Review Audience Behavior to Deepen Your Understanding of Intention
Since the June 2021 rollout of Google’s Core Vitals, 70% of businesses took advantage of the Analytics platform’s assessment tools to review their website, according to a recent article from Speero. Google’s Core Vitals dashboard focuses on the three areas that create the user’s ‘Page Experience, which is defined as, “A set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value.“
Core Vitals 101 – Terms, Targets and Tactics
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lative to when the page loaded.
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Target: A “good” score for LCP means the main content is loaded within 2.5 seconds of the page loading.
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Tactic: Make sure the largest element visible on the viewport is loaded faster than the rest of the content on the page.
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Term: First Input Delay (FID) – quantifies user interactivity, which is the time from when a user first interacts with a web page, to when the browser begins processing event handlers in response to that interaction.
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Target: Pages with a good user experience have an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
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Tactic: Improve load times with the understanding of the attention lost in each millisecond of delay.
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Term: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures “visual stability” which means the elements on a page remain in place.
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Target: aiming for a CLS score of 0.1 or less.
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Tactic: Elements should remain on page and in position.
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Prior to the ‘new’ Core Vitals, page experience has been historically tracked using metrics that helped clarify UX, but failed to illustrate the full journey: mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, HTTPS, and no intrusive Interstitials. Core Vitals has caused marketers a fair share of frustration as reliable metrics became buried within the reporting, and total focus shifted to the CV3. There is a significant benefit to the reorientation of the displayed data reports – getting organizations back to focusing on the basics. The Core Vitals requirements are all rooted in best practices: speed optimization, responsiveness and layout shift are all integral to the user experience, and improved user experience translates to increased conversions. According to research by Google, 89% of people are more likely to recommend a brand if they have a positive customer experience on mobile.
Baseline, Benchmark & Build Back Better
When you pave the way for a smooth digital customer journey, you’re setting both you and your prospect up for a sales-worthy experience. Data analysis is crucial to understanding your site’s strengths and where you can improve the customer’s experience. There’s a variety of tools and strategies that can help you collect data about your audience that will show how they use the site, but turning reports into insights can be challenging. The Adage Marketing Group knows what it takes to create a memorable customer journey and more. We focus on reviewing industry best practices and distilling them into actionable insights so you can implement them on your site. We’re here to help you take your site and brand to the next level.
To leverage a positive user experience for website visitors into actual sales, it is useful to begin by understanding the behavioral trends of your prospects. We will break down and examine some areas where UX design and audience go hand in hand.
Identifying Intent
Delving into audience intent can also have you ask questions about how they are consuming the content you create. Does your audience have informational intent or transactional intent? Let’s break down what those mean:
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Informational Intent: The audience consumes content as they’re researching a topic, or exploring a general interest in the topic.
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Transactional Intent: Your audience is pursuing information with the intent to complete a transaction.
Watch for Signals
When you take the time to study your audience and their behavior on your site, you can start to develop insight into their intent. To further explore audience intent, tracking behavior flows will allow you to see where the traffic is going. But you can also go further than that.
As you’re reviewing behavioral trends and referring to your data gathered from form analytics, you may find that certain content applies to a specific audience with a particular intent, i.e. social media traffic to your site may be predominantly community-level professional partners interested in accessing resources and willing to trade their contact information for gated content; compared to the C-suite decision-makers who visit the website from LinkedIn to review the portfolio and services page without completing any form.
Sources & Pathways
Remember that your audience may have similar goals, but they’re likely a diverse group of people with varying needs and skills. As you’re learning more about audience intent, you can look for specific paths that apply to different subsets of your audience. Isolate the traffic source to see where this specific traffic is coming from and where they’re headed. You can see if traffic is coming from social media, organic search, referrals, and more. From there, you can make marketing decisions that work best for your brand.
Prepare to Pivot
You may notice that your audience interacts with infographics much more than other types of content. If you start incorporating infographics on pages or blogs regularly and notice increased traffic to these areas, then you’re providing your audience with the content they like and will keep them engaged.
It’s also important to identify weaker areas. If your organic search isn’t bringing in the amount of traffic you’ve aimed for, it could be time to get creative with your SEO strategy. Using your long-tail keywords and other relevant terms related to your brand, you can write blogs exploring the various topics related to these words and ideas. Consistency shows that you’re active and invested and you can do a deep dive into specific questions that your audience might have.
Identifying intent can take some trial and error as you test new strategies based on the data you’ve gathered. With so many options at your fingertips, it can be difficult to know where to start. One phone call can make all the difference in YOUR experience – reach out today.
Ready for More?
A user-friendly, intuitive site made with your audience’s needs and behaviors in mind will give you the opportunity to increase user engagement and turn lead generation into sales conversions. We’re dedicated to helping brands elevate their sites so they can best serve their audience. The Adage Marketing Group is ready to help.
Ready for a fresh perspective on the digital user experience with your brand? Reach out to our team to schedule a free consultation.