The crisis in which we are currently living generates a lot of stress within our organizations. In addition to this, user behaviour has drastically changed in the past few weeks, forcing us to be more agile to quickly identify their new needs and to take advantage of the resulting business opportunities. Using this knowledge, I want to share some tips for those whose role is to monitor and analyze data on a daily basis.
The current situation has divided businesses into two key groups: those for which sales (mainly online) are exploding, and those for which consumer interest in their products and services becomes lower every day. For each of these groups, here are our general observations as well as the key questions you should be asking yourselves in order to adapt your business strategy to the new behaviours of your users.
The first general change that we see concerns the distribution of traffic sources to the different digital properties of businesses. Given that users are in an emergency situation with a specific goal in mind, more will arrive on your site through search engines (organic source) or by accessing it directly through the browser. Social networks are also driving more traffic to websites as the world is spending more time on social media channels.
The types of platforms used will also change. Mobile is very prominent right now, but as more people are working from home, they will be much more present on websites using their computers rather than their mobile devices.
It will be very interesting to see the change in behaviour regarding internal searches made on your website. What are the keywords you see that are emerging most often? Are there trends?
All organizations that are seeing an increase in site visits (notably those in the food or pharmaceutical industries) will see a significant change in the behaviour of their users as well as a wave of new users who will discover their site for the first time.
Here are a few key elements to observe in user behaviour.
In your particular situation, start making hypotheses and make a list of your questions on the new behaviours you expect from users at this time. This should always be your first step – don’t dive into an analysis without a goal in mind!
It would also be interesting to compare the behaviour of users who are already used to your site with the behaviour of users purchasing from your site for the first time: do they make more regular purchases? Is the average cart value higher? Use segments to isolate these two types of users.
All of this information will allow you to generate insights that will help improve your e-commerce site performance and user experience. I recommend you consult my recommendations below on how you can use this new data.
Whether you have an e-commerce site or not, user visits on your site are not related to an essential need. Among the users who still come to your site, you’ll need to ask yourself the right questions to identify new behaviours and adapt accordingly. Here are a few examples:
Once you have all the answers to your questions and you’ve identified your user needs, you can then implement actions in order to help them more easily access what is important to them.
In this stressful time, we want to minimize user frustration and make their experience as simple and pleasant as possible. In some cases, the goal will also be to reduce volume on call centres which are experiencing a significantly higher volume of calls.
Armed with these new optimization ideas, I hope this helps you with your analysis! The mots important thing is to stay positive in this situation and to take the time to find opportunities, optimize your time and efficiently contribute to your business objectives.
If you’re looking for support, our dedicated Analytics team is there to help you analyze your data and define the key actions to put in place to adapt your service offering in these strange new times.
Take care of yourselves, your families, and your measurement tools!