User experience is the quality of the user’s interaction with your website. Was it easy to use? Hard to navigate? Maybe they left before it even loaded because it took too long. It’s what users think and feel when they’re on your website. Your goal as a business owner is, of course, to make this experience a good one.
Below we’ll go into,
- The value of great user experience
- How to measure user experience with Google Analytics metrics
- The impact of poor user experience
- Whether or not you should hire a UX design agency
Positive user experience should be something every business measures and works towards making better. UX has a significant impact on your conversion rates because competitors are just a simple click away. So your web design should not only look appealing but function in a way that’s satisfying for users. Otherwise, they’re onto the next.
The Value Of A Great User Experience
Design solutions that cater to the user are what make websites feel different from one another. It’s what allows you to stand out from competitors, but ultimately, user experience is valuable because it promotes customer loyalty and retention. In addition, a positive user experience is beneficial to your brand reputation and leads to lots of positive word-of-mouth marketing between consumers and their friends and family.
Research shows every 1$ that you invest into the user experience will bring back a 100$ return. You will see results when you’re fulfilling users’ needs and leaving them with a positive impression of your business. It’s no question that every business should have user experience at the top of its priority list.
How To Measure User Experience
So, we know the importance of a great user experience. Now, we’ll get into how you can measure the user experience on your website and what’s considered positive user experience statistics.
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a service that collects data from your website and apps to create reports that provide valuable insight into your user experience. Some of the data this service collects are the time of visit, how long users stayed on the page, pages visited, type of web browser, type of operating system, and the list goes on. Google Analytics is one of the most popular service’s website owners use to measure user experience. It’s free, thorough, and definitely something we recommend.
It may be wise to work with a professional if you need to familiarize yourself with doing your own user experience optimization. Setting up your analytics account correctly is vital because you want to ensure the data you receive is accurate. The reports can be tricky to navigate, so if you still need help figuring it all out, feel free to call in a professional.
Google Analytics Metrics To Measure
There are some metrics that every business owner should become familiar with. Let’s take a look at what these metrics are, what they mean, and how this information can benefit your UX design changes.
Traffic And Traffic Sources
The amount of traffic coming to your website is a telltale sign of whether or not your marketing efforts are working. Google Analytics shows the recent amount of users that visited your website. Usually, a graph is shown of the last seven days of traffic. The number of visitors is important information, but so is the place they came from.
If you hop over to the traffic acquisition section, all potential traffic sources are put into sections, including organic, paid, direct, social, and so on. The source information is helpful because it offers direct insight into which sources you could be lacking on. For example, if none of your traffic comes from organic search, it may be time to do some SEO work. Or maybe your content strategy just isn’t hitting home for consumers. Either way, you have an idea of where to move next.
User Engagement
So now we know how many people are visiting your site and where they’re coming from, but what content are they engaging with? Average engagement time tells us what kind of content we need to be creating more of and which pages are due for a repurpose.
Once you get a feel for which content engages your audience the most, you can use free keyword research tools to get some related content ideas. This way, you’re creating content with a purpose that you know will resonate with your target audience based on your user’s data, not just general search volumes and other information.
New And Returning Visitors
One of the significant benefits of great user experience is customer retention. Returning customers are some of the most valuable, and you want to keep them there. Repeat customers tend to offer higher conversion rates, so tracking and comparing these customers is a great way to determine what is working for your marketing goals.
You can compare new vs. returning customers, and based on your website’s specific goal; you’ll be able to gauge where you’re at. If you have a website that exists to draw people to a physical location, you wouldn’t expect a lot of returning visitors. Whereas if you’re running a weekly blog, you want to see a lot of repeat customers coming back for new content. If you have goals set on your account, you can see whether your new or repeat customers are fulfilling them.
Suppose your new visitors resonate more with your website than your returning visitors. In that case, you can offer consumers incentives like a coupon for their second purchase or take advantage of email marketing to keep repeat consumers engaged and updated on any sales or promotions.
Conversion Rate
As we mentioned above, Google Analytics allows you to make “goals,” and this is how you’re going to track conversion rates. An example of a goal could be a completed purchase or a submitted form. Simply put, a goal on your GA account is just a completed activity that benefits your business.
A low conversion rate can mean a lot of different things, your design is hard to navigate, you’re targeting the wrong audience, or you have a generally poor user experience. Low conversion rates suggest most of these problems are occurring. It’s not usually just one thing that produces a low conversion rate, it’s issues all across the board.
Tracking how people interact with your site through Google Analytics is a powerful way to determine precisely why your conversion rates are low and where you need to make some improvements.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate explains how many users visited your site and left without engaging with your content. A high bounce rate suggests the page was not relevant and valuable to the user. Although, a high bounce rate doesn’t always mean that you have bad content. The high number could be due to slow loading times, or your layout was off-putting.
By improving the overall page experience, you’ll start to see lower bounce rates, but this isn’t something you should be looking at once a year. You should check on your website’s metrics often to stay updated on how your current users are interacting with your website.
Average Session Duration
Session duration is the total time a user stays on your website. Not to be confused with time on page, which tracks the time spent on specific website pages. If a user enters your website at 1:00 pm and bounces around from page to page until 1:30 pm, the total session would be 30 minutes. The average time a user should spend on your page varies drastically because each website’s goal is different. However, if you’re seeing questionably low session times, this is a bad sign.
Usually, this means your website is not visually engaging, or your website’s information is hard to find, and your website is challenging to interact with. Internal links are a great way to boost the time spent on your website. It allows users to efficiently gain the information they otherwise would’ve gone somewhere else for.
Page Views Per Session
It would be awesome if a user visited all of the pages on your website during a session, but this, unfortunately, is not the reality of the situation. Page views per session show how many different places the user went on your website. We definitely want to see lots of page visits. This is a sign of a healthy user experience, but if users are looking at one page and bouncing, there are some improvements to make.
Optimizing your navigation menu could be the solution to enhance page views. This is the primary way people are going to move through your website, so if there’s too much going on, not enough, or it’s not visually appealing, this could be why you’re seeing users visit just one page on your website. Another way to improve this metric is by adding more internal links to other pages on your website.
Demographic Information
Google Analytics provides vital demographic information such as user location, age, gender, etc. With this information alone, you’re not going to get very far, but you can draw conclusions about consumers’ motivators, pain points, and general desires based on these demographics.
Different types of people will respond to your website in varying ways. So how can you make sure that you’re engaging the right people with the most valuable information? Simply to understand them. You can achieve a better user experience with demographic information because it allows you to narrow down your target audience effectively.
The Impact Of Poor User Experience
According to research, 70% of consumers will back out of a sale because of poor user experience. Even if your business has great products and services, a poor user experience will drive away valuable consumers who couldn’t reach what’s great about your business. Amazing services and products mean nothing when they’re hiding behind a poor user experience.
Some of the most common reasons we see people leaving websites is slow loading times and visually unappealing sites that look outdated and untrustworthy. Slow-loading websites are one of the top reasons a consumer will leave your website. If your pages take more than two or three seconds to load, people are onto the next. When you’re on a website, are you going to wait patiently when there’s an infinite amount of quicker options just one click away?
A great user experience is critical to the growth and success of your website, and a poor user experience can actually cost you money. We understand that a website is an investment, and you want to make the most of it.
Should You Hire A UX Design Agency?
If you have the time and energy and want to tackle this project on your own, consider us your biggest cheerleaders. Without experience, there’s a lot of learning and research in store for you, and it will not be an easy task. However, it is definitely something you can learn on your own with the proper time and resources.
So you don’t have to hire a professional, but you’ll probably want to. Our designers here at Strategic Media Inc. understand that user experience runs a lot deeper than just pretty layouts. We deeply analyze the customer’s interaction with your website from start to finish. The data we collect is accurate, and with thorough experience observing UX metrics, we can translate this information into an actionable plan to boost the overall experience consumers have on your website.
While performing your own user experience optimization, even if you’ve made it to the point where you have all the data, now your next step is figuring out what it all means. If you’re stuck and looking for valuable feedback from the pros, call us at 727-531-7622 or contact us online to boost revenue and customer retention through optimal user experience.