Evaluating user behaviour on your corporate site

By Carl Grönwall

We all know that the user experience is essential for all digital channels and corporate channels are no exception to this. We work together with our clients to continuously improve the user experience on their websites and intranets.

By continuously evaluating and improving your website, you’re improving your chances of having a user-friendly and accessible website that makes it easier for users to find the information they are looking for. They will be more likely to act on the content by writing about your company, deciding to invest, or applying for a job. The loading speed, the navigation and the content structure are some of the features that make a website user-friendly.

We asked corporate communications professionals in Europe what activities they will prioritise this year. One of the two highest prioritised areas was user experience, with 46% rating the priority 5 out of 5. The other area was content in digital channels. These two, in combination, show the need to tell your story in a way that users can access it.

Although most companies work together with an external partner on how to actually improve the user experience through design, content structure, UX writing, microcopy and other activities, they are often quite good at evaluating their website to identify improvement areas.

How to evaluate the user experience on your site

There is an abundance of tools and methods to assess the user experience. According to our survey, the most popular is behaviour analytics, used by 70% of respondents. This is about understanding users’ behaviours on websites - the actions and events that take place on your website reveal how their engagement impacts retention, conversion, revenue, and the outcomes you care about.

The second most popular method is to use heat and/or scroll maps, such as Hotjar, that visually show where people click and how they scroll on a website. These can show if users scroll beneath the fold, find your call-to-action or expect to be able to click somewhere else on your website.

User surveys are also reasonably common. There are both standardised and custom surveys available on the market. Our experience is that the custom surveys give better input as they are designed to evaluate your content and website. Comments from popup surveys on the website can help indicate potential issues but should be followed up with data to ensure that it is a common issue worth prioritising.

These are all excellent methods to evaluate that the website is doing its job and identify any potential issues that need to be solved. User testing and A/B-testing are additional methods that are even more hands-on than surveys, as they actually show the user behaviour.

Analytics tools and methods

Speaking about analytics - 48% of respondents use web analytics every month, whereas 26% use it weekly or more often. More are using the data every week this year, compared to last year, which we see as an improvement. Despite all the data and knowledge that the data can tell, many companies still don’t use the full potential of analytics. The most popular usage is to measure the size of their audience or to follow up KPIs. To do this for a corporate website, a monthly evaluation is most likely sufficient.

On a positive note, more than half of all respondents use web analytics to update the content structure or to prioritise the content so that users can find relevant content that they are looking for, and in that way, make the website user-friendly.

We recently wrote an article about the changes in the analytics landscape due to stricter regulations, as this is expected to have a significant impact on companies’ web analytics. 54% of the respondents agreed with this and thought that stricter regulations regarding the use of cookies would have a negative effect on their analytics work. Despite this, only 2% of the participants already used a cookieless analytics tool. 23% were considering changing, and as many as 74% were not ready to abandon their cookie-dependent analytics tools.

What now?

So what do you do now? Well, start by making sure that you have routines for following up on user behaviour regularly to ensure that your website does its best for its users. Improving the user experience is a never-ending task. We're happy to help you on your journey towards a more user-friendly website.