Gaining in-depth knowledge of your customers helps you serve them more effectively. Customer behaviour analysis tools provide the insights you need to create products and services that genuinely cater to your customers’ needs.
Understanding customer behaviour analysis
Customer behaviour analysis involves studying and understanding how customers interact with your brand – online and offline – so you can use those insights to enhance your marketing efforts and overall customer experience.
There are a variety of tools that can help you analyse customer behaviour, offering valuable insights into your customers’ preferences, expectations, and motivations. Here are seven easily accessible tools that might help take your customer marketing analytics activities to the next level.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps businesses make insightful, data-driven decisions by uncovering the story behind key website metrics and serving as a barometer for visitor satisfaction. For instance, a product page with a high bounce rate may indicate that the page isn't living up to your visitors' expectations, urging you to revisit its design, content, or functionality.
This free tool draws from your customers’ online journey to provide insights that can help your brand thrive, with key features like:
- Affinity data, which helps you understand customers' interests and passions to create personalised content that resonates with them.
- User demographics insights, providing a breakdown of the age, gender, and location of your audience.
- In-market segments that help you identify your customers' purchase intent and align your marketing approach with their needs.
- Real-time reporting for monitoring website performance and user interactions as they happen, allowing you to adjust strategies as needed.
- Conversion tracking, allowing you to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and discover growth opportunities.
2. YouTube Analytics
If you're creating video content on YouTube, then you've got another stream of free and interesting data to work with.
YouTube Analytics offers insights into demographics, visitor duration, how people share your videos, and more, helping you to spot trends and identify at-risk customers. Some helpful features include:
- Watch time reports that let you gauge visitor duration to measure your content’s retention power.
- Sharing metrics that show how and where your videos are being shared.
- Audience engagement reports that allow you to explore likes, dislikes, comments, and shares to better understand your audience's reaction.
- Traffic source reports to help you determine how viewers discover your content and optimise your visibility accordingly.
YouTube Analytics also provides detailed data about which content creates the best reaction, so you can focus on what works and ditch what doesn’t.
This data isn't just for your video creation, either. There's a good chance that if certain video content creates a strong reaction among your followers, the same theme or concept would work in a different medium, too.
3. Meta Audience Insights
Similar to Google Analytics, Meta's free consumer insight tool, Audience Insights, provides in-depth demographic data, enabling you to understand how people are engaging with your brand on Facebook and Instagram. It provides:
· Detailed demographic data to help you learn about the age, gender, and location of your audience.
· Access to data on estimated retail spending, purchase behaviour, and more to help you predict your audience's future actions.
· Insights into consumer lifestyle characteristics, including the types of products that users are shopping for.
· Insight into page likes and follows, allowing you to understand which other pages your followers like and follow on Facebook to expand your consumer knowledge base.
If you're trying to get a better handle on who your customers are, Meta’s Audience Insights could be a good place to start.
4. Amplitude
Amplitude is a customer analytics software platform for small businesses. This self-service tool allows you to track analytics across different digital platforms and experiment with different data sets to turn customer interactions into useful insights. It includes:
- Behavioural insights that allow you to explore user behaviour trends, patterns and correlations, uncovering insights that drive product improvements and strategic decision-making.
- Data visualisation tools – including charts, graphs and dashboards – that make it easier to interpret complex data and communicate insights effectively.
- A/B testing integration, which enables you to test and compare different variations of their digital products to determine which ones yield the best user outcomes.
The data you glean from Amplitude can be used to develop a strong content marketing program or product development plan.
5. Google Trends
Google Trends is a customer behaviour analysis tool that provides insights based on search criteria across Google Search, Google News and YouTube, allowing users to gather insights by location and keep up with market trends.
For example, if you want to extend your product line and need to know what customers are searching for, or if you need to know about the latest industry trends in fashion, retail or finance, Google Trends provides all of the information you need, with features such as:
- Trend analysis, which monitors the popularity of any Google query over time to gauge customer interest.
- Geographic distribution that allows you to learn where your search terms are most popular to strategise your regional marketing efforts.
- Related topics and queries that help you discover related searches and topics that can provide context to existing trends.
You can also create targeted search criteria, set up alerts, and build workflows so your marketing team stays informed about what your customers and potential customers are thinking.
6. Hotjar
And last, but not least, is Hotjar, a customer behaviour analytics tool that gives you deep insights into website visitor activity via heat maps and detailed reports.
Company websites are often small businesses’ most visited – and expensive – marketing assets, so having a seamless user experience is key to building conversations. Hotjar can be used to identify opportunities for improvement across all digital platforms (websites, products, etc.), with access to continuous, data-driven insights. Key features include:
- Heatmaps, which allow you to visually represent user interactions on a website by using colours to indicate where users click, move their mouse, scroll and engage the most. Heatmaps help you identify which parts of a webpage are attracting the most attention and which elements might be overlooked.
- Visitor recordings, which provide a detailed view of user behaviour, including mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling, allowing you to understand how users navigate through your site and identify usability issues.
- Tester recruitment, allowing you to improve usability testing by asking users to participate in user testing sessions.
Enhance customer experience with the right insights
Customer behaviour analysis tools provide remarkable insights into your customers' demographics, needs, and desires. With this data, you’ll be empowered to create better marketing materials and improve your products and services, ultimately creating a better customer experience. A strategic approach to building that customer experience can be important for sustainable business growth, and it all begins with good, useful data.