User experience (UX) is how your website or app behaves with your visitors. If it offers smooth navigation, engaging UI, captivating images, well-plattered content, prompt CTAs, a smooth purchase and checkout process, and more, the visitor will likely end up coming repeatedly to your site. The simple reason is that he had an amazing experience with not just your products or services but also with your site. Therefore, UX is as important as your product and drives your visitor to become your permanent customer. The best UX boosts customer retention, which creates more interest in your product and eventually sales. Whether yours is a startup, mid-scale company, or enterprise, your online customer engagement is directly proportional to your site’s caliber to deliver an excellent user experience.
Let us help you understand UX better and give you answers to the whys and hows of creating an exceptional end-user experience. Web analytics is the way to measure the UX of sites and apps. It helps you identify the peak points of user engagement as well as bottlenecks in the user journey. Once you gauge the issues and fix them through website optimization, you improve the chances of engaging the user by manifold. First, you need to understand a few UX metrics that give an insight into the website’s performance.
Identifying Key UX Metrics Using Website Analytics
Bounce rate
Perhaps the most important UX metrics, bounce rate checks and measures the percentage of visitors that leave a website after checking just one page. So, they may need a better experience and practically bounce out of the site. The logical reason for a high bounce rate is that the visitors are unable to find what they are searching for or like on a website. This means they don’t find things that engage them to check the site further. High bounce rates could be due to the slow loading of pages, dull design, poor navigation, and irrelevant content. Investigating every page and finding out which one shows the highest bounce rate can help you fix the actual issue. Fixing this metric could be a game-changer for your site. To improve this, analyze the pages with the highest bounce rates, identify potential UX issues, and implement a targeted website redesign to enhance engagement.
Session duration
A session is defined as the time a visitor spends on your website. To measure total user engagement, you need to find the average session duration. It is the sum of the total time users spend on your website divided by the total number of sessions. If you achieve a high number on calculating the average session duration, then it means the site is highly engaging, and vice versa. Similarly, time on page is another metric that suggests the time difference between landing and leaving a user from a page. It suggests how engaging that particular page is. You can study user behavior through these metrics and do the needful to deliver an engaging user experience.
Pages per session
This important UX metric calculates the average number of web pages accessed by users per session. It is the number obtained if you divide total page views by the total number of sessions that happened during that particular time frame. This metric suggests how your site pulls a user to explore more pages. Well, a higher number means your site is interactive enough to ensure that users go through it easily. The factors responsible for this are relevant content, sharp navigation, effective interlinking of pages, meticulously placed CTAs, etc. If the number of pages per session is low, then it’s time for website optimization. The site should be visibly appealing and informative, with a flow of content that drives users to explore more pages.
Conversion rates
This UX parameter serves your purposes of engaging the users to the fullest. It drives the user to take actions like responding to polls, filling out forms, signing up for newsletters, downloading eBooks or whitepapers, etc. In a nutshell, the conversion rate is the percentage of users that get involved in any action or transaction that you have defined for them. This rate should be analyzed and tracked to understand the user journey and choke points in it. You can improve it by working on customer journey mapping, which involves studying and marking the touch points, actions, and pain points of individual customers. Conversion rates can be improved by minimizing navigation hassles, increasing readability, using interactive CTAs, optimizing forms, simplifying the checkout process, etc. Consider a UX design audit to map customer journeys and identify barriers to conversion.
New and returning visitors
New visitors are the number of users who have landed on your website for the first time on a particular date range. It is the number of people who have never visited your site before and are fresh users on a certain date range.
Returning users are the number of users who have already visited your website before a particular date range. Fixing a date range helps to get both of these numbers with accuracy. More returning customers means your site attracts them to come back, either for product or service.
User flow and pathways
This UX parameter defines different navigation ways and paths that users take to travel through your website or app. They are tracked by marking nodes and connections. Here, nodes are the pages found in the User flow report, and connections are the paths that link the nodes. So, pathways suggest how users travel from a particular page (node) to another. While pathways can be many depending on the user journey, nodes are limited. Again, there are many combinations of user flow and pathways from particular nodes. Tracking these parameters helps to fix hurdles in the navigation of the site or app. By gauging the user journeys from particular pages to particular paths, it helps to figure out the flow of traffic between certain pages. It also spots exit points from any specific pages. Knowing these metrics helps to fix the navigational issues of the site.
Exit rates
Simply put, it is the percentage of users landing on a page from which they exit to jump on another website, irrespective of the page on which they first landed. Used for traffic analysis, this number indicates the page where users showed the last interactions. For example, a user landing on the home page, jumping on the blog page, and then exiting from the product page suggests that the product page needs optimization. Normally, higher exit rates are expected from content-driven pages like blogs. On the other hand, product pages show lower exit rates.
The formula is:
Exit rate (%) = (Number of exits from the page / total number of visits to the page) × 100
This parameter helps to gauge why a user exits the site. It could be from a particular page or action. So, once you figure out the reason, you can reduce the exit rate and retain users on the site.
Monitoring UX metrics is the best way to judge user behavior. Regular monitoring helps site owners modify the site as per the changing behavior of the user. The eventual result is more user retention, lead generation, higher sales, and an excellent return on investment. If you don’t have a team for analytics, then it is a must to invest in a company that offers web analytics services. Taking professional help for website optimization is the key to increasing traffic, customers, sales, and revenue.
If you are a startup or enterprise looking to improve the user experience for your website, then KrishaWeb could be your best technology partner. We have the resources and experience to bring up a low-performing site to a popular, high-performing website or app. Connect with us for the UI/UX design services.
Nisarg Pandya
Project Manager
Experienced Project Manager and Scrum Master at KrishaWeb, delivers expertise in Scrum methodologies, Laravel, React.js, UX design, and project management, ensuring efficient project delivery and agile implementation.
