Tracking Gaps In the UserExperience

Charles MeadenDigital Nation

The Very Brief Intro

• Been involved in web analytics for 20 years• Run a small agency specialising in analytics and usability based in Swansea

Great Quote

Ease of use may be invisible, but its absence sure isn’t.IBM

The Flow

The Blockages

It’s A Combination of Things

• Websites often fail due to multitude of issues• The whole experience is death by a thousand cuts• Aggregation of marginal gains

Analytics Will Get You Halfway There

• Properly configured, it’ll tell you where you have an issue• Can’t necessarily tell you the important

Look at Device Type

• Mobile has 38% of all traffic• Bounce rate is at 41%• Conversion rate is just 0.69%• Clearly an issue with mobile and good place to start

Browser and Browser Version

• Don’t just look at browser• Look at browser and browser version • Remember Internet Explorer 8?

– Visitors were seeing this at the checkout!–

• Estimated loss of revenue was £75,000 a month

Funnels and Funnel Flow

• Statement of the bleeding obvious….• Gives you place to start looking for gaps• If using Google Analytics, don’t stop the at the default goals• Make friends with the API• Learn how to use tools such as Analytics Edge

Funnels and Funnel Flow

404 Error Pages

• At the very least track the referrer page• Segment against channel• Calculate how many are entrances to your site• Look outside your analytics

– Crawl the site with ScreamingFrog– Use tools such as Textpipe to crawl log files for errors

Failed Search Terms

• Capture search terms which generated zero search results• Analyse these to understand

– Are they phrases your users use to describe your products– Are they for services you don’t (yet) offer

• You can then finetune your search engine• At the same time, analyse all your search terms for their effectivness

Error Messages

• Capture the error messages on all your forms as events

• You can quickly see where people are having issues

LiveChat Interactions

• Where are people initiating the sessions• What questions are they asking?• Are they things that are not clear on the site?

Track Incoming Phone Calls

• At the very least assign a unique phone number to the website• Ideally assign a unique number to each campaign • Get whoever answers the phone to make a note of common questions

Navigational Choices

• If you can track which navigational elements people selected• Are people selecting

– Menus– Images– Links in the body text

• What are the most post popular choices• What elements are people ignoring

Toast: Case Study – Home Page

Toast: Case Study – Filters

Navigated To Pages

• Which pages are your visitors choosing not to visit• Simple to calculate

– Unique Page views minus entrances

Track Timings • Are there any pages that people less

time on than expected?• Use page speed reports to determine

whether some pages are slower than others

– Set the sample rate at 10% of higher• Look into user timings to understand

how long it people to complete a certain task

• Read Tracking Conversion Duration in Google Analytics

Track When Things Go Wrong

• Track key events such as logins • Vonage clearly didn’t

• Use Intelligence alerts to spot when issues happen• Or build your own

Heat Maps and Screen Recordings

• Use a tool such as HotJar, Crazy Egg or Decibel Insight

Ask Your Users Why

• Context Sensitive Questions

• Post Sale Survey Questions

– Why did you choose to buy from us today

– Is there anything that might have prevented you from buying

Thank you and get in touch

Email charles@digitalnation.co.ukTwitter @charlesmeadenLinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/in/

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