Tawni Sattler

If you really want to get inside your website visitors’ heads—to know what they actually think about your site, and how they think it could be better—you’re in the right place.

When you think of analyzing your ecommerce site, you probably think about ecommerce tracking data like bounce and exit rates, average order value, checkout flow, and conversion rates, and maybe running an SEO audit and/or checking your site against competitors.

Website usability is at the heart of customer-centricity. If you give your potential customers a difficult, complex, or broken experience, it’s unlikely they’ll stick with you for long.

Either as a consumer or an online business owner, you’ve experienced the ecommerce customer journey.

As a consumer, you came, you saw, you purchased.

As an online business owner, you watched prospective customers come, and see, and purchase—or you watched them exit your site, leaving you with burning questions, like:

Why did that customer abandon their shopping cart?

Did this person not find what they were looking for?

What changes do I need to make to my site to increase conversions?

How can I learn from these customers’ actions on my site?

In this piece, we show you a few quick ways to help you find some of the answers. To keep this practical, we’ll use real examples from designer furniture store MADE.com, whose Head of Digital Experience, Spencer Wong, wanted to improve the experience for MADE customers across each stage of their online journey.

To understand your customers, it's not enough to look at metrics like pageviews, bounce rates, and conversion rates alone—standard metrics are out of context and leave you guessing and making assumptions about what your customers need.