On today’s episode, we are going to talk about four more ways to understand how your visitors are using your website, right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 334.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. This is the last week of April 2017 and we’re wrapping up this month by just talking about a few more ways that we can analyze and visualize and see what people are doing on our websites. But first, let’s dive into the announcements and then I’ve got a cool plugin to share with you. So, the first thing is last week WordPress Maintenance Version 4.7.4 came out and it is the fourth maintenance release of WordPress 4.7. It includes 47 maintenance fixes and enhancements and the chief problem that was solved was an incompatibility between the upcoming Chrome version and the Visual Editor and there were some inconsistencies with media handling and just some further improvements with the rest of the EPI.

So, I definitely recommend updating to the latest version. Most likely, you’re already updated if you had the auto update turned on. So, yeah, that’s the first announcement this week. The second announcement I found is there is new way to find high quality WordPress jobs and this comes from an article over at poststatus.com and the Post Status Job Board is a great place to find and list quality WordPress jobs, whether you’re trying to recruit candidates or seeking your next job opportunity, it’s a place for you. It is just a little bit more information over there. If you’re interested, definitely check this out.

It is something to try to find both that relationship of people that are looking for work and people that are trying to find people to give work to. So, this is another place that you can look to subscribe to and find if you’re looking for more clients or you’re just looking for some sort of developer that can help you with an upcoming project. So, that’s over at poststatus.com, so definitely check that out. Another piece of news that came out this week is WordPress 4.8 will no longer support Internet Explorer 8, 9, or 10 and so that’s big news. They’re kind of getting rid of some of the legacy components that are built in. Lastly, there is an article by one of my colleagues, or ex-colleague I guess, that used to work at Automatic and he is putting together this plugin that is for curation for WordPress curation.

Basically, the whole premise behind is when you go to add plugins for the very first time you see featured plugins and so you see like BuddyPress Theme Check, bbPress, and WP Super Cache. Those are the featured plugins. Those probably aren’t really necessary for a lot of people. Most people do not install BuddyPress or bbPress. They might do Super Cache but they don’t know exactly what that is. So, this plugin is making a recommendation tab and making it better and it’s looking for things that they may be searching for and it’s more like a manual curation process. So, this is a plugin called better plugin recommendations, so if you’re interested in that, there’s only show notes for that as well. It’s just kind of a neat idea that somebody is taking more of like an app store idea.

Like, if you go to the Apple App Store or the Google App Store you will find curated content or curated things that appear on that front page that are just highly useful and it automatically changes and it changes regularly because there is a person that is actually doing that. That’s what this individual is looking to do, so if you’re interested in seeing what this is like or being able to help out in any way, definitely check out this. It’s over at secretpizza.party and then the URL is there. So, I’ve got a link to that in the show notes for Episode No. 334. All right, is there a plugin for that section? I want to share and highlight a plugin because there’s more than 48,000 plugins in the WordPress repository. Each week I just try to find cool interesting ones that may or may not be useful to your application but I just want to highlight and showcase how vast and diverse these 48,000 plugins are.

So, the developers wrote in for this one and they kind of highlighted it to me, so I thought, hey, I’ll give this a mention on the show. So, this is also an open call if you do have plugins that are interesting or that you want me to highlight on the show, definitely highlight them and send them over to me and I can take a look and share them on an upcoming show. But this one is called Watsons Find and, basically, the jest of what this plugin does is it analyzes your current content to provide insights on the emotions that your audience may perceive as they read it. So, it is an analyzer. It’s kind of like Yoast does. It analyzes your content and then tells you what grade level your content is but this is more about what emotions your audience may perceive as you read it.

So, if this is something – this is just really kind of a unique idea. There’s an analyzer and the plugin will add an icon to the WordPress Text Editor so you can analyze your posts and pages right in there. It can give you extremely in-depth insights or, I guess, it basically divides into five different emotions – joy, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear. So, those insights will allow you to adjust the content if necessary or just kind of rewrite your content, or whatnot. So, this was one that you can find in the WordPress repository if you just search for Watson Find. Of course, there’s always a link in the show notes for this episode, so that is another plugin that I want to highlight to you in this week’s episode.

All right, let’s go ahead and just finish up this conversation on what we’ve been talking about the last week weeks and just basically spending this month looking at different ways that we can analyze the people that are coming to our websites. It’s not an easy job to run a website. Like, it’s not an easy job to try to figure out what’s working and what’s not but some of these tools that we’ve talked about and the ones that we’ll kind of share today can help you do those things. They can help you understand what’s working on your website, what’s not working, what should we tweak, what should we modify, and all those good things. So, just kind of recap the last two big things that we’ve talked about.

The first one is using some sort of web analytics and web analytics software gives you details about visitors to your website, where they come from, which links they clicked on, how they arrived. It’s tons of information and what we talked about in the episode about Google Analytics is that you’re just inundated with tons of data and it’s probably more than you even care to look at and care to digest but the information is there. It is sophisticated. It’s a powerful analytic suite and it’s sufficient for pretty much every website that’s out there and it just gives you so much information and lets you know how many people are coming to your website and what devices and all that good jazz. So, that’s what we talked about a few weeks ago with Google Analytics. The other thing we talked about last week was capturing the information about what people are doing on your website with Qlikmaps or Heat Maps. This basically will allow you to see where people are clicking on areas of your website. Now, it doesn’t really work as well when there’s not – there’s actual links to be clicked on but it highlights, okay, what are people clicking on?

What menu items are they using? What advertisement areas are not giving any clicks whatsoever? Should we remove those? That’s all of those things that are talked about and we talked about last week in last week’s episode. So, there’s a lot of advantages to this. You can automatically add this script to your website and it just starts working in the background and then later you can go and look and say, oh, well, this fourth menu item has never been used. Maybe I’ll replace that out with something else or just remove it completely and just make it that much easier for our customers to navigate around. So, that’s something that we talked about last weekend. For a full recap, just look for Episode No. 333.

Now, I’ve got four more things that I want to talk about today and none of these I have really tested per say, but I have used some of the concepts before but I’ve never used really any of the tools that I’m going to talk about today and mainly because I just haven’t had time or just haven’t done it yet. I know that there are always tons of things that should be done for our websites and tons of things we need to be working on and there’s always side things. I don’t know – it just never got done for me, especially now that I’m not really marketing for this website. Like, I’m not trying to build businesses. This is just my hobby and people that listen to this show are just in it to learn more about WordPress. I’m not out there to try and make a big buck, or whatnot.

So, that’s probably the main reason why I haven’t done any of these techniques yet but the first one I want to talk to you today is using a session recording tool. So, this will basically allow you to see videos of visitors looking at your website. So, the web analytics software’s concern is about moving of people between pages but these session recording tools can be a good complement revealing what people did on each page. It captures each visitor’s keystroke and mouse movement. So, these screen recording tools can be used like this – like, you can watch a replay, so you can watch movies of visitors on your screen on your website.

You can see visitor’s browsing sessions as videos looking over their shoulder. I have to say, like, this is a little bit on the creepy side and it just feels creepy that we’re watching somebody use our website but the technology is there that you can do this and you can really see how people are using your website. You get a feel for how people are using it. They’re not substitutes for people that you’re finding randomly to do a user test. These are actually people that come to your website because they’re already on your website or they’re coming to your website. You can also see errors that may be happening, like if there’s any software errors or if they’re getting some sort of popup notification that says some sort of error. You can definitely see all of these. You can analyze your funnels. You can see where your visitors are dropping off, like especially if you have a free download. You can see if they click on the download and if they start to type their name and start typing their email address and then they leave. Like, you have more information like maybe they don’t want the opt-in, maybe they didn’t like putting in their name and their email address, whatever that is you can see that. And you can also see with these screen recording tools – you can see scroll maps. It will show how far people have visited or how far they’ve scrolled down your page, which is pretty interesting as well.

Now, there are a few services out there that will do this. One is called QlikTell. There are some other ones called Hotjar, Inspectlet, Usability Tools, UserReplay, SessionCam, FullStory, Decibel Insight, Mouseflow. There are a lot of tools out there, so you want to just kind of make sure that they’re doing the right thing or they’re finding the right piece of information for you. Most of these are paid for services. I’m going to link to them all in the show notes for this episode, but those are some of the things that you can do if you’re really interested in watching somebody or watching videos of somebody use your website. Another one and this is kind of different, I guess, if you will.

This one is for using form analytic software or using some sort of software to analyze where people are kind of dropping off when it comes to filling out forms on your website. This will allow you to study people and how they’re using your forms. The software can report many issues or many things that are happening, especially like the overall success of a form, how many visitors landed on it, what percentage of people interacted with it and tried to submit or successfully submitted. You can also see the percentage of visitors that dropped off on each form field, so it goes in and tracks like, okay, you’ve got five form fields. They fill out the first three and then they’re like, nope, that’s too much information – I’m going to leave.

So, you can see where they lose their patience and they abandoned your website. Another thing you can see from this particular tool is the amount of time your visitors spend on each field. If they don’t abandon in any particular field – maybe it’s early in the form and they’re still motivated but they may fatigue. Maybe they start filling it out and it just gets longer and longer and they just kind of run out of patience and time and then they just leave. You can see which fields tend to be left blank and then this usually means that it maybe the form field is confusing or intimidating and such fields reduce visitor’s ability to complete the entire form. You can also see which fields resulted in error messages.

So, whether that would be like email address is a required field – like if they don’t fill that out. You can see if that’s something that’s taking place. You can also see which browser and devices are performing poorly. So, if your form is too hard to use on small mobile devices or certain internet browsers, you can see that information as well. Now, there are some tools that you can do this. QlikTell and Hotjar that we talked about earlier and then there’s a handful of other ones. SessionCam, Inspectlet, Decibel Insights, Formisimo, so there’s a whole bunch of them that you can do this as well. That’s the second one. The third one is to use Live Chats on your website so visitors can actually tell you what’s wrong. Now, this is kind of a convoluted way of thinking about it. Like, most people don’t start Live Chat just to tell you that there is something wrong with their website but they will tell you if they are having any questions or concerns or if there’s any objections or if they just want to know more information about your products or what kind of pages or maybe they can’t follow the instructions or they’re just wondering how to submit this form – things like that.

So, the tip here is if you want to really get in-depth information from the visitors to your website, you know, have that option for them to Live Chat so they can go in there and they can actually tell you things that they may be having problems with right away without having to pick up the telephone and call. That’s a way to do that. There’s some suggestions, Chat Solutions, that are out there. There’s tons of them out there. Zendesk, LiveChat, Drift, FreshDesk, Olark, Live Person, HappyFox, SnapEngage – just lots and lots of them out there and so if this is interesting to you or if you have the bandwidth and resources, then this is maybe another option to have LiveChat on for a while.

In these LiveChats, have the ability to talk on LiveChat on and off and if there is no operators available, they won’t see LiveChat. So, maybe this is something that you do. You know, two hours a day, you turn on LiveChat and you just go on about your business doing your work and then you turn on LiveChat so you’re online and then you just wait for customers and see what kind of interactions you have and just make really good notes about what’s happening and what kind of questions they may be asking and if they can be fixed or if you could send it over to a development team or whatever that looks like. That’s just another option to get real-time feedback from people that are using your website.

Okay, and the fourth technique is using co-browsing and this is software that allows your visitors to share your screen with a customer support person. Co-browsing tech tends to be particularly useful when you’re struggling to work out what your visitors are seeing. So, this is like some sort of screen sharing app. There are tons of these out there as well but, basically, this is great information to see what’s being dynamically generated on their end of the screen. You know, a lot of times you may try some search term or maybe you’re not getting it quite right. Seeing either screen shots or a video of what’s happening with them right there on their computer can help out a lot.

There’s tons of, again, I’m not going to list all of them because there’s just a lot of them out there but you can even jump on Google Hangout or things like that that you can see and that’s something you can work in and you can kind of integrate with your customer support team, or whatnot. So, this is probably the hardest one to implement of these four today but this is another option that you can do and you can see exactly what kind of errors and what kind of things are coming up on their websites. Okay, to recap, here’s the four techniques that we talked about today. The first one is to use session recording tools, like to create a video so you can go back and watch later to see what people clicked on, where they moved the mouse, how they scrolled, things along those lines. The second one was to use some sort of form analytics tool that you could go in and actually see how far people are filling out forms, like what the conversion rate is from somebody that starts a form to actually complete it. All of that information can be saved and transmitted to you. You can add LiveChat. That’s Option No. 3. You can add LiveChat to your pages and turn it on or always have it on just so you can have that real one-to-one interaction with customers to see what kind of issues they may be having, what kind of problems are they running into, and so you can get all of that great information from LiveChat.

Then the last one is co-browsing and this is a way to share your screen or let your customers share their screen with a support representative on your team and just allow them to see what kind of issues they’re having or see the error messages or see what kind of dynamically-generated page that they’re seeing and they’re having problems with or they’re struggling with. So, those are the issues or those are the four items that you can also use to learn more about your customers and learn more about what people are using on your website. I think it would be really fun to just kind of do and see how people are interacting. It probably is very humbling too to say, oh, I built this complete website. I think it’s awesome, it’s perfect – and then you see that half of the stuff isn’t being used and they’re scrolling past this and they’re not using that.

It takes them four clicks to get where they want and whatnot, so I think this could be very humbling. It could just really – I don’t know – you have to kind of take it and look at it without any emotion, I guess, and just kind of look at it like, okay, this is what a user is using. This is what the customer is using. Let’s redesign it so it’s better for the customer and really kind of take that emotion out of, oh, hey, I spent hundreds of hours building this thing. I think it’s perfect but if nobody is using it right, then it’s obviously not perfect. So, those are the key takeaways that I wanted to talk about this week and we’ll talk again soon. Like, next week I’ve got more WordPress information coming to you and we’ll kind of focus more on WordPress in the coming months or in May for sure because this last month has just been kind of generic website type things. But next month we’ll be focused back into WordPress and we’ll talk again then. Take care. Bye-bye.