 Okay, great, let's get started. Thanks everyone for being here so late on Sunday afternoon. So, we're gonna be talking about behavioral analysis. And, you know, a couple months ago, I noticed on our website that it was a comfort event had come back to our website three times. And we use IQ detection software, so as we can see the specific companies that are coming to our site and exactly what they're doing on our site. And so, you know, they came back three times and there was a good sign, and then they wound up calling us. And so, we'll have to do a conversation. And then after that conversation, they wound up coming back to our website 24 times. So think about that. You know, normally when we talk about websites, we talk about the success of websites, the performance of websites, we're really looking at conversions, right? Well, in this case, there were no conversions, right? They hadn't downloaded anything off of our website. They hadn't bought anything. But this was hugely, hugely important for us because after several months of discussions with them, they wound up becoming one of our largest clients. And so, understanding the digital body language of your site, this is hugely important. It can have a very direct impact on the success of your business, not just your website, but the success of your business because just because someone comes to your site and they don't quote unquote convert, doesn't necessarily mean that it's a wasted visit that there's no value in it towards driving your revenue growth. And so, we're going to do a deep dive into behavioral analysis and behavioral analytics today. Hopefully, we'll be able to give away some recommendations to really drive your business growth. So, a little background on myself. My name is Tom Shapiro. I'm the CTO of Stratitude, which is a branding, web design, and marketing agency. We work exclusively at WordPress. We've always worked only in WordPress. We really love it. I'm the author of a book called, We Think Your Marketing. It came out last year. We found it on Amazon. We're the founder of a Nora marketing group here in Boston. We now have over 400 members. So, if anyone's in the Boston area, we'd love to have you come to one of our events. At my last employer, I was the director of digital strategy of the 85th employee. And we completely rethought the way that we were driving business. And while I'm going through the 85th employee, it's over 700 employees in five years. And I've worked with a lot of startups, a lot of middle market companies, as well as a lot of Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T, Packard, Intel, about 10 different brands at P&G, UnitedHealthcare, and others. So, let's go a little bit about me. Now, let's dive into the topic of discussion. So, data analytics. You know, we are inundated with data, right? We all have so much data, but we have to make sure that we're making use of it, right? Like, if you are looking at your data, if you're looking at your analytics, and then you're not taking action, it's kind of worthless in terms of driving the performance of your business, right? And so, how do you interpret the data after you make the most use of it? So, a lot of us use Google Analytics, right? Show of hands, how many of you use Google Analytics? So, pretty much everyone, right? So, that's great. And there are a lot of really fantastic data points in Google Analytics. But, Google Analytics really only reveals about half of the story. What we need to do is go beyond the what. Google Analytics doesn't provide you with the what. It doesn't provide you with the why. Why are your site visitors doing what they do? Why are they clicking what they're clicking? Why are they leaving when they leave? Why are they abandoning your forms? Why are they doing all these things? Google Analytics won't tell you. And there's a lot of data inside of Google Analytics where it can be misinterpreted and can actually cause you to make the wrong conclusions. So, for instance, page view, try Google Analytics, page views, try all look at page views, right? And we think, oh, page views are high, that was a successful page, right? But, not necessarily. Okay, so we, our agency wrote a blog post in 2015, about three years ago, and we didn't think anything of it at the time, but it really took off and got over 81,000 unique page views. 81,000, that's 81,000 unique people. You would think that's hugely successful, right? Anyone looking at Google Analytics would say, wow, that's amazing, you know, how did you do it? And we looked at it and we said, okay, well, you know, for this type of page view volume, even if we had, say, a 1% conversion rate, you know, okay, we should have gotten 800 page additives, right? 800 qualified page additives. With a 1% conversion rate, imagine if you had a higher conversion rate. So, how many leads do you think we got out of this? We got zero, zero. In fact, don't know, right? So, how is that possible? How's this humanly possible? We have 81,000 page views, unique page views, and have zero leads come from that, right? It's a huge failure. And so, what we wanna do is dive deeper than Google Analytics numbers. We wanna look deeper than just understanding of what. We wanna look deeper than something like a page view, because a page view doesn't tell us anything. So we declined an enterprise software client that came to us and you're pretty proud of their Knowledge Hub. They had a lot of great information that you could download in their Knowledge Hub. So, if you're in their Knowledge Hub, they have rings and rings and rings of these offers where if you click through, you go to a landing page and you can download a white paper or you can download a webinar report anymore. But one of many, many, many different offerings that they had in their Knowledge Hub. You're pretty proud of this and you look at their Google Analytics data and sure enough, yeah. It was a substantial part of the traffic and it really put a solid traffic and so they knew that it was really popular and successful. Except for what? Because when we looked at behavioral data as to what people were doing when they arrived, they weren't doing anything. They weren't scrolling down the page at all. They weren't clicking on anything. They weren't downloading anything. The offer that they had that had the most clicks and remember, this is not a download. This is simply a click to the landing page. The offer on this paper has had dozens and dozens and dozens of offers. There was one item that had the most clicks had a total of three clicks over the fire line. How do you call that successful? It's a failure, right? It's a total failure. Yet they were perceiving their Knowledge Hub as this major success because there were a lot of page views. And so we have to go deeper and then this is where we're gonna begin, right? We're gonna go down this behavioral analysis road and I think, and hopefully, you'll be surprised at just how powerful this could be. Some of the benefits of behavioral analysis, including getting a deeper understanding of your audience, identifying the triggers that influence behavior, increasing engagement, increasing conversions, increasing user acquisition, increasing retention, all fantastic things, right? It makes you a better web designer. And also, in case you have to record into anyone or you have to record into a client, you're able to justify your design, your design decisions much more strongly. So the first place that we like to start, and this is with any of our surfers, certainly with behavioral analysis, is with the audience, right? The first is to know who you're targeting and understand them. You have to understand who before you can really take action. And so what I'm gonna urge you to do is really look at your audience segmentation and your personas. And let me just ask you, how many of you have segmented your audience into different audience segments, whether it's verticals or something else? Okay, maybe 85% of you, right? And how many of you, if I asked you right now, to show me your documented audience personas, so not that you know it in your head, but documented, you show me right now, how many of you have your personas documented? Maybe one or two people in this entire room, right? So this is your homework. By tomorrow, I want you to document your audience personas. I'm telling you, this is where you start. I can, I can, you go on the face, talking to you about behavioral analysis, if you do not define your audience segments, if you do not define your personas, if you're not gonna maximize the value of this, you have to know who you're talking to and then customize based on who you're talking to. And depending on who it is, you're gonna speak to them differently. They're gonna have different problems to solve, right? And you're gonna have different solutions for each of them. Example that I really like is Don't Want to Software Company, where you go to their homepage and they ask you to self-select who you are. So immediately, before they start telling you anything about what the software can do, you have to say, oh well, I'm a marketer, or hey, I'm in finance, I'm a CEO, I'm in operations. And then they have a very customized conversation with you about whatever field you're in, whatever department you're in. And so I go there, I sit on marketing, and absolutely everything is fully customized for me, whether it's the explanations of what they can do for me, the problems that they can solve for me, the case studies, the testimony, everything is geared towards a marketer. Beautiful. If I was in finance, it would be the same thing. So we have to go beyond the who, okay? So the audience segments, personas is the who, but let's go beyond the who. And understand why, okay? If we understand our audience segments, if we understand who it is that's coming to our site, the next question to ask is why? And really, why are they coming to your site? They're real people, they're just like you and me. There's gotta be a reason why they're there. They probably have a problem to solve, right? Or a goal to achieve, an objective to achieve. So you really need to figure out, okay, why are they here? What problems are they trying to solve by being on my site? And is my site specifically answering how to solve that problem, or how to achieve that goal? What are you expecting them to do on your site? Don't just build a site, don't just design a site and say, oh, it's beautiful. What behaviors are you expecting them to demonstrate on your site to indicate to you that they are getting full value out of your site? If you don't know the digital body language that you're looking for from them, then who does? What specific actions should they be taking on your site? Right, should they be downloading something? Should they be registering for an event? Should they be rehearsing something? Should they be contacting you for more information? Should they be setting up time for a demo? What are all of those different actions that they should be taking? And again, going back to my original story, it doesn't have to be a traditional conversion, right? Like downloading a white paper or something like that. Remember that the company I told you about was on our site a total of 27 times over the entire course of their journey. What are the different things that they need to be doing in order to keep driving the conversation forward? Segment your audiences, right? Within each segment, make sure you have a defined persona. And this is what I'm gonna ask you to do. Oftentimes when you're building a persona, what you're told to do is figure out things like, oh, they're age and what city they're in and all these what aspects of their lives. I'll tell you, I couldn't give a crap about their age. I don't care if they're 40, I don't care if they're 45, I don't care if they're 50. Why? I wanna know about the problems they're trying to solve. That's what I wanna know, right? Because who cares if they're 40 versus 50? Who cares? If I know the problem that they're trying to solve, I can then help them solve it. So you'll see that 50% of this persona, 50% is dedicated to what they're trying to achieve, right? What? And the challenges that they have in achieving them. So the problems that Mackenzie's facing is pressure for aggressive growth numbers, right? Her boss or CEO is pressuring her for very aggressive growth but she doesn't understand why conversion is on higher than they are. So she knows that she has to try growth but she doesn't understand why conversions are on higher. What, you know, where is she turned, what does she do next? She doesn't have enough time to get done everything she needs to get done. She doesn't have all the resources that she needs to get done everything that needs to get done. Competitors are probably more sophisticated all the time. They're using more sophisticated software, more sophisticated data science all the time. She's overwhelmed by the amount of data she has without understanding how to tie it all together and how to make sense of it, how to integrate her marketing. She's confused by the changing tech landscape. You know, back in 2012, I think it was, the tech landscape had, I think the exact number, something like 150 or 250 marketing technology solutions and now it has more than 6,000. I mean, we are dealing with chaos, right? If you're a marketing director or marketing VP, that's the challenge, those are the problems that you're dealing with. So how can we help solve them if Mackenzie's are persona? So drive all the way down to the why and then what you're gonna do is say, okay, well Mackenzie has all these problems, right? So what is going to use her story? What is, she's starting, where did she start the process of thinking through her problems and winding up on our website? So document that journey, document the customer journey of the aha moment, like wow, I may know in my head I need some healthcare, I need an expert committee, we need to build our team, we need to reach out to an agency, right? So when does that all start? And then document it to the time she lands on your site to everything you want her to experience on your site in order for that to be the ideal experience for her. It might not be the ideal experience for a different persona, but for her it is, okay? So that's looking at audience segments and persona is very, very important from a starting point. Once you have that in place though, now the fun begins, because now we get into the analysis. So let's run through different types of behavioral analysis today that you can do on your websites. So how many of you today have behavioral analysis software running on your website? So about two or three of you, okay? So behavioral analysis software takes about three seconds to install, okay, super easy. And you can use a cloud solution, so if you're paying on a monthly basis at any time you want to stop, you can stop super, super easy to do. And the insights that you can glean from it are really amazing. So let's start with scroll mapping, which is one of the things that behavioral analytics software can achieve for you. So with scroll mapping, you're gonna see exactly how far down the page your users are going to the exact pixel. And so here we're on page, it's the top of the page, it's indicating red, which means everyone is viewing it, which is obvious because it's the top of the page, that's where you land, but as you scroll down the page you can see the color changes and it's all mapped to the level of scrolling that's taking place. And the software will tell you exactly what percentage of people are driving down your page to the exact pixel. And so you can see, okay, only 50% of my audience is actually getting to this paragraph or that paragraph or this CTA button or this offer on and on and on. And so for instance, if you're noticing that only 15% of your page viewers are getting to certain content, but you feel that content is really important for the success of that page, let's say it's a call to action, right? And if only 15% of the people on the page are viewing it, well then, page views mean nothing, right? It's all about how many actual people are looking at that CTA, right? And so this changes the whole paradigm of how you look at the success of a page and it also tells you whether people are actually seeing what you need them to see in order for this page to be successful. Another way of looking at this is besides scrolling is to cross-reference that data against where are they flipping, where are they hovering, where are they spending time, where are they moving around on the page. So heat mapping is fantastic because it tells you exactly where they're spending their time on your page. And so even if they scroll down the page, they might have spent 90% of their time on a specific video, on a specific CTA. We'll get a question that you pose in your content. And so for example, in this case, the authenticity paragraph on this page had the highest engagement rate in terms of people spending the most time on this paragraph. However, what you also find is that it was after a certain drop-off from a scrolling perspective. So you always need to cross-reference your data, right? And so what this would indicate to us is, ah, okay, well, we're making a mistake by not having this higher on the page because clearly people are interested in it, right? It's the most engaging part of the page. Yeah, we're not allowing everyone to see it. We're not enabling everyone to see it because we have that drop-off from the scrolling. So we have a client that runs a bunch of events around the country and they have a wide attend page in one of their event websites. Makes sense, right? Go to the website, it's promoting the event, and you might not fully know why you would spend that much money to go to their event. You know, it involves the ticket price, it involves the hotel, you probably have to fly there. So having a wide attend page makes a heck of a lot of sense for them. Okay, you go to the wide attend page and towards the top there's a call to action button, grab your ticket, and there were 33 clicks on this. Okay, we can see using the behavior on the list exactly how many clicks will work in any given time period. You can filter the time period, okay? So that's fine, okay? We want them to grab tickets, so that's good. The next call to action on the page, lower on the page, is to meet the speakers, and that has 19 clicks. And then we keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and download the justification letter has 40 clicks. So think about the justification letter. That's something, for instance, if you need to seek a budget from your boss, you can just download this and customize it for yourself and bring it to your boss to better enable you to get the budget to go to this conference, right? So they're arming you with this, and clearly it's very popular. In fact, it's so popular, they go under twice as many clicks as meet the speakers. Right, even though meet the speakers is one of the most popular pages in the website. So what does this tell you? Well, we know through the scroll map that only 21% of people who visited the page even saw the justification letter call to action. Only 21%, one out of five. And yet it was crushing the meet the speakers call to action button. Move it up big, move it above meet the speakers, right? And how would you know that if you weren't looking at the scroll map and the click map? You wouldn't know, you wouldn't know that's your message. So this gives you the ability to know exactly what's working on your page, exactly where it's working, exactly why it's working and then to change your design accordingly, to change the flow of your content accordingly. So another fantastic aspect of a lot of the behavioral analysis software packages is session reporting. So this is where it's literally taking a video of your site visitors on your website and showing you exactly what they're doing on your website. So it's anonymous, you don't see them, you do see their screen, right? You see their cursor, you see what's happening. And when I say that it's anonymous, that is true for certain packages. And for other packages who actually can see who it is if they're opted in, right? If they've registered, if they're logged in to an account. And an example of that would be, for instance, a software package called Full Story. So in this example, you can see everything that this user, Jill, is doing on this website, the Jane website, everything, clicking, scrolling, navigating, changing, everything's reported in chronological order and you can dig deeper and see exactly how long things we're taking. You can see everything that this person is doing. Our website, one thing which we found interesting was we were examining the flows of how people were navigating through our blog posts. And one of the things we noticed was typically it's a very vertical flow. People will go down the page, but interestingly enough, they also go up the page and then down and up and down and up and down. And so, okay, that's the normal flow, that's the normal navigational pattern on a blog post for our blog at least. And that was fine until we looked at this and we were like, what the heck is going on? It's going all over the place. It's totally chaotic. It's going horizontally. It's going diagonally. It's going all over the place. Very atypical. And what we realized was it was the video that was causing this. Because we looked at the different blog posts that we have with video content and this is what happened every single time. And so we said, ah, ah-ha, this signals engagement. We need more videos, right? Why does this signal engagement? Because we think with our cursors. We don't even realize we're moving our cursor. And when we leave in, right, when we leave into our screen, we're getting more engaged and our cursor's moving too. And so this is a clear indication of engagement. You can also find patterns of frustration too, right? I don't know how many of you know, rage clicking where, like, you click and something doesn't work. And then, ah-ha-ha, right? And so you can see all of that through the April analytics. And say, oh, something's broken on my side. I better fix that, right? And so it's really helpful both from perspective of what's working as well as what's not working, what's frustrating your users. What's interesting is you can also see exactly what someone takes off for 10 minutes grab a cup of coffee and come back and finish the session. So another fantastic way that you can do analytics is to see exactly where your users are abandoning the forms on your site. And so, for instance, with Google Analytics, what are you looking at? You're looking at whether they submitted a form or not. But, okay, for all of those who didn't submit your form, why not? That's probably why analytics comes in. Because you can see exactly what's happening in each field. So in this example, I don't know if you can see it, the text is a little small, but it's the phone number that is causing a massive, massive drop-off and abandoning rate. Clear answer. Get rid of the phone number and the form. You'll increase your conversion rate astronomically, right? And so, it's very simple. The data is there. And like I said, it's very easy to implement this type of software. It's usually just one type of code snippet that you add to your site. But the insights that you can glean from this are invaluable for driving business results. And then not only looking at within a page, right? Or within a form and looking at the different, how each of the different form fields are performing, but across your website, if you have funnels that you know you're trying to drive your users through, you can see how successful those funnels are and where the abandoning rate is in the funnel itself across multiple pages. So this is a software package called Mouseflow. Our agency uses this software quite a lot. And this is just a simple example of going page to page to page. And you can see the massive drop off that you have after the second page. One thing that I'll encourage you to do if you implement behavioral analytics software and you're looking at the data, I would encourage you to filter and filter and filter the data. Don't just look at the aggregate. Don't look at everyone who comes to your website the same because they're not. So for instance, if you only sell in the United States, why would you be looking at global data? Yeah, we see it all the time. We see companies looking at global data because that's the default in Google Analytics, right? But why would you do it if you could only sell in the US, right? Or if you sell in the US and Japan, then why don't you look just at those two? You don't need to filter the data without the country data, right? And so you can segment by country. You can segment by city. You can segment by traffic source, whether it was organic, whether it was a specific advertising campaign. You can also, and this is really, really important, when you're looking at your behavioral analytics data, try and segment by first-time visitors to your website versus repeat visitors to your website. So when it comes to your website for the first time, they're totally unfamiliar with it, right? They learn everything in Scratch and they're going to exhibit very specific behaviors to someone who's been to your website versus someone who knows your website, right? They've been there two times, three times, four times. They're gonna navigate through your site and behave on your site very, very differently, right? The digital body language is gonna be very different. And so segment the data so that you feel more accurate, you feel more accurate understanding of those first-time visitors versus repeat visitors. And then, again, you can customize the reporting language. So talking about behavior-based triggers and behavior-based analysis, one of the things we implemented on our blog was a behavior-based call to action to sign up for our mailing list. So you go to our blog and we don't get you with a call to action immediately because we know you don't know if you like our content or not. We don't know if you find our content valuable or not, right? So what we want to see is your digital body language first and then we'll hit you up with a call to action if you qualify yourself as being interested and engaged in our content. I think it makes sense, right? So if someone scrolls 90% of the way down in one of our blog posts, we hit them with a subscribe or a newsletter call to action. If they don't, if they only get 70% of the way down, we don't hit them with it. Again, we want to customize the experience to what makes sense if their digital body language is saying, hey, I love this app. Well, let's tell them what the next step is. Let's give them that next step. Opt-in will give you tons of this type of content. And if they're bouncing, why in the world would you just clutter up their experience on your site by hitting them with non-relevant call to action or that they didn't give you any digital body language to single, but they would be interested in that. In fact, the digital body language would be that opposite. But it's only that they wouldn't sign that. We did that one change to our blog. And it increased our signage by 300%. By 300%. So think of the digital body language that you want to see from your site visitors that will indicate to you that they're sincerely interested in your value and what you have to offer. Your, whether it's your content, your services, your products, whatever it is, and then hit them up with a very contextually relevant call to action. And I bet you'll see more success. And then also, you can go beyond the website. So everything that we've been looking at so far has been strictly limited to the website itself. But there are software packages out there that will enable you to combine these types of behavioral insights on your website with what you're doing in your marketing outside of your website. So for example, SharpSprint is a marketing automation software. But there are plenty of others. HubSpot is another one where you'll be able to see exactly who it is. Once you have their email address, once they opt in, you'll be able to see exactly who it is and every interaction that they have with your brand. So you'll see exactly what they're doing, the website, what they're downloading, how they're responding to your emails. And it provides you with much more holistic insights as to what the who is doing on your site, right? Bob, Mary, and Kenzie, whoever it is, right? What are they doing on your site? What are they doing off your site? What kind of content are they engaged with? What are they not responding to? And it gives you a more holistic picture. So I've been talking a lot about behavioral analytics software. So let me just run through a couple of packages that they can connect. So I mentioned Mouseflow. It's a fantastic piece of software. We use it at our agency all the time. I'm in Mouseflow pretty much every single day, finding incredibly helpful, very insightful. But there are many, many others, and they're all good. They're all good. And you just have to test each of them or test some of them and see which is good for you. Hoop is another fantastic one. Hotjar, love hotjar, full story, I would say is if you're more advanced, I would say the full story would be appropriate. If you're just a beginner, you're just going to start it. It might be a bit too advanced. And maybe start with a more elementary level software. CrazyAid is good for beginners. If you've never done behavioral analytics, if you're just going to take your toes and see what it's all about, CrazyAid is super simple. It's very basic. Well, it doesn't have as much functionality as some of these others, but it's a nice place to start. There's Lucky Orange and Perra, and I'm sure there are many others that I'm missing here. But again, the idea, all of these software packages are super easy to implement. One code snippet takes about two to five seconds to implement, and then you can have all of these insights that we went over today. So I hope you found this helpful and I'd be happy to answer any questions from my left. It's had a more calm. So we tend to work with sites that have, say, a minimum of 5,000 unique visitors a month, and some of them go over a million. So I would say, I would say, if you have at least 1,000 visitors a month, you can gain really good insights out of this, but maybe what you want to do is, instead of analyzing the data every week or every month, maybe you analyze it quarterly. Like, the less traffic you have, you can space out your analyses, and it can still be really relevant. If you have more traffic, then you want faster cadence on your analysis. Absolutely, absolutely. So, these software packages have a toggle where you turn it off for Europe. So for instance, with mouse flow, where we implement it for clients, we turn it off for Europe. We don't even go there. So it is not captured for European data. So if you're a large portion of your audience in Europe, yeah, just be aware it's not gonna capture that data. So the spirit of GDPR on the West or out of order or something, can they opt out of it, and then it doesn't get tracked? I'm not aware of any way to opt out individual users. So if you wanted to follow the spirit of GDPR, then you probably wouldn't want to use the software. This is definitely confusing. Definitely. With Google Analytics focusing more on mobile devices, how does the software work on mobile devices? So that is one of the filtering mechanisms is you can look at this data strictly for mobile and only see the mobile data, or you could look at it strictly on a tablet or strictly on desktop. Further to that, you can look at mobile, time-specific campaigns, or mobile, specific to certain countries or cities. You know, we like to drill it down to the city level. If we see through our IP detection software, if we see this specific company that's visiting us at a specific time level, we know exactly what minute of the day they're on our site and what they're looking at on our site. So we can map that to the behavioral analytics to know exactly what they were doing on our site. And so there's so many different ways to filter this. That's what was encouraging really, you know, instead of just looking at it in the aggregate, feel like you're saying, you know, filter by mobile, filter by desktop, filter by country, filter by city. There are many, many different ways to filter. Do you use right detection software? So we use an application called Lead Forensics. There are many out there that Lead Forensics tends to be on the more robust, expensive side, but there are cheaper options out there. There's one called Lead, I think it's called Lead Feeder, which is also very, very good. And if you just Google it, there are a bunch of applications that they can do it. So the software applications have many of case, many case studies on their websites. We're not able to provide a case today just because it would be revealing secret software clients and give them away a little too much to the competition. And so if you go to Mouskill's website or PopChart's website, I think there are plenty of case studies that are before and after effects and they're fantastic to learn from. I'll tweet it out afterwards. So later today, if you just go to, my Twitter handle is at Tom Shapiro. And so just go to at Tom Shapiro and you can also post on the strategy, Twitter feed as well, just at strategy, so you can download the slides that you'd like. Okay, well thank you very much. Thanks guys.