Using Behavioral Intelligence to Create the Website of Tomorrow

Every organization wants to be a leader in their industry. One way to get there? Creating an innovative, user-friendly site that thrills your audience.

If you’re like most organizations, you’ve used data to guide your website improvement efforts. Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics are powerful and provide essential information.

However, that data only reveals half the story. This is a problem when most organizations rely solely on web analytics. So how can you uncover the rest of the story?

Every organization wants to be a leader in their industry. One way to get there? Creating an innovative, user-friendly site that converts.

If you’re like most organizations, you’ve used data to guide your website improvement efforts. Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics are powerful and provide essential information.

However, that data only reveals half the story. This is a problem when most organizations rely solely on web analytics. So how can you uncover the rest of the story?

Enter: Digital Body Language

Think about the last industry conference or company happy hour you attended. If you’re a good networker, you don’t spend all your time talking about yourself and throwing business cards at people.

Instead, you start a conversation.

During your conversation, you read their body language. If they lean in when you talk about account-based marketing but glance over your shoulder at the clock when you mention PR, well…you talk more about account-based marketing.

Reading body language seems like a no-brainer when it comes to face-to-face conversation.

So why aren’t companies applying this same tactic with their website visitors?

The answer: many organizations don’t realize reading digital body language is even possible.

Introducing Behavioral Intelligence

If you’ve ever wished you could read the body language of your website visitors, we’ve got good news – you can! With behavioral intelligence.

Behavioral intelligence is an innovative solution to uncovering not only what your site visitors are clicking and looking at, but why.

Here’s how it works:

Behavior Mapping

FullStory, MouseFlow, Decibel and Hotjar are all examples of behavioral analytics software for websites. One feature they provide is behavioral mapping. Click, heat, attention and scroll mapping are instrumental in finding out if your site is effective. By seeing where on the site people look, click, spend time and scroll, you start to understand what is and isn’t working.

Who knows? You may find that none of your site visitors scroll through more than 25% of your page! If your most important messaging sits at the halfway mark, your visitors never see it. But thanks to behavioral mapping, you can adjust your site accordingly.

Or, let’s say click mapping shows your users are “rage-clicking” – i.e., clicking the same spot over and over again thinking it’s a link when it’s not. With this data, you can adjust your design and make sure users leave your site satisfied – maybe even converted – rather than angry.

Video Recordings

Some behavioral intelligence programs take mapping to the next level with actual video recordings of site visitors. (No, not through their webcam. That’d be creepy.) These recordings of their screen, cursor movements and navigation patterns give you a live view of their digital body language.

This type of qualitative data provides insights the aggregate data may not. Filtering videos by traffic source or type of visitor can reveal even more opportunities to improve user experience.

Conversion Funnel Tracking

Behavioral intelligence platforms don’t limit you to a single page. They’re also useful in tracking how a site visitor moves through your entire conversion funnel.

For example, you could be getting great traffic to your home page. That’s awesome, but it doesn’t do much for you if your site visitors never land on your contact or product/service pages.

To see where site visitors are dropping off, you can create a funnel on your behavioral intelligence platform.

Let’s say you’re a B2B SaaS company. Your funnel might look something like this:

Home Page > Product > Pricing Plans > Free Trial

You may find plenty of people are making it to the Pricing Plans page but are never actually signing up for a free trial. Now that you know where the problem is, you can run behavioral mapping software on the Pricing Plans page and find people aren’t scrolling down the page and moving their cursor all over the place around the “Compare Plans” layer of the page but never clicking anything. Your realization? Your site visitors are totally confused by your plan comparison chart!

Now you know exactly what needs to be fixed to move site visitors more smoothly through the funnel.

Form Analytics

Form analytics work similarly to conversion funnel tracking. Let’s say you’re trying to collect leads through a form on your site, but the volume of leads is less than ideal.

All you see on Google Analytics is that your users aren’t clicking “submit.” That means they’re not touching the form at all, right?

But when you fire up the form analytics, you see something different: most visitors are filling out their name and email but hesitating when you ask for their phone number and zip code. Now you know the page isn’t the problem – it’s the form itself!

Behavior-Based CTAs

A similar function can be used for calls-to-action (CTAs). Let’s say you have a form at the bottom of the page. Behavioral analysis shows your site visitors never scroll far enough to see it. One solution? Add a behaviorally-triggered CTA. They may not scroll to the bottom of your page, but when they move the mouse up to hit the back button – boom! – your form pops up.

Need proof that behavior-based CTAs work? In our blog, we added a CTA requesting visitors subscribe to our newsletter. Once the visitor scrolls down 70% of a blog post, the form is triggered. This one addition to our site led to a 300% increase in the opt-in rate!

Onsite Surveys

Amazingly, behavioral intelligence still has more to offer – like uncovering contextually relevant audience insights through surveys.

If you have a page promoting accounting software for businesses, you could insert a survey on the page that asks them why they’re visiting your site or what kind of functionality they’re looking for in an accounting package or even what their thorniest accounting problems are. You could even apply conditional logic to the survey to uncover deeper insights depending on their initial responses.

Using Insights to Innovate Your Site

All these tools help you go beyond the WHAT to the WHY. Knowing what part of your funnel your site visitors never get to is almost useless. Knowing why they never get there, on the other hand? Well, that opens up doors for some amazing innovation.

When you discover what’s working for your visitors and what’s not – not just technically, but emotionally, too – you also discover the means to improve your site. The result? A more innovative site, an impeccable user experience and higher conversion rates.

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Tom Shapiro oversees and manages Stratabeat, which provides branding, design & marketing services that drive client revenue growth. Stratabeat operates on the foundation that strategic thinking is the heartbeat of everything the agency does for clients. Services include marketing strategy, branding, web design, web development, SEO, PR, and conversion optimization.