Website Visitor Segmentation is one of the most important steps in understanding the behavioral aspect of people visiting our website. Following visitor segmentation has been made based on what exactly happen technically when someone attempts to open the website. The segmentation gives an idea on how to put a visitor into certain relevant segment based on their arrival pattern and the response recorded by the analytic system.

Here’s the explanation on how a request for specific web page is treated at technical level:

Visitors

• New Visitor
• Anonymous
• Exit before tracking
• Cookie deletion & Cookie detection problem
• Private / Safe browsing
• Proxy
• Observed
• Robots / Crawlers
• Showing hits as ‘not identified’
• Soft 404
• Identified
• Tracking of successful visit
• Event firing in response to action
• Form fill-up (Not submitted)
• Verified
• Verified by email address
• Form fill-up and submitted
• Transaction completion
• Returning Visitor
• Identified as new visit
• Deletion of cookie
• Forget password & unable to retrieve, attempting new login
• Verified returning visitor
• Tracking cookie successfully
• Visitor already having Login credential for website

It becomes very crucial to consider certain assumption on number of Anonymous visitors while considering the overall visitors to a website. This assumption helps us in identifying issues with website loading, tracking and other GUI related problems. Also, by carefully assuming Anonymous visitor figure we can achieve a precise statistics of Conversion rate and Bounce rate.

As we can see, only Identified and Verified visitors matter to us while judging the Conversion Rate. But on the other hand we can’t ignore Anonymous and Observed visitors to our website as they might be the prospects to our website, and we might have lost them.

Bounce Rate:

(Landing page = Exit page) =>Bounce rate

Exit Rate:

Any landing page ->Traverse -> exit on X page
=> Exit Rate = Page views of ‘X’ page / No. of exits from ‘X’ page (including bounces)

The exit rate says that for all cases where someone visited that page (including the bounces); it was the last page that much % of time. Bounce and exit rate both calculated based on page views and not based on unique pages views. Exit rate include bounces.

Consider one example,

My website is having one page named Product1.html, having 35% exit rate and 28% bounce rate. As I mentioned, bounce rate is a part of exit rate; we can take difference of these two to get interesting information.

Exit Rate (35%) – Bounce Rate (28%) = 7% visited other pages on my site then came back to the main product1.html page and exited from that page. This observation has an exception, like what if Bounce rate is greater than exit rate!

Logically, greater bounce rate than exit rate is bit misleading in understanding the behavior of users. Means, when people landing on a particular page and exiting from there only, what’s the reason behind people exit less when they’re landing on some other page, traverse certain number of pages and coming on that page. If a page is not really interesting for engaging its visitors then exit rate and bounce rate should be almost equal.

“If you own a Website and it is slower than the average loading time of other websites, you are already a loser.”

When we analyze website loading time as a part of usability analysis and user’s behavioral analysis, we can get to know about something which is somehow being ignored by majority of websites and online business owners; that is website speed.

Start thinking from a Website User’s perspective and note down the points which you insist a website to have:

• Fast Loading of website
• Security, Confidentiality, and Ethical Use of Information provided by user
• Easy Navigation & less number of steps to follow while making any transaction

Now, what would be your expectation being a Website Owner from the users:

• Stay longer on the website
• Do visit the website more often
• Put trust on the website and spread the trustworthiness
• Do the Transaction which matches the organization’s ultimate Goal (any type of Transaction)

What makes Website Performance so crucial?

• According to Forrester Consulting, Web site performance is second only to Security in User Expectations.
• According to a study, Users who experience a 2-second site slowdown make almost 2% fewer queries, click 3.75% less often, and report being significantly less satisfied with their overall experience.
• 57% of online consumers will abandon a site after waiting 3 seconds for a page to load.
• According to an observation done by Aberdeen Group, a 1-second delay in page load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions. (In dollar terms, this means that if your site typically earns $100,000 a day, this year you could lose $2.5 million in sales.)

What Website owners can do in this regards?

• Match website quality and performance with user expectations.
• Do periodic auditing of your website performance and evaluate the improvements.
• Establish and follow Design & Coding Standards and do QA them thoroughly also for Website compatibility to different browsers after following those standards.
• Implement Cognitive Psychological improvements to your website along with technical changes to improve the overall performance of your website from user experience point of view.

Objective

“Help organizations to pursue their ultimate goal of expanding and engaging customer base in every feasible and deployable way.”

A general emphasize of any organization would be to engage customers in the online social locations where they naturally spend time.

How does Social Media differentiate itself from conventional online marketing tactics?

Conventional online marketing focalize on presenting company’s own fabricated content to the people and waits for people’s response to that marketing efforts.

On the other hand, Social Media is all about user generated contents. People buy some product (or even take something into consideration) online or offline, and put facts and opinions about that product or services at Social Media. People use to engage themselves by Sharing, Rating, and Reviewing contents, and Connecting and Collaborating with people around Social Media.

Other people who’re ‘connected’ or are sharing common circle or community will respond to that. This whole unit of process will form a generalized opinion of specific product or services. Based on this feedback, an organization can have much meaningful information.

For example:

• Ideas for product or service innovation
• Early warning of problems or opportunities
• Market expansions (Ideas for new product applications)
• Public sentiments around certain actions
• Competitive threats or exposed weaknesses
• Customer service tips that flows from users to users (User generated content)

People participating in the conversation can be categorized as following:

• Advocate (Supportive and Active) or Dormant (Supportive but Inactive)
• Adversarial (Non Supportive and Active) or Apathetic (Non Supportive and Inactive)

Who can be seen as prospects and Loyal Customers out of these four?

Advocate participants of the conversation might be our existing loyal customer for specific product, brand or towards an organization. Or in other case, we can categorize them as people with highest possibility of getting them as our future customers.

Same is the case with Dormant participants with lesser possibility of them as being our existing loyal customers.

Interesting case comes into picture when we consider Adversarial Participant seriously. We should see the Non supportive yet Active behavior of Adversarial conversation participant as the scope to identify the improvement areas. Adversarial participant might be raising ‘early warning of problems or opportunities’, and as he/she’s not getting any response from the organization, he has been becoming Active negatively to spread his concern.

So, do we still have the scope to solve his concern and retain him back to our store? Answer is, yes.

An Organization can strengthen its relationship with Adversarial participant by tracing them upon raising issue by him on first occurrence only. You can explore ways to prevent negative sentiment to get spread by satisfactorily solve the issues and concerns of Adversarial participants and avail them with multiple ways of engagement by offering better after sales services, special discounts, reward points, etc.

Finally, What is noteworthy to measure?

• Fans, Comments & Interaction, Active Participants, Likes
• Uptake – % of fans become active users
• Churn – Percent of fans lost.  Fans can remove their like from your page
• Gain – Net change in organic growth (active users), new fans, geographic locales, and impressions

There’re billions of people surfing the web every day, searching for something or exploring something that they already know. Establishing your product’s unique identity across the web has now become a critical thing for marketers and analysts.

Web has now become a jungle, and if you’re new to it then you’re a small plant who needs lots of planning and strategy as nutrition to grow your product plant bigger. With this post, Dooduddy will share the Curiosity of how people discover a brand across the web.

As shared in my previous post of Cognitive Psychology, I used one sentence that is “People are much better in recognizing than recalling something”. Human brain recognize images and color quickly than it recognize textual content, and that is the reason why companies and organizations give emphasize specially in designing their company or products’ logo carefully, so that people can remember the logo and product and thus Branding objective get satisfied at least partially.

Now, there’re mainly three ways by which people might discover your brand:

Observing others with brand

People may discover you brand by observing others with brand. For example, you find some of your friends participating in active discussion running on Facebook Fan page for some product. It might be possible that you ignore that brand’s name few times but upon listening or reading that brand more often, your Curiosity may lead to know more about that brand and thus you get to know about that brand.

This way of discovering the brand is more related to feeling the presence of brand unconsciously initially which further results into exploring more information due to curiosity.

Initiating the discovery on his own

“Necessity is the mother of invention.” A well known sentence which we’ve been listening for years is also applicable to the online discovery of a brand. We might initiate the discovery of brand from a conventional way of ‘Googling’ the need. We get to see relevant results on the search page and possibly hit some of the results, like it, bookmark it and return to that brand frequently. And by this we might actually get to discover brand that we were looking for.

Being encouraged by others

Social media and forums play a big role in this way of discovering the brand. You might have observed frequent sharing of interesting content among friends in Facebook, Twitter, etc. Under the positive influence of a Brand it is quite possible that people advocate your brand by suggesting it to their friends through email, social media sharing, and participating in discussion forums.

In an era where a brand need to reach to their customer, it is always good idea to exist where people more likely to surf. Present your brand in the best possible way as first impression is the last impression also applicable to branding process.

Looking forward to have readers’ input with their innovative comments and healthy discussion.

What is Cognitive Psychology?

It’s a division of psychology to explore the mental process. It helps us to understand how people distinguish, memorize, speak, and solve problems.

Mainly brain holds two types of memory: Short term & Long term memory. Short-term memory can be compared to RAM of a computer, it holds only a limited amount of memory for limited amount of time. It might goes to long-term memory. Typically, average human can hold 5-9 objects in STM (Short Term Memory). On the other side, Long Term Memory stores unlimited amount of information for an indefinite period.

There’re two types of basic actions which human brain perform while seeing any object, Recognition and Recall. People are much better in recognizing than recalling something.

Which important essence of Cognitive Psychology should be first focused by Analyst?

‘Attention’ is the most important part of cognitive psychology which itself need special attention from analyst and insight developers.

Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on the one aspect of environment while ignoring other things.

What are the essences of Attention?

Attention: Focalization, Concentration, and consciousness (these are worth considering while designing UI)

Distraction: Confused, Dazed, and Scatterbrained (to avoid distracting objects on your website)

So, how to use them?

According to Fitt’s law, the farther and the smaller the target from the user, the longer it take to move the cursor and point at that target.

By this statement, it is advisable to make the button’s size proportionate to its expected frequency of use. For example, back and next button given below the form where there is more than one form filling steps. Another example is to inspire website visitor to click to ‘buy’ button.

On the other side, Hick’s law states that the time required to choose/decide, is linearly related to the number of choice or the amount of information that must be processed in order to respond.

Fitt’s law applies to taking action, while Hick’s law applies to the decision making process.

We received raw data of every type to fit our analysis demands, we analyze and finally we’ve come with something interesting. Insights are called useful only if they can be put into practicality. If I’m a business owner and I’ve ready to use analytics software in front of me, then it’s not a big deal to analyze up and down with figures and charts.

With this post, I would like to mention few important points to improvise the insight development process. Please note that, following steps can be applied to every common operation you perform over data from initialization to the end of analysis.

When you first collect the data, you first perform data cleaning operation to remain only with those data which can guide you through the right direction of analysis.

First of all try to understand the pattern of data you already have.

Normal patterns

• Constant
• Linear
• Cyclic
• Seasonal pattern with growth

Abnormal patterns (Triggered by external sources)

• Transient impulse
• Sudden rise
• Sudden fall

Once you’re able to judge the data pattern, you can make decision on if there is any data modeling technique applicable to those data or not.

For abnormal patterns, modeling is not possible as it is triggered by the external sources, and forecasting on their triggering behavior is not possible. But yes we can make some prediction on triggering but can’t forecast. When we use two almost similar words forecasting and prediction then we must clearly understand the difference.

As we can see in the comparison, when some formulation and processing on facts and figures comes into an operation, the outcomes become more relevant and precise.

This is first part of a depth oriented insight development post. With my next post, in continuation to this post, I’ll take few psychological rules to understand user behavior against their positive or negative action.