How to track customer behaviour with digital metrics

With multiple free digital tools at your disposal, all it takes is a little analysis of the data in front of you to understand customer behaviour and what to expect from existing customers in future. More importantly, it helps you identify key areas in your business that need to be enhanced further, along with aspects of your product or service that aren’t resonating with your target consumers. Ultimately, customer behaviour can tell you everything you need to know about being a successful brand by collecting data straight from the horse’s mouth.

Monitor purchases to gauge customer loyalty

Boosting customer loyalty by only 5% can help you enjoy a 25-95% increase in profits, as it’s often far more beneficial to retain existing customers rather than gaining new ones. Going through a customer’s purchase history to check for repeat orders can tell you a lot about whether they are brand loyalists, or customers that were simply experimenting with your products. Once you’ve identified the customers that make repeat purchases, and have identified a purchase pattern (for instance, customer A always buys organic products), you can target tailor-made communication that highlights similar products you know they’ll be interested in, thereby capitalising on their buying potential.

Determine the number of active users through multiple metrics

If you have a platform that measures its success based on viewership, or offer SaaS products, you know that having active users is far more crucial to your growth than solely having a high number of registered users. Monitoring Logins is a dependable way to measure the number of active users on your site, along with other metrics such as the length of sessions on the site and the customer engagement index, which tells you if your target consumers are interested in what you have to offer. Engagement metrics differ from platform to platform, however, an easy way to gauge customer engagement is to assign values to specific user actions to see not only the engagement rate itself, but also the activities that users most commonly indulge in. Doing so can help you enhance a popular offering on your platform, thereby increasing customer satisfaction in the process.

Find out what customers dislike by evaluating your bounce rate

The bounce rate refers to the percentage of site visitors that leave after viewing a single page. While this may sometimes be the home page, this isn’t always the case, especially if consumers land on internal pages through organic searches. Your bounce rate can give you an accurate idea of the content pieces on your platform that resonate with your audience and inspire them to explore more, as well as the ones that turn them off.  With this data, you can tone down those pieces while dialing up content that your consumers enjoy. Instead of only focusing on positive metrics like engagement and repeat purchases (where applicable), you must also look at what doesn’t work to be able to optimise your offerings and ensure more brand affinity. 

Google Analytics is one of the most popular free and easy to use tools you can integrate with your website to track user behavior.