii. Engagement deficit: Your content isn’t engaging and converting visitors to leads.

iii. Navigation flaws: Users struggle to find products from your navigation menu that has multiple categories.

Before making alterations to the current user experience or launching A/B tests to address these issues, it’s crucial to have a precise understanding of what’s going wrong. The figures derived from a web analytics tool merely serve as symptoms; uncovering the root cause of the problem involves delving into the user experience when they decide not to convert. This is precisely where a behavior analytics tool proves to be invaluable.

So, how can a comprehensive tool like VWO Insights-Web with vast application assist in tackling these three challenges? Let’s delve into it with the help of three case studies featuring high-growth businesses that successfully overcame these issues using the tool.

Note: Here’s a guide for you to refer to when you come across various features of VWO Insights-Web in this blog. It provides details of how these VWO features work cohesively for behavior analysis.

Success stories: How brands harness VWO Insights-Web to transform challenges into triumphs

Qualicorp discovered a form-filling conundrum: Indistinct field names

Qualicorp, a healthcare organization based in Brazil, aimed to enhance lead generation and boost conversions on their health insurance plans page. However, the page was underperforming. Enter VWO Form Analytics from VWO Insights-Web, which proved instrumental in analyzing the user experience.

The form analytics features provided valuable insights into user pain points, tracking metrics such as hesitation rate, ragged clicks, dead clicks, completion time, completion rate, and more. Upon analysis, it became evident that one of the factors contributing to the low form-fill rate was the need for discernible field names during the form-filling process. This, in turn, resulted in fewer users making it to the health insurance plans page.

In response to this insight, Qualicorp implemented an A/B test featuring a new design. The results were impressive, with the new design boosting the conversion rate by a substantial 16.93% in the primary goal.

Read the full case study.

Encyclopedia Britannica Group found blue to be the most engaging link color

The Encyclopedia Britannica Group, a venerable institution with over 250 years of global knowledge leadership, strives to ignite curiosity and enhance engagement with its content to cultivate a robust user base and drive subscriptions.

To optimize their approach, the marketing team at the group employed A/B testing through VWO Testing, experimenting with three colors—red, orange, and blue (control)—for in-line article links, coupled with calls to action, to determine the most effective option. Subsequently, the team utilized VWO Session Recordings to delve into click behavior, and mouse flow in order to see how users perceived these different colors. 

During this analysis, a noteworthy observation emerged: many users attempted to click on words highlighted in blue, even though these words weren’t actual links. Recognizing this user behavior, the team decided to keep the blue color for the actual links, resulting in a remarkable 10% improvement in their click-through rate. 

Additionally, the team harnessed VWO On-Page Survey capability to uncover the most pressing inquiries users had about the topic. Armed with this valuable insight, the company took proactive steps by designing an accordion feature on its website, showcasing the top Q&As derived from the survey for each article. The outcome was impressive, with over 23% of users engaging with the accordion to access answers to their questions.

Read the full case study.

Shopclues improved the product searching process on the navigation bar by focusing on user feedback

Shopclues, a prominent e-commerce player in India catering to 42 million visitors, took a strategic approach to enhance its Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) initiatives. In a meticulous analysis of each element, the focus was on tracking conversion signals. The tool of choice for this endeavor was VWO Insights -Web, utilized to delve into user behavior on the category page.

Through VWO Heatmap analysis, it became evident that filters such as “new arrivals,” “best selling,” and “price sorting” were capturing the majority of user attention. Users had to navigate by clicking on these filters and then sifting through products to find what they were looking for.

To streamline this process, Shopclues’ CRO team leveraged VWO On-Page Surveys to directly gather feedback from visitors regarding these filters. Armed with valuable insights, a variation was crafted that eliminated the extra step for users. This new approach presented visitors with products matching their chosen filters right away in a horizontal display in the navigation.

The new top navigation bar delivered 50% more CTR. Not only did the improvement in visits-to-order (48% from the category page) translate to higher revenue, but it also improved the quality of visits.

Read the full case study.

These three case studies serve as compelling illustrations of how VWO Insights-Web proves to be a valuable tool in addressing common challenges across diverse industries. It excels in pinpointing the root causes behind low conversion rates, showcasing the versatility and effectiveness of this solution.

And does VWO Insights-Web stop here? Not at all; there’s more to explore and leverage.

Beyond optimization: VWO keeps a watchful eye on your user experience

Imagine you’ve honed your user experience using data from VWO Insights-Web or another tool, implementing a series of optimization campaigns over a quarter. As the quarter concludes, assessing the performance of these optimizations becomes crucial. How do you go about it? Well, VWO provides a solution – the Insights Dashboard. 

This tool empowers you to effortlessly track and analyze the effectiveness of your optimizations. The dashboard offers a comprehensive view, shedding light on friction points and experience scores derived from user satisfaction, delivering valuable insights into the performance of your enhancements.

Notably, you can easily identify pages with low scores and validate the reasons using heatmaps and scrollmaps. Furthermore, pinpointing visitor segments with low experience scores allows you to tailor customized plans for these segments.

This is just one application 

The dashboard is also invaluable in the early phases of behavior research, providing insights into friction points contributing to low conversion rates. 

Thus VWO Insights-Web provides comprehensive and versatile solutions throughout the entire lifecycle of website enhancement and optimization efforts. Let’s see what some of our clients have to say about the tool. 

Rave reviews: What users are saying about VWO Insights-Web

In conclusion

VWO Insights-Web is a tool that enables proactive and continuous monitoring of your website experience score. It empowers you to identify issues using features like heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys, and form analytics for low-performing pages and visitor segments. Once you formulate a hypothesis, you can seamlessly run an A/B test from the same platform and subsequently track the experience score. This makes it a one-stop shop for the entire experience optimization process.

So, if you’re ready to give it a try, here’s an all-inclusive 30-day free trial of VWO. It encompasses all the capabilities and features that will assist you in making informed business decisions when choosing an optimization tool.

No, they don’t wave a magic wand to score successes.

Among the strategies they employ, a common thread is placing customers at the core of everything they do. It all begins with tuning in and understanding how audiences navigate their websites and engage with their brands. And this naturally leads them to leverage behavioral analytics.

While anyone in an organization can explore visitor behavior, certain professionals absolutely need to delve into it because their work is rooted in deriving valuable insights from such analyses. And when they become pals with behavior analytics tools, they can do justice to the work they do. 

Product managers convert insights from visitor behavior into actionable steps for the development team to create features that visitors love.

Next, we have the marketers who identify conversion roadblocks and optimize them to maximize the return on marketing investments through behavior analysis.

Lastly, UX professionals leverage behavior analytics to craft intuitive, frictionless website journeys, addressing visitors’ pain points and needs. 

Their use cases may vary, but they recognize the value of analyzing visitor behavior for their company’s success. 

Continue reading to know in detail how each of these personas can benefit from using behavior analytics.

How Product Managers benefit from behavior analytics

Product managers are responsible for recognizing customer needs and improving the product, either by enhancing existing features or introducing new ones. It’s not just about meeting customer needs; they also make sure these improvements help achieve the overall goals of the business. 

They act as a link between customers and the development team, turning feedback into practical plans. This entire exercise requires a solid understanding of how visitors behave on their websites – indicating a lot about their needs, expectations, pain points, and aspirations. 

Prioritize features that users want

Wondering if your product has peaked and reached its best version? Well, that might not be the case. Visitor needs are ever-evolving, and it’s essential to stay tuned to their preferences. Some innovative ideas arise from their needs, ones you might not have considered. In such cases, using behavior analytics tools like surveys allows you to directly understand what they’re looking for.

But it’s not always a straightforward conversation. Sometimes, you have to observe their actions, pick up on subtle cues, and figure out how to enhance their website journey without them explicitly stating it. This is where tools like heatmaps and session recordings prove invaluable. 

Hot red colors on heatmaps indicate high engagement, while cool blue colors show low engagement. On the other hand, session recordings offer a comprehensive view of visitors in action—revealing where they pause, what they click, and more. This way, these tools help uncover the challenges visitors face, providing product managers with opportunities to create new features that align with evolving needs.

Increase feature adoption

Introducing cool features is fantastic, but the real magic happens when our visitors actively engage with them, doesn’t it? Now, how do we gauge their usage? Heatmaps and recordings step in to showcase how smoothly audiences interact with the new features. 

Let’s say you’re a product manager at a gaming company, and you want to see the audience’s reaction to a new feature showing interactive gaming tutorials and walkthroughs. By tuning into insights from visitor behavior, as unveiled by these tools, you can effectively assess how players are responding to the feature.

Are the heatmaps indicating less engagement in this area? Do recordings reveal that not many visitors are interacting with these tutorials? Delving deep into their behavior will help you determine at what stage of engagement the visitors are with your new product feature. This allows you to refine visitor experiences, encouraging them to embrace the feature with ease. 

Expedite bug fixes

Imagine you have a website selling various products, and customers often encounter broken links when trying out a new feature, such as viewing a product in a 3D setting on the product page. That’s a bug, and they happen in software. But the quicker these bugs are fixed, the happier users are. Swift bug resolution is essential for maintaining a seamless user experience. 

Behavioral analytics tools, such as session recordings and surveys, offer a proactive approach to bug detection and resolution. Suppose, when you observe in a recording that visitors are clicking the link and it shows as broken, it indicates a friction in their journey. This way, you know where the problem is, and you can take quick action. By leveraging these tools, product managers can promptly identify and prioritize fixing critical bugs, ensuring a more stable and reliable product for users.

Decrease support tickets

While efficient customer support is crucial, we should ensure that our product is so finely tuned from the get-go that our visitors face little to no problems to begin with. Consider a travel booking website where users occasionally encounter hiccups in the flight search process, leading to a surge in support tickets. 

Now, through heatmaps and surveys, the product manager gains a sneak peek into visitors’ sentiments and pain points during the booking journey. This way, they can proactively tackle specific challenges, like fine-tuning the search filters. This not only elevates the booking experience but also naturally reduces the number of support tickets, ensuring a smoother journey for visitors planning their trips right from the start.

A product manager’s strategy is rooted in creating a product that is intuitively designed, motivating visitors to make the most of the new features. Incorporating intuitive guides and tooltips within the product can preemptively assist visitors, reducing the likelihood of queries and support ticket submissions.

How Marketers benefit from behavior analytics

In today’s era where data fuels business growth, marketers zero in on a data-driven approach for sustained business growth. Hence, by investigating visitor behavior on websites, they uncover optimization opportunities and implement effective strategies. In doing so, they ensure maximum conversions from website traffic, contributing to businesses’ returns on marketing investments.

Reverse low conversions

The role of a CRO marketer is to decipher why website visitors may slip through the cracks without completing desired actions. Are there any friction points hindering them from following the expected conversion route? Heatmaps and session recordings shed light on visitor behavior, unveiling areas causing confusion or disinterest. By addressing these pain points, you can effectively reverse the trend of low conversions.

Let’s consider a scenario where your heatmap reveals a lack of engagement with the primary CTA button on your website. After adjusting its placement and design based on insights from session recordings, you’ll likely observe an increase in conversions.

Note: Qualitative research reveals the ‘why’ behind visitor behavior, explaining why visitors act a certain way on a website. However, before delving into qualitative insights, quantitative research provides the ‘what’ – identifying specific issues on the website. 

Once quantitative research uncovers problems like drop-offs and declining average page sessions, qualitative research comes into play to understand why visitors exhibit certain behaviors causing these issues. In all these scenarios, personas either proactively dive into behavior analytics to stay ahead of visitor behavior or turn to qualitative research after identifying problems in quantitative research (using tools like Google Analytics 4) for in-depth analyses.

Discover engagement gaps

Websites serve as intricate canvases, capturing the ebb and flow of visitor interactions. Ever noticed those quiet corners or pages where visitor engagement seems to dim? CRO marketers pinpoint and revive these areas of potential disengagement.

How’s that possible? By turning to behavioral analytics. Heatmaps highlight areas with low and high engagement, offering a detailed map of user activity. Meanwhile, session recordings delve into the subtle nuances of visitor disengagement, providing a playback of their journey on the website. Armed with this insightful palette, you can strategically enhance specific sections, improving the overall experience.

Consider a scenario where a clickmap signals low interaction with a crucial product description. By delving into the related session recordings, you hypothesize that bringing it above the fold could enhance visitor engagement, offering them maximum information for their purchase decision. Strategic adjustments like these demonstrate how marketers can effectively leverage insights to bridge engagement gaps and drive results.

Segment for personalization

Embracing a one-size-fits-all approach can spell disaster for any website’s conversion rates. Instead, you should uncover the unique behaviors within diverse visitor groups and tailor experiences to align with their preferences. To achieve this, employing a behavior analytics tool like VWO becomes essential—it allows you to delve into specific segments for personalizing experiences. 

For example, simply choose the segment you want to see the session recording for and create a targeted view of a specific page. Additionally, with advanced filters, you can gain insights into how various segments engage with forms and on-page surveys on your website. This wealth of information becomes the foundation for building your personalization strategy.

Suppose you apply a filter to form responses and observe that new visitors show the highest drop-off from your services website. You can brainstorm creative solutions such as introducing complementary offers or discounts to incentivize this specific visitor group to complete form submissions. By adapting your approach based on these insights, you tap into the power of personalization for improved conversion outcomes.

Refine messaging

Do you know what’s the best way to strike a chord with your website visitors? Talk the language your visitors really want to hear. It’s all about paying attention to how visitors behave on your website and tweaking your messages accordingly. 

And you can probably guess what helps you in this case? Yes, behavior analytics. Let’s say you have a real estate website, and you see on GA4 that visitors from urban areas are spending more time on modern condo listings than suburban homes. When asked through surveys what exactly they are looking for, you get to know visitors want to see more benefits of booking condos on your website. 

You can refine your messages on those condo pages, highlighting the verified sellers, affordable pricing, and perhaps emphasizing the nearby trendy spots. It’s like customizing your property listings based on what urban dwellers are truly seeking. Hence, behavior analytics empowers you to craft messages that resonate with potential buyers. 

Watch our webinar to discover how to write copies that solve visitors’ pain points and improve conversions. 

How UX Professionals benefit from behavior analytics

UX professionals play a crucial role in shaping how visitors experience a website. Starting with UX researchers, their responsibility is to deeply understand the needs, behaviors, and preferences of visitors. With these insights, UX designers create user-centric interfaces that are intuitive, visually appealing, and aligned with user needs. 

Throughout this journey, behavioral analytics serves as a valuable companion, supporting them every step of the way. This data-driven research and design approach ensures that decisions are well-informed, making the overall visitor experience effective. 

Uncover navigation bottlenecks

A visitor-friendly navigation structure isn’t just a fancy improvement. It can boost product or information findability by 72%. This is supposed to have a positive impact on the overall visitor experience. The key lies in employing behavior analytics tools to keep a close eye on how visitors interact with your website.

For example, imagine discovering through clickmaps that visitors are frequently clicking on a non-clickable element, clearly indicated by a conspicuous red color on your website. Concurrently, session recordings show instances of rage clicks followed by a subsequent drop-off. Based on these insights, your UX team can proactively address the challenge, delving into strategies to enhance navigation and ensure a smoother user journey on your website.

Expedite research with visual data

Trends are fleeting, and visitor preferences evolve rapidly. Therefore, the ability to promptly make well-informed decisions that align with current audience desires is crucial. 

Behavior analytics provides an immediate and comprehensive overview of visitors interactions on your platform, accelerating your research and design executions. For instance, imagine you manage a learning platform and observe through visual insights from heatmaps and session recordings that students tend to skip lengthy lecture recordings. 

To delve into the reasons behind this behavior, you initiate quick and focused surveys, efficiently collecting user opinions. The feedback indicates a desire for quizzes and community discussions in addition to traditional lectures, revealing the pulse of your visitors’ preferences.

Make targeted improvements

Understanding the unique needs of diverse user segments is crucial for tailored improvements. Behavioral analytics tools allow us to investigate and enhance the experience for specific visitor groups. 

Let’s say your UX team notices through qualitative research that mobile visitors often struggle with the checkout process on your eCommerce site. So, armed with these insights, your UX team optimizes the checkout flow, making it simpler for this segment to complete the purchase, ultimately enhancing their overall shopping experience.

Sounds like a hassle? If you’re thinking of skipping, remember the fact that personalization helps companies get 40% more revenue than those that don’t. This should motivate you to have your UX teams trained on behavior analytics if you have not already. 

Validate designs with user feedback

When a UI matches a visitor’s mental model, it feels intuitive and reduces the cognitive load on visitors. It aligns with their expectations, making it easier for them to navigate and interact with the interface seamlessly.

That’s why validating your UI with visitor feedback tells you that you are on the right track. Behavior analytics, like heatmaps and session recordings, play a critical role in understanding how users interact with the UI.

Consider a scenario where a UX team is working on the mobile version of a banking website. An increase in premature drop-offs as shown in Google Analytics tells you to identify potential friction points. Session recordings reveal users struggling to find the transaction history. Surveys further confirm that users expect the transaction history to be more prominently placed on the home screen. Subsequently, the UX team redesigned the layout to align with users’ mental models, resulting in a more intuitive and user-friendly interface. 

If you’re eager to contribute to your company’s growth through visitor research, our blog will guide you on how you can make a meaningful impact within your role. We’ve discussed examples to justify the perks of behavioral analytics – and guess what? It works in almost every industry! 

Just make sure to follow best practices, starting with quantitative research to identify problem areas. Then, move to qualitative analysis, document your learnings, and set the right goals you want to achieve based on the insights gained from visitor behavior. 

So, let’s say you have hands-on visitor insights, but you’re unsure whether you need them to reverse conversions or bridge engagement. In such cases, it might make little sense, and you could inadvertently encroach into another persona’s work territory

VWO Insights – Web: The go-to behavior analytics tool for businesses

VWO Insights – Web has always been at the forefront of visitor behavior analytics, providing businesses with profound insights into their websites. Recently, its power has doubled with the launch of the Insights dashboard, bringing your website’s overall engagement performance report to your fingertips. Now, you can view page-level heatmaps, session recordings, segments with the lowest user experience, and more.

And you know what else? We’ve integrated AI into surveys that generate questions for your surveys until you’re satisfied with the output. You also receive summarized survey responses with key insights, actionable for easy implementation of optimization ideas. To witness all these features in action, try a free trial with VWO. So, get ready to experience its magic and unveil more visitor insights than you could ever imagine. 

Luckily for us, the reality is different. The strategic implementation of cutting-edge customer behavior analysis tools has helped numerous brands overcome these hurdles and position themselves to thrive in the ever-evolving market dynamics.

Leveraging user behavior analysis for transformative improvements

To maximize customer insights and strategically prioritize growth, companies have customer analysis tools at their disposal. These can be used to define clear goals and key metrics, implement robust tracking mechanisms, meticulously segment user data, and discern meaningful patterns in user behavior. 

VWO Insights – Web, has the power of features like session recordings, heatmaps, surveys, and form analytics. It goes beyond mere observations to dive deep into user interactions, identifies issues with surgical precision, and provides actionable insights that shape the very fabric of design decisions. 

You can browse all sessions of a visitor in a single hub to understand their complete journey. You no longer need to miss any intricacies of their journey – in fact, you witness firsthand how they navigate and experience your website. 

Say, for instance, your goal is to evaluate the effectiveness of a new user interface and identify opportunities to enhance the visitor journey.

You begin by accessing the session recordings tool to observe user interactions on the website. The focus is on users who successfully complete a purchase, aiming to understand their journey from landing on the homepage to completing the checkout process.

You can see whether your users navigate easily through your redesigned homepage – whether the simplified layout and clear call-to-action buttons contribute to a positive first impression. You can check how quickly visitors find the product categories they are interested in, and note down instances of confusion or hesitation.

If session recordings and heatmaps highlight users smoothly browsing through product pages, you can check whether the transition from product selection to cart management is as seamless as you’d like. The clickmap, scrollmap heatmap, and session recordings all come in handy to analyze the efficiency and placement of the add-to-cart button. 

You can also evaluate the checkout process if you notice an increase in abandoned carts. How are users progressing through the checkout steps? Session recordings can show any issues they encounter giving you the opportunity to brainstorm optimization ideas like adding clear progress indicators, concise form fields, or the option to save payment information.

With a quick setup and a free trial, you can harness the comprehensive analytics offered by VWO Insights – Web to guide transformative improvements on your website, ensuring a digital experience that resonates powerfully with your audience. 

In the following section, we present 3 case studies of high-growth brands that used VWO Insights – Web to fast-track their UX goals. 

Success stories: The power of surveys, session recordings & heatmaps

Bear Mattress identified issues with their product detailed pages: low click activity, less interaction with products, non-engaging copy

Bear Mattress, a sleep wellness trailblazer, sought to elevate its revenue game by tapping into cross-selling opportunities. Teaming up with VWO, they embarked on a strategic journey to optimize their website and boost conversion rates, aiming to redefine the sleep experience for their diverse customer base, spanning athletes to professionals.

Honing in on the ‘Cross-sell Flow’ on mattress product detail pages, Bear Mattress identified challenges with the help of VWO Insights – Web. 

The following observations were made:

• Not many people clicked on the ‘Frequently bought with mattress’ section that shows other products you might like. Compared to other parts of the page, not many clicks happened on those suggested products, as seen in the heatmap.
• In the ‘Frequently bought with mattress’ part, there were no pictures of the items, making people less interested in that section. It affected how much people engaged with that part of the page.
• Also, the words used were more about the product than what the customer might like. The words didn’t make customers curious or give them good reasons to think about buying the product.

A daring redesign of the cross-sell section based on these insights led to a 24.18% uplift in successful purchases and a remarkable 16.21% revenue boost. 

Here’s the full case study. 

Micro Focus identified the cause of the low form completion rate with form analysis: no indication of mandatory fields

In the intricate realm of digital transformation, Micro Focus, a stalwart with almost five decades of history, embarked on a journey to redefine success in a dynamic marketplace. The team championed optimization efforts across Micro Focus’s digital properties. 

The goals were crystal clear for this seasoned team— Home page enhancements, revenue page elements, and an overall superior user experience were top priorities.

Deep-diving into user interactions using VWO Insights’ heatmaps, scrollmaps, and session recordings, the team unearthed critical observations. Mandatory form fields lacked asterisks, free trial CTAs were below the fold, and the Marketplace domain needed product linkage for traffic flow.

When these crucial issues were addressed,  a 12.37% uplift in form completion rate and a 124.13% increase in traffic to revenue-generating product pages were achieved. 

Here’s the full case study. 

IMB Bank identified the friction that led to high drop-offs on their website pages and form: lack of instructions, uncertainty around USP, and missing social proof

IMB Bank, a financial stalwart since 1880, leveraged VWO to uncover hidden engagement opportunities and boost conversions by a remarkable 87%. 

User behavior research using VWO Insights – Web, including heatmaps, funnel analysis, form analysis, and session recordings, guided the team. The results spoke volumes:

Personal loan conversion rate: A stellar 36% increase.

Home loan conversion rate: Soared by an impressive 87%.

The team ran two campaigns:

Campaign 1: Personal loan application form – 1st page optimized

Addressing a high drop-off rate on the first page identified by VWO Insights – Web, elements like USPs, awards, time indicators, improved design, and clear instructions were introduced. The result: a 9% increase in form completions, later escalating to a 12% YoY boost.

Campaign 2: Personal loan application form – exit popup

Analyzing an 84% drop-off before completing the form, an exit popup was employed. While not impacting form completion significantly, there was a surge in users saving the form. Recognizing the need for additional information, the ‘save’ option proved highly impactful. Post-implementation saved forms and resumed completions soared by 37% and 250%, respectively.

Here’s the full case study.

What clients say about VWO Insights

The surveys, session recordings & heatmaps features appeal to us the most. Knowledge and customer data are king and these two features shape our roadmap as to what we prioritize for development and initiatives we work on. At the moment we are using surveys as the primary source of behavioral insight. This then shapes what the priorities are for features for our customers.

Alice Michael, Group Head Of Ecommerce Operations at APG & Co, attests to the significance of VWO Insight’s features in steering their company initiatives.

Decoding customer behavior with innovation

In essence, VWO Insights – Web acts as a conduit between businesses and their customers, transforming raw data into meaningful narratives. By understanding customer behavior through surveys, session recordings, and heatmaps, businesses gain a nuanced understanding of their audience. This deep comprehension, in turn, fuels informed decision-making, targeted improvements, and a customer-centric approach that fosters long-term success.

VWO amplifies the power of its user behavior analytics with its “Insights Dashboard”. This dashboard helps accelerate the optimization velocity of teams. How? By helping users zoom in on user struggles on their website without having to comb through terabytes of data collected by VWO Insights.

The Insights Dashboard comes with important enablers like the Experience Overview and Friction Trend, measuring metrics like ‘Rage clicks’ and ‘dead clicks’ to create a ‘friction score’ indicative of user struggle. The ‘experience score’ reflects user satisfaction, aiding in identifying and prioritizing UX issues. It enables the identification and resolution of page-level issues through instant analysis, associated heatmaps, and session recordings.

The dashboard facilitates the proactive identification of dissatisfied user segments and offers concise summaries of form performance and surveys. With diverse use cases, such as comparing experiences after page optimization and boosting product sales through experience enhancement, the Insights Dashboard becomes an indispensable tool for quarterly holistic reviews, providing a comprehensive understanding of website health.

With VWO Insights – Web you can also leverage a groundbreaking Generative AI update, enhancing survey capabilities with two innovative features. The AI-powered Survey Creation allows users to specify goals, generating tailored questions to uncover insights like customer preferences or product feedback. The process is iterative, enabling the regeneration of questions until the ideal survey is achieved. 

The AI-generated Survey Reports offer quick comprehension through enhanced summaries, including feedback comments. The AI analyzes survey feedback, providing actionable suggestions for improvement. Key benefits include efficient survey crafting, seamless question regeneration, and a deeper understanding of the audience. Currently, in beta, users can enable this feature by contacting support@vwo.com.

Additionally, VWO Insights – Web unveils an advanced filtering feature, empowering smarter decision-making by allowing users to effortlessly pinpoint issues affecting specific visitor cohorts. With unlimited filtering capabilities, standard filters, and custom attributes, users can streamline the analysis process, saving valuable time and enhancing the effectiveness of their marketing strategies and user experience refinement.

VWO’s vision is to build products that help customers improve their websites by giving them smart solutions and useful information about their visitors. The newly launched features are therefore a step in the right direction. At VWO, we want to help our customers not just gather data but enable them to create value about it. We want to help our clients understand and connect with their visitors in new and improved ways.

In conclusion

Visitor behavior analysis tools stand as a powerful force, bridging the gap between businesses and their customers by deciphering raw data into meaningful narratives. The implementation of VWO Insights – Web, has empowered brands like Bear Mattress, Micro Focus, and IMB Bank to fast-track their UX goals, achieving remarkable success through strategic optimization efforts. The showcased case studies demonstrate the tangible impact on revenue, conversion rates, and user engagement. Furthermore, the Insights Dashboard and the innovative Generative AI update enhance VWO’s capabilities, providing actionable insights, efficient survey crafting, and advanced filtering for smarter decision-making. 

We leave you with some love shown by our users on G2 in recent times. 

In the pursuit of some trendy sneakers, Corey thought he hit the jackpot on an online fashion store. Everything seemed perfect – the ideal pair, the right price, you know the drill. However, that’s when things took a turn for the worse.

Upon clicking ‘Add to Cart,’ Corey confronted a dreaded account registration form. Numerous mandatory fields stared him in the face, and there was no quick option to log in with Google or Facebook. Given the morning rush, Corey wasn’t in the mood for a digital obstacle course. So, he decided to bail, thinking he’d just grab those sneakers from his usual store in the upcoming festive season.

As someone working hard to increase sales from your website, doesn’t it bug you that the e-commerce store missed out on a seriously promising lead? I mean, Corey visited from a search engine, so the SEO game was on point. Plus, he liked the sneakers and their pricing – total green lights for customer and product research. But then, bam, the website experience drops a red cross and just kind of ruins the vibe that other teams worked hard to build. 

If you find yourself empathetic to the described situation and want to steer clear of a similar fate for your website, it’s time to consider diving into behavior analytics. Also, if you find yourself in the dark about the intricacies of user behavior analysis and how it could be a solution, then this blog post is for you.  

We’re going to break down behavior analytics for you. We’ll start by introducing the concept, walk you through how it works as per business objectives, help you choose the right behavior-tracking tool, and why you should consider VWO for behavior analytics. 

Let’s roll!

What is behavior analytics?

Behavior analytics involves systematically tracking visitor interactions with a website and its critical components. The goal is to gain insights into how the website is perceived and identify any pain points that visitors may encounter. For example, the online fashion store that Corey visited could analyze how he hesitated when faced with the sign-up form. This analysis serves as a foundation for devising potential solutions to the identified issues.

With behavior analytics, you can dive into the visitor activity, like mouse flow, clicking patterns, scrolling habits, moments of hesitation, and even instances of frustration. The results of this analysis are then compiled and presented visually, providing a more nuanced understanding of customer engagement and potential pain points. Behavior analysis can be done using heatmap, clickmap, scrollmap, form analytics, session recordings, and surveys. 

Here is a short intro to each of these features in case it’s the first time you are reading these terms. Otherwise, you can move on to the next section. 

• Heatmap: A heatmap is like a color-coded map showing where visitors click (hotspots in red) or don’t click (spots in blue) on a website. It’s a quick visual snapshot of what’s popular and what’s not.
• Clickmaps: This is a type of heatmap that visually displays where visitors click on your website. They show the click activity on different elements, such as CTA buttons, images, text, and URLs.
• Scrollmap: This is a type of heatmap showing how visitors scroll on a webpage. It highlights the average depth of scrolling and pinpoints visitors’ drop-off on the web page in terms of percentage (Like 25% drop-off at this point.)
• Form analytics: This tracks how visitors interact with your website forms. It reveals who completed, abandoned, or hesitated during form submissions and even provides the time visitors took to fill them out.
• Session recording: This is a feature that captures visitor actions, including clicks, mouse movements, and page scrolling, providing a playback of their journey across the website.
• Surveys: This enables you to collect insights on a specific page or entire website by conducting surveys and asking visitors questions about their experience. 

Now, let’s delve into how you can gain insights into your customers’ experience through behavior analytics.

How to tap into customer experience with behavior analytics

To grasp how visitor behavior analytics can unravel the intricacies of your customers’ experiences, let’s take a journey akin to Corey at the fashion store to buy sneakers. We’ll construct a parallel experience for each stage of the funnel and then reconvene on the other side of the table to explore how behavior analytics can be instrumental in pinpointing potential friction points.

Top of the Funnel (ToFu):

The journey kicks off with a quest for insights on sneaker shopping, guiding to the fashion store’s blog addressing “What to look for when buying sneakers.” Within the blog, strategically placed CTAs in the middle and bottom prompt Corey to venture into the product list page titled “Our Best Sneakers.”

Middle of the Funnel (MoFu):

On the “Our Best Sneakers” page, Corey peruses a variety of sneakers and engages by clicking on the “View product” CTA for the selected sneaker.

Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu):

Upon discovering the ideal pair, Corey faces the pivotal decision to click “Add to Cart,” proceed with account creation, and ultimately make the purchase through the checkout page.

Now, armed with this breakdown, let’s use behavior analytics to dissect each stage and uncover those friction points that may have disrupted the flow.

Let’s start with web analytics

Before getting into behavior analysis, you can start with web analytics. With Google Analytics, you can set a funnel exploration report for each of the steps mentioned earlier. The completion event for ToFu is clicking on the “Our Best Sneakers” CTA from the mentioned blog, for MoFu, it’s “Clicking view product CTA,” and for BoFu, it’s making the purchase.

Once the data starts rolling in, you’ll have a clear view of the conversion rate and customer drop-off rate for each stage of the funnel. Now, let’s delve into how behavior analysis can come to the rescue, especially when you identify a stage where the drop-off exceeds our benchmark. 

Here, it’s a hypothetical scenario with an elevated drop-off at each funnel stage to illustrate how behavior analysis can be the key to uncovering those elusive pain points. 

Carrying out behavior analysis

a. Low conversion rate at the blog post

Suppose the blog is acing its ranking for the chosen keyword, and there’s a substantial influx of traffic. However, a notable chunk of visitors is detouring away from the blog post, failing to progress by clicking on “Our Best Sneakers.” Which is leaving a mark on the conversion rate, dragging it below the benchmark you’ve set.

Now, armed with behavior analysis features, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and uncover the reasons behind this diversion. Starting with the scrollmap, you can see how many visitors are dropping off by checking the percentage scroll depth. The scrollmap will allow you to find what percentage of visitors are dropping before seeing the first text CTA to the product listing page.

If the scrollmap reveals a significant number of visitors dropping before seeing the CTA and validates the drop-off at the funnel, you can formulate a hypothesis. Perhaps moving the text CTA up the page or analyzing the content to ensure it remains engaging, steering clear of lengthy paragraphs or text-heavy sections, could be potential avenues for improvement.

Suppose, visitors aren’t dropping off, and the content keeps them engaged. The next stop in the analysis is the heatmap reports. 

These reports can shed light on how actively visitors are interacting with the text CTAs. If the CTA’s texts are indicated by a cool blue hue in the heatmap, it might be time to craft a hypothesis. To amp up engagement, you can consider tweaking the CTA text, experimenting with different colors, transforming it into a prominent CTA image banner, or even exploring the option of removing the CTAs and introducing a floating side widget.

So, you see scrollmaps helped in figuring out how visitors were engaging with the content, and heatmaps gave clues on how well the CTAs are doing and if their position on the page is hitting the mark.

b. High drop-off at the product listing page

Suppose, visitors are bouncing off the product listing page. In this scenario, you dive into the reports of heatmaps and clickmaps. If you spot a trend of lack of clicks on all CTAs of the listed product, it might be time to redesign CTAs to catch the eye and be super user-friendly. To double-check, you can peek into some session recordings to see if visitors are casually scrolling past those CTAs before. Also, this might help you understand the role of the product image size (whether visitors are trying to click on them to expand.)

Now, if the clickmap report on individual product lists doesn’t reveal a clear pattern or there is a significant difference in clicks between various products, you can ideate to bring the products with higher clicks up the page and bring new ones in place of the non-clicked ones. 

So you see, when you’re digging into visitor behavior on product listings with multiple CTAs, heatmaps, and clickmaps capture the overall trend of clicks. Meanwhile, session recordings precisely let you know how visitors are experiencing the page and whether those CTAs are being shrugged off.

c. Low purchase rate on the product page

If the quantitative analysis shows low purchases from the product page, start by studying heatmap and scrollmap data. This will help you understand how visitors navigate the product page and whether the add-to-cart button is getting enough clicks. If the clicks on the call-to-action (CTA) are low, consider redesigning either the CTA or the entire product page. Experiment with image positioning and CTA placement to see if it makes a difference.

If the add-to-cart CTA is performing well, move on to examining how new visitors interact with the registration form. Use the form analytics report to identify hesitation, frustration, rage clicks, and completion rates, assessing the overall form performance. If it’s not meeting expectations, brainstorm and implement new design ideas for the forms.

For a more in-depth analysis, explore session recordings to observe how visitors are filling out the form. This will provide additional insights for optimizing the registration process.

Don’t forget to use all of these features to assess the checkout page and determine if it’s user-friendly for payments. During the BoFu (Bottom of the Funnel), deploy exit surveys to gather direct insights from high-intent leads about their experience. At this stage, the response rate to surveys is high, and you get quality feedback on the most crucial stage of your funnel.  This information can guide improvements in design, pricing, and the overall checkout experience.

So, if you see, using multiple features for behavior analysis provides you with highly detailed insights into visitor behavior. These detailed observations can lead to valuable ideas for improvements or experimentation.

It’s worth noting that you don’t always have to kick off with web analytics. If you have just rolled out a new page experience, caught wind of issues through customer feedback, or noticed a decline in sales trends, you can go straight to behavior analytics. 

Your funnel might be different, but the above approach and the features used can act as an inspiration to you. Take a cue from it and strategically use these features to decode the behavior patterns of your customers or visitors. 

Now that we’ve covered the details on how to conduct behavior analysis, let’s progress to the next step: shortlisting a tool for the job.

How to choose a tool for behavior analytics

Selecting a behavior analytics tool is mainly driven by the need to address business-specific challenges, set goals, and the allocated budget for the project. In addition to these considerations, here are some guardrails to assist in narrowing down the tool.

a. Explore tools that give full-featured free trial or free plan

Securing a thorough free trial is incredibly valuable for understanding the capabilities of a prospecting tool. It offers insights into the customer service experience and how well it aligns with established practices, all without committing financially. Prioritizing such tools in the initial phase is a smart move for any business. Additionally, consider exploring tools with forever-free plans, especially if you have budget constraints or just setting up your behavior analytics roadmap.

b. Look for tools that provide instant value

Consider exploring tools that provide features with quick turnaround times. Take generative AI, for instance. Its popularity is on the rise, transforming the scale and speed at which businesses deliver solutions. Its applications are now extending to processes like behavior analytics. 

As your organization grows and places greater emphasis on behavior analytics for optimization, the manual task of sorting through each report for insights can become cumbersome. Fortunately, analytics tools are incorporating Generative AI solutions to automate insights derived from survey and heatmap reports, streamlining the entire process. It’s advisable to explore tools that offer features in this area to enhance the efficiency of your analytics endeavors.

c. Prioritize privacy-first tools

Privacy is a fundamental right of every human being, and when you are analyzing the behavior of your visitors, you must be using tools that are privacy first. Here are some features of a privacy-first tool:

• It allows data minimization, collecting only necessary information and obtaining user consent transparently. 
• Allows user whitelisting to limit account access based on user location or IP address, and access is restricted to only those designated areas.
• Offers security measures, including encryption and adherence to international privacy certifications, to ensure data protection. 
• The tool prioritizes data residency compliance. Additionally, it employs data anonymization techniques, respects deletion timelines, and incorporates privacy principles into product development, showcasing a privacy-by-design approach.
• Provides user consent mechanisms, opt-out options, and adherence to privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, and others for user privacy. 

In essence, a good privacy-first tool integrates transparency, user control, and robust security practices to uphold privacy standards effectively.

Now that you have a grasp of behavior analytics and tool selection, consider exploring VWO Insights – Web, a tool with compelling reasons to be on your radar, regardless of your business stage.

Behavior analytics with VWO Insights – Web

VWO Insights – Web stands out as an all-in-one product, providing heatmaps, session recordings, form field analytics, and on-page surveys. The setup process is straightforward, and its uniqueness lies in its approach to sampling visitors. Based on the volume of visitors purchased, it uniformly samples visitors from the traffic directed to your website (or specific pages where the VWO tracking code is present). This ensures a representative set of data across a month. Each visitor is counted as unique, meaning that once a visitor is sampled, all data points for heatmaps, recordings, and forms are collected for that visitor, regardless of how many times they return in that month. This approach ensures that your quota isn’t depleted simply because someone is visiting multiple times.

To add to its sophistication, VWO Insights-Web also provides access to generative AI features, such as Generative AI-based surveys. This empowers users with cutting-edge technology to achieve success swiftly. To illustrate, here’s how it generates survey reports using generative AI, streamlining the otherwise tedious process of extracting insights from a vast dataset:

Now, let’s talk pricing. VWO Insights-Web offers a forever free plan that covers up to 5000 monthly tracked users. Once you get used to the tool, you can explore and choose from plans like Growth, Pro, and Enterprise, tailoring your selection to the specific needs of your business. This flexibility allows you to scale up according to your requirements and budget as your business grows.

When it comes to safety and compliance, VWO stands out as the only tool among its competitors that adheres to stringent standards. It complies with GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001:2013, ISO 27001:2019 certification, and SOC 2 Type II. This commitment to various regulatory and security measures ensures that your data and user information are handled with the highest level of protection and following industry standards.

Feeling intrigued? Take the leap and give it a try with a full-featured 30-day free trial. If you prefer to learn more before making any decisions, check out the fascinating success story of the 250-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica. They used VWO Web-Insights to comprehend visitor behavior and successfully increased their click-through rate by 10% through experimentation. It’s a compelling testament to the tool’s effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Also, you can get a detailed read on how VWO handles behavior analytics.

Final thoughts

Creating a website with the best practices is a solid start, but the real insight comes when visitors start interacting. Analyzing their behavior becomes crucial, as imperfections and friction points may only become evident when you put yourself in your customers’ shoes to understand their experience.