Our thoughts and emotions rule our buying decisions and our levels of engagement with a subject.
We all know that if we are feeling engaged and satisfied with what we are seeing - then the likelihood of us wanting to know more, making the effort to communicate or simply taking particular actions are much likely to happen.
The Internet has many tools to help you understand how your web visitor is feeling - our job is to ensure we select the correct software based on your users demographic information and apply regular monitor and analysis to help with taking actions to improve the user experience and thereby the success of your website.
The following is a snap shot of some of the tools at our disposal:
We all want to know what our website visitors really think of their experience, at Clickingmad we work with industry partners to install automated survey tools that offer this functionality.
Clearly most users will only respond if they have strong feelings either way or if they feel like being helpful, but it is still often worth asking the question as it sends out a message that you care about your visitors experience.
A heatmap is a graphical representation of data that uses a system of colour-coding to represent different values. In this case red indicates a lot of mouse activity, and the cooler the colour the less activity.
Heatmaps can be used to show where users have clicked on a page and how far they have scrolled down a page.
These 'maps' are created by software that tags your users activity anonymously.
This way you can see which parts of your website presentation are getting the most attention from users - an alter your layout or content accordingly.
This is at the more expensive end of understanding your user's behaviour as it involves moderated and almost clinical studies of where humans physically look when viewing your website.
From the test subjects, heatmaps can then be created so that you can see with ease which parts of the website pages actually receive the user's attention - whether or not they actually move their mouse or click a link.
If you have a website that is at the core of your business, then these services are worth considering.
When we help our clients with Search Engine Optimisation (See our SEO page on this link) or when we build a website for them, we always create and install the free statistics package from Google; Google Analytics.
As discussed on the Deep Analytics page of this website, true and valuable analysis is more than just looking at the headline numbers.
There is one part of Analytics that is invaluable, it shows the users path they take through your website and where they 'drop-off'.