User Behavior for Conversion Rate Optimization

Understanding User Behavior for CRO #

If very basic and dilettante answer, user behavior is the way how users interact with your website. Where they click, what they read, how they navigate, and what they buy. Imagine we have a surveillance camera in a physical store. We can see where customers go, what they touch, and what they buy. User behavior analysis is the digital version of this surveillance camera.

For websites there are such cameras too, you can put, for example, Microsoft Clarity, and later in the dashboard you can see where users clicked, where they scrolled, and where they left the website. In which page they entered and in which page they left.

But this is just the start, honestly for some websites it is absolutely enough, data is overrated and sometimes simple common sense is pretty enough, need to control your feelings and cut off difficulties, if the thing works don't overcomplicate, if you see just visual checking of the sessions is enough, you can stick to that for a while, and make improvements based on that.

User leaves product page #

For example, let's imagine a very common issue, people visit your product page and you can see they leave the best at the moment when they scroll a very tall text and content, this simply means that content is very boring, it took the entire phone viewport and user just doesn't want or is not motivated enough to read it. After seeing a few such sessions you should consider that maybe it is worth dividing the content into a few pieces. This is very common on Shopify stores, where people overuse the product description field.

This is Shopify's fault too, they integrated an AI-written tool in their product description and now junky content is being generated very cheaply and by AI, no human touch, when AI is doing the thing usually it doesn't have common sense limits.

Okay, back to our problem, so user leaves the website in the middle of the product page (PDP) and you can see this in Clarity, in video, in the sessions. So, the simple solution is just go in the product page and take 80% of the content off, but don't throw it, we are going to use it.

We are not saying we will just truncate the content, but we will represent it in a different way, we will need to enrich the remaining content with simple images and have it as image - text, text - image on the website, so it is easier to digest.

In Shopify we can use blocks, and we can create a few blocks with images and text, and we can put them in the product page, so the user can see the image and read the text, and then scroll to the next block, and see the image and read the text.

If your Shopify theme doesn't support blocks, you can hire some Shopify agency to do that for you, that's a very quick modification and it will cost you a few bucks, but it will be worth it.

So basically improving the representation of the content we improved the CRO, how? The more time user spends on the page, the more chances he will buy the product, so if we make the content more digestible, we will have more chances to sell the product. As simple as that.

List of common user behaviors #

Okay, to not make it messy and not hide the things in the paragraphs, let's list the most common user behaviors: (though since AI became popular we hate lists, as it always gives the vibe of AI, everything is fucking over structured)

Okay, yes, we are AI haters, so what? What will you do to us, send a prompt to chat gpt to give you an ideas how to kill us? ))) First I wanted to separate the list into 2 categories, such as mobile and desktop, as the behavior and actions can be different, but later I understood that we will lose the main point of the user behavior analysis, which is how to learn and improve Conversion Rate Optimization. So instead of focusing on the device, we will focus on the user behavior itself. Just to make things clear here why the actions are different on mobile and desktop, on mobile we have a very limited space, so the actions are more focused on the main goal, on desktop we have more space, so the actions can be more diverse. On desktop, users can hover, basically on desktop the website is landscape, on mobile it is portrait.

• Clicks: Where users click on your site. Keep in mind some hover actions should be transformed into clicks, as on mobile there is no hover.
• Scrolling: How far users scroll down a page. On desktop this can be easier as they can use the mouse wheel, on mobile it can be overwhelming, as they need to swipe. So keep the content short and sweet.
• Session duration: How long users spend on your site. Do they leave quickly? If yes, just start thinking about the reasons. Put something catchy, put yourself in the user's shoes, what would you like to see on the website?
• Micro-interactions: Small actions like hovering over a button or clicking on a link. This is very important, as this is the first step to the conversion, if the user doesn't click on the button, they will not buy the product.
• Form submissions: How users interact with forms on your site. What type of keyboard opens on mobile when the user clicks on the form? If it is just numbers input, we need to open the numeric keyboard, if it is email, we need to open the email keyboard. Make sure the inputs are not zooming in. This is a very common issue, just put a minimum 16px font size on the inputs.