Summary
You need to understand your customers online to best meet their needs. To understand your customers online, you can use data from your website, surveys, panels, and third-party sources.
Why You Need to Understand Your Customers Online
Understanding the needs, attitudes and behaviors of your customers are required for successful marketing.
It is crucial if you are to improve your ability to sell your organization’s offerings.
You develop effective online goals and strategies only when you understand your customers online.
Do note that your customers are the same online and off.
But, you might find interesting differences between those that choose to do business with you online and those that do offline.
How to Understand Your Customers Online
Data on your customers helps you to understand them. Fortunately, the online environment is data rich.
Web analytics help you measure, collect, analyze and report on web data. To understand and optimize web usage.
Sources of data on your customers’ and prospects’ online needs, behavior and/or preferences include:
- Online surveys
- Panels or focus groups
- Site-centric data
- Third party data sources
Online Surveys
Surveys are useful for collecting data from individual users or visitors.
Generally, survey help reveal:
- What people are thinking (attitudinal data)
- What people are doing (behavioral data)
Note that survey is not the best means of knowing what people are doing. What people responding to a survey state as what they do might be quite different from what they do in reality.
There is a difference between claimed behavior and observed behavior.
Surveys are less useful for understanding the details of people’s behavior.
They are great for understanding who people are and what they think.
Surveys enable you to know who is using or visiting your website. You can ask people about their gender, age and other details useful to your marketing.
Surveys are about the only way to find out about what people are thinking or why they are doing something.
They are the only source of information about whether your customers are satisfied and why.
Site-centric data may also highlight that users are dissatisfied with your offering. They do this by showing a reduction in the number of repeat visitors to your site. But site-centric data won’t tell why it’s happening.
Online surveys can be undertaken by any organization to understand its customers.
Find outlined the following advantages of online surveys:
- Online surveys are relatively cost effective. When you compare with face-to-face interviews and telephone research, online surveys are cost effective
- Project time can be very small. With some online tools, you can set up a survey within a short time
Fitting Online Surveys to Audiences
Different types of online surveys fit different audiences.
The types include:
- Site-based surveys
- Pop-up surveys
Site-based surveys are better suited for obtaining information from actual customers or subscribers.
You can send email invites to people to take part in a survey with a link to the survey in the email.
How many people do you need to send your survey to?
This article helps you decide. And here is a tool helpful for calculating how many responses you need to be confident in your results.
Google Forms and Survey Monkey are great tools for creating site-based surveys. Other tools include:
Popup surveys are more appropriate when you want to survey people you don’t have any data on.
You could use pop-up surveys to get feedback from the users of your website. Note that pop-ups could be quite obstructive. Use it with case and be well informed.
GetSiteControl (affiliate link) is a great tool for creating pop-up surveys.
Tools you can use to create pop-up surveys include:
Important Note
For your surveys to be reliable, it should be easy for people to answer your survey questions.
The easier it is to answer, the more likely it is that people will complete it. And give you data that will be reliable and meaningful.
Panels
Again, surveys are great for understanding who people are and what they think. They are less useful for understanding details of their behavior.
What can you use for understanding the details of people’s behavior?
Panels are great for understanding who people are and how they behave.
Panels are typically services developed by or with the help of professional research companies. Such companies invite people to take part in a research program.
For a large business, it might be practical and desirable to develop your own panel of users. It is recommended that you work with professionals to ensure the success of the undertaking.
Developing a real panel might be out of the reach of a small business. A small business can ask a few customers or friends to serve as it panel members. This might suffice if the small business knows the kind of questions to ask and task to observe.
Site-Centric Data
Site-centric data refers to data that is sourced from the activity of your website.
It provides meaningful information on visitors and users of your website.
When a user makes a request to visit your website, a request is made to your server.
All request to your web servers is logged in web server log files. These provide a record of every page, gif or page element that has been requested.
Unfortunately, log files were never designed to offer insights into website visitors and how they behave.
A log file doesn’t record who is visiting the site. It is only recording a few details about:
- Where the user has come from (their IP address)
- Type of browser
- Operating system they are using
It’s difficult to know individual users and which request they are making.
Since you are interested in knowing each user and their behavior on your site, your web server log files alone are inadequate.
You also need cookies and where practical, authenticated login.
Cookies help augment the information in your log files. They help you identify which user is visiting which pages and whether they have visited your website before.
A cookie is a simply a text file deposited onto the user’s computer when they visit your website. Cookies used for tracking visitors usually contain a string that uniquely identifies that computer.
Web analytics systems commonly make use of JavaScript tagging and cookies to help you:
- Collect data from your website
- Process and manage those data
Web analytics systems provide you with helpful data and reports. Such could be useful for improving some of your key digital marketing processes.
A good and simple web analytics system is Google Analytics.
Note that cookies are not that perfect in helping you identify visitors. This is because cookies identify computers, not people.
At home, in an office or any other public area, different people could be using the same computer.
Having a fully authenticated logging in system is the ultimate way to identify visitors.
With such a system, users must identify themselves before they are able to use the website. Most social media platforms require users to log-in before they are able to use the website.
For many websites, this is not practicable.
Important Note
Web analytics systems can only provide you with data and reports. Actionable insights from such data can only come from people that know how to extract value from such.
Informed people, not the tools and cool technology are the keys to success with web analytics.
As you plan to invest in analytics, you should spend most of your budget on people. People (brains) who will help you extract value from data provided by tools.
Or you can invest in yourself to become the brain that can extract value from data from analytics tools.
Third-Party Data Sources
Data on consumers and customers are important to companies and they will always be willing to pay for it.
Research agencies or marketing information companies collect data to sell to companies.
These are third-party data sources, they offer services such as:
- Panels
- Data aggregation
- Syndicated surveys
Panels
We earlier examined panels. Panels have the ability to begin to link an understanding of who users are with what they do online.
Panel data providers offer two main types of panels:
- Audience measurement panels
- Access panels
Audience measurement panels are also known as media panels or internet audience panels.
Their primary purpose is to establish the size and profile of an audience of a website.
Alexa is an example of an audience panel data provider.
Alexa provides traffic estimates and ranks websites based on their estimated traffic.
Alexa states that its traffic estimates and ranks are based on the browsing behavior of people in its global data panel. It claims its global data panel is a sample of all internet users.
The reliability of Alexa’s data is in doubt. Research by Moz has shown that you can’t rely on the data from Alexa for serious decision making.
Access panels are means of accessing a particular group of people for surveying and monitoring behaviors.
Access panels provide quicker and cost-effective means of conducting customer research among target groups.
UserTesting provides access panels for user experience testing.
Data Aggregators
Data aggregators collect data from different sources and sell. Panel data providers can be said to be data aggregators. They collect data from thousands of internet users to sell.
SimilarWeb is an example of a data aggregator. It provides an estimate of traffic a website receives. It also helps you compare traffic estimates of competing websites.
SimilarWeb states that its data is taken from diversified sources. Again research from Moz examines the accuracy of data from SimilarWeb.
Search engines such as Google are also data aggregators. They provide insights into consumer behavior on search engines. They total the number of searches and report on their popularity.
Syndicated Surveys
A syndicated survey is a consumer survey developed and run by a research company at intervals.
The results of the survey are available for sale to whoever wishes to buy. Such surveys provide attitudinally and claimed behavioral information of a particular audience.
Euromonitor International is an example of a provider of syndicated surveys.