Software web analytics uncover user behavior

Introduction

Understanding user behavior is the key to creating successful software and digital experiences. With the rise of data-driven product development, software teams are increasingly turning to web analytics to uncover quantitative insights into how users interact with websites, mobile apps, and other digital touchpoints. By tracking specific actions and events, web analytics solutions provide unprecedented visibility into user engagement, conversions, pain points, and more. These behavioral insights enable developers to make smart optimizations that improve user experience, increase retention and sales, and fuel product growth. This article will explore how software web analytics work and demonstrate how they uncover hidden insights around user behavior.

What are web analytics?

Web analytics refers to the collection, measurement, analysis and reporting of data related to web traffic and users' online actions. The metrics derived from web analytics provide concrete, quantifiable insights into trends, engagement patterns, and user behavior on websites and apps. This data empowers businesses to make data-backed decisions around optimization, user experience improvements, and product development.

Popular web analytics metrics include:

• Page views
• Clicks and clickthrough rates
• Button/link clicks
• Scroll depth
• Time on page/site
• Bounce rates
• Traffic sources and referrers
• Conversions and goal completions
• User flow analysis
• Funnel and conversion analysis

Leading web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, and others help compile and visualize these insights. Integrating these solutions into software products enables the continuous collection of behavioral data from real users in the wild.

Types of user behavior insights uncovered

Web analytics provide a variety of user behavior insights, including:

• Identifying the most popular vs least used features based on usage and engagement data. This indicates what resonates with users vs. what needs improvement.
• Understanding user flows through websites and apps by analyzing page navigation sequences. This reveals common paths and potential usability issues.
• Pinpointing drop-off points leading to loss of users or customers. For example, abandonment rates during checkout funnel steps. Fixing these pain points can boost conversions.
• Optimizing user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) based on behavior data like time on page and click frequency.
• Determining high traffic vs low traffic pages and how users arrive at them. Low traffic pages may need promotional efforts or content improvements.
• Segmenting users by behavior attributes and analyzing trends specific to those cohorts. For example, monitor engagement for new vs returning users.
• Finding correlated events that strongly predict conversions. These signals can guide optimization priorities to focus on what matters most.
• Uncovering issues causing high bounce rates and early exit rates. This indicates problems understanding content or navigating the site/app.

As you can see, web analytics provide powerful insights that can help attract new users through optimized experiences while also increasing engagement and conversion rates for existing users.

Tracking user actions with events

The insights delivered by web analytics are only as good as the quality of the underlying behavioral data. Much of this data comes from tracking discrete user actions via “events”. Events can be attached to page views, clicks, form submissions, and other interactions. By instrumenting code to fire events on a site or within an app, product teams gain visibility into exactly how users engage.

Common tracked events include:

• Page views - Tracking each page visited along with URLs, referrers, time on page and other parameters provides the foundation for user behavior analysis. Page views reveal content consumption and journeys.

// Page view tracking example 
analytics.page({
  path: window.location.pathname,
  title: document.title
});

• Clicks - Tracking clicks on buttons, links, navigation elements, exit links, and more uncovers how users interact with key site elements. Clicks are essential for calculating clickthrough rates.

// Click event tracking example
button.addEventListener('click', () => {
  analytics.track('Button Click', {
    buttonId: 'signup' 
  }); 
});

• Form submissions - Tracking completed form submissions like contact forms, signups, purchases, and others measures conversion effectiveness. Form analytics can also uncover dropoff points where users abandon the process. For example, excessive fields or confusing inputs may cause dropoff. Fixing these issues improves form completion rates. Marketing teams can further attribute forms using UTM parameters to analyze campaign channel contribution.

Other contextual data like URLs, timestamps, referring sites, and UTM campaign parameters provide additional dimensions for segmentation and analysis. The combination of multiple event types and parameters provides a detailed picture of user actions over time.

Page view event tracking

Page views provide a starting point for user flow and engagement analysis. By tracking each page visited, web analytics can piece together navigation paths users take through a site. Page view parameters like URLs reveal the specific pages and content consumed. Referrers show how users arrive at a given page. Time on page indicates content quality. Comparing page views to goals shows how well pages align with desired conversions.

Click event tracking

Click tracking provides granular visibility into how users interact with page elements like buttons, links and calls-to-action. This reveals clickthrough rates for site navigation, conversions, exit links, and more. Teams can identify elements with low clickthroughs and optimize content or placement accordingly. Click tracking is also vital for understanding multi-step user journeys preceding conversions.

Form submission tracking

Form submissions indicate user intent and engagement. Tracking form completions like signups, contact requests, purchases, and others measures conversion effectiveness. Form analytics can also uncover dropoff points where users abandon the process. For example, excessive fields or confusing inputs may cause dropoff. Fixing these issues improves form completion rates. Marketing teams can further attribute forms using UTM parameters to analyze campaign channel contribution.

Analyzing user behavior

Once event tracking gathers user behavior data, web analytics tools transform it into actionable insights via reports, funnels, cohorts, and dashboards. Statistical analysis reveals trends, correlations and patterns within the raw data. These derived insights guide optimization and development priorities.

Funnel analysis

Funnels visually map out the user journey from initial visits to goal completion and purchase. This makes it easy to quantify dropoff at each step in complex conversion processes. Funnel analytics pinpoint major obstacles and guide enhancements to reduce friction across signup flows, checkout processes, and other conversions. Funnel insights can be filtered to analyze and compare different user segments.

Cohort analysis

Cohort analysis groups users according to shared attributes like signup date, first visit date, referrer etc. Their behavior is then compared over time to reveal trends specific to those cohorts. For example, analyzing engagement patterns of users who signed up in January vs June. Tracking cohort-specific metrics helps teams understand how new features and changes impact different user segments differently.

Cohort

Users

1-day Retention

7-day Retention

28-day Retention

January 2021

5,000

25%

10%

8%

February 2021

6,000

30%

12%

10%

Custom dashboard reporting

Teams can customize web analytics dashboards by choosing key metrics to monitor in a central location. Dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of critical business and conversion metrics updated in real-time. Users can dig deeper into dashboard reports using filters and segmentation. Prioritizing dashboard metrics aligned with business objectives keeps everyone data-driven.

Using insights to optimize software

The true value of web analytics comes from leveraging insights to guide optimization. By fixing pain points revealed by user behavior data, teams can boost engagement, retention and conversions.

Guiding development priorities

Analytics dashboards make it easy to identify issues and opportunities in the product. Engineering and product managers can then focus resources on high-impact changes suggested by the data. For example, adding features that show heavy usage and fixing usability problems causing excessive exit rates. Features with infrequent usage can be deprioritized.

At Airbnb, analytics revealed that adding photos led to a dramatic increase in bookings. This guided engineering efforts to optimize and streamline the photo upload flow.

Improving user experience

Analytics empower teams to streamline and refine user experience based on how customers actually engage with the product. For example, shortening checkout funnels by removing steps with high dropoff. Or redesigning elements like navigation menus that exhibit low clickthroughs. Teams can also highlight key actions based on usage trends.

Hubspot used analytics to identify and fix UX issues that boosted conversion rates like adding live chat and simplifying its pricing page.

Driving product strategy

User behavior data guides strategic product decisions around expanding functionality, entering new markets, targeting customer segments and more. Web analytics help executives identify differentiated value propositions to double down on. Product managers can also monitor adoption metrics after each launch to quantify impact and guide planning.

For example, Slack analytics showed huge engagement from software teams, guiding its positioning for that niche.

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

• Web analytics provide unprecedented visibility into exactly how users engage with digital experiences. This enables data-backed optimization.
• Tracking user actions via page views, clicks, form submissions and other events feeds quantifiable behavioral data into analytics tools.
• Funnel, cohort and dashboard reports extract insights from the raw data around conversions, engagement, pain points and more.
• Teams can optimize software development priorities, user experience improvements, and product strategy based on analytics insights.
• Continuous analysis of user behavior through web analytics and implementation of data-driven optimizations drives growth, engagement and conversions.

Ready to unlock the power of web analytics? The team at DevHunt can help you choose the right analytics solutions and implement tracking to start uncovering user insights today. Their integrated analytics dashboard makes it easy to measure and optimize developer traction and engagement.