User experience (UX) is the core element that differentiates products (both actual and virtual) from one another. In order to increase conversion, you may need to completely overhaul the UX of your product, but where to start? How do you find the pain points and how do you figure out what your users actually want?

It’s easy to make excuses and to think you know exactly what’s wrong with your product without any research or investigation. You have to be humble, be smart, and draw your conclusions objectively through analytics.

There are popular analytics services like Google Analytics, Hotjar, Chartbeat, and Kissmetrics to name a few. If you are not sure which analytics service to use, this analytics tools article from Sitemap might help you select the right one.

I’m not going to be discussing everything from the perspective of one tool, instead I’ll talk about each way to extract data from your product and you can figure out which tool will work best for you. 

The points we are going to cover are insightful, actionable, but basic. If you already have Google Analytics installed, you’ll be able to check the data of each component we’ll be discussing, hurrah!

Bounce rate In layman terms, when visitors land on your website and leave it in a few seconds, bounce rate is.Technically speaking, it is when a visitor lands on your website that they leave under five seconds and/or visit less than three pages.

It’s something you don’t want to have a bounce rate above 70 per cent. It is like 70 out of 100 visitors do not find the information or product they expected. To minimize the bounce rate, you need to search your site immediately for the following problems: 

Wrong target audience: targeting the wrong demographic is often the root cause of a high bounce rate. The way users discover your web, in the analytics world, is called a’ campaign.’ You’ve ever clicked on a link and that looked like this:

You can tell exactly where and how a user finds your website, when you set up your analytics correctly. This can tell you exactly what’s wrong about the way you market your website. You’re a publishing company, for example, manufacturing and selling books on entrepreneurship. You’ve got a paid advertisement by Google Adwords that targets young children (12–15). An enticing banner ad will make them click on the ad but you should expect a high bounce rate because young children wouldn’t be interested in goods for entrepreneurship. The ad may be on the mark, but the person who is seeing it needs to be reconsidered.

Navigation issues:

Website navigation is like the table-of-contents of any well-organized book. The navigation should be very well organized and grouped. An ideal navigation has a very obvious name that users can predict what the information/content underneath will be.

Navigation is still one of the most frequently used components for content discovery on a website. Having a very complex, lengthy, and unorganized navigation will create confusion with your end users. Here’s a real world example where navigation is key:

You are in a totally new airport which has 2 terminals, 6 concourses, and 3 floors. (Have you ever flown out of ATL?!) You need to reach the terminal 5-B in under 5 minutes. How would you reach your gate without proper map/sign-boards? A bad website navigation is like being in a giant airport without signs. 

Your users are going to get frustrated and take another mode of transport. Here’s an article from HubSpot on how to organize your website navigation. It is a bit old and still very relevant.

The easiest way to find out if this is an issue is check if users are actually clicking on each item of your navigation bar. If they aren’t, seriously consider dropping some items, or think about restructuring all your navigation with a card sort.

Problematic design elements: 

For your website, you build a design language that should remain standardized for every article.

If you create a page that has a totally different color scheme, design style, and typography you create intense UX friction. Every user who visits the homepage or other uniform pages before this page is certainly going to leave quickly and add to your bounce rate.

This would be more difficult to identify through analytics, but now you know why if you have an uncomfortable page with awful fonts and colors with a super high bounce rate.

Lack of calls for action: on your website you need to direct your users to take any actions. You may be familiar with Amazon’s “You might also like” feature that motivates users to click on suggested items and get them to engage with more products.

If you have a page with very focused, organized content, try adding recommendations for your other product or service. Fill it with some meaningful content such as testimonials or ratings if you still find space on the page. The goal here is to keep engaging the consumer.

Analyzing time spent: 

Time spent on a website is another important factor for user engagement. How much time they spend on your site and on your pages is significant.

A person spending more time on a website is sometimes a positive sign and sometimes a negative sign. How would you identify them? And what action should you take?

The positive: if you watch users spend more time on a page that has a long but well-researched content. It represents a positive sign. You should think of it as a commitment. It occurs usually for blog posts.

The negative one: It is a negative sign if you find users spending more time on a website that has very little content. The chances are that your users are confused, have no clue on where to go next, and have not found the information they were looking for. If you see that happening with your product / services page, action is needed.

James Montano