Data Science

Data science looks into how customer preferences, interactions and marketing can be analyzed, studied and optimized through the scientific method. It looks into all aspects of marketing, from conceptualizing products to buyer preferences and behaviors to product development.

Data Scientist

To help marketers understand how their consumers decide on what products and services they might prefer, marketing data scientists use content analytics and text mining to do things like interpret social media trends, and schedule offers for customers to receive at the optimal buying time. Marketing data scientists are able to gauge audience movements through algorithms. Through the data generated by algorithms, they are able to reach insights that can help the business and ensure that their target market achieves the message the company is broadcasting in the ways and times intended.

With the help of a marketing data scientist, marketing strategies are improved. They also help with reducing costs in efficiently sorting, filtering and optimizing data for marketing purposes.

Behavioral Analytics

Another way to understand consumer action when it comes to products and services is through behavioral analytics.

What is behavioral data?

Behavioral data is the collection of information resulting from commercial behavior actions. These actions might be things like websites and pages visited, terms searched for games played, links clicked, and apps downloaded. Marketing teams can then use this data to see what trends apply to your business and see where users are most active.

Why should companies use behavioral analytics?

Marketing, product, and analytics teams look into how customers access their marketing, use their products and engage with the company. With behavioral analytics, teams get a picture of how their target market acts and can help anticipate what future customer need.

If businesses do not use behavioral analytics, teams cannot interpret their collected data for trends and user movements. It also disables companies from adjusting their services to fit what their customers like. For example, Netflix would not be able to determine what titles they can offer to new users if they do not know what their users prefer.

Behavioral analytics also enables teams to answer the following questions:

• Where do customers spend time the most?
• How do customers react to website changes or offerings?
• How do customers respond to ads? to marketing messages?
• Which ads get the most responses?
• Are there ways to get more users to get into the site?
  Steps to successful behavioral analysis for businesses

Analyzing customer behavior is a meticulous process, and teams will be successful if they can maximize analytics tools to the fullest. They must also be able to adhere to their tracking plan to get the right data. Without a plan in place, teams will not be able to select the right tool for their strategy.

Behavior Analysis Steps

To achieve a successful behavioral analysis for your business, here are some steps that can help:

Know your customers well

If you are running a business, and you decided you want to personalize your offerings, you need to understand customer trends to help you with this effort. With behavioral analysis, you can check what kind of customers or users go to your platform and adjust how they can enjoy their visit on your site.

User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) tools help you collect and combine quantitative and qualitative data that track human behavior patterns. As a result, you can discover certain anomalies that may represent security risks.

For digital and web-based applications UEBA can help you know:
· Where on a page visitors and users get stuck and struggle before dropping off
· How users interact with individual page elements
· What users are interested in or ignoring
· What users actually want from your website or product

Solutions such as heat maps will quickly highlight aggregate behavior on a page so you can see which buttons, CTAs, videos, or other clickable elements people are interacting with, scrolling past, and ignoring. Session recordings will show you how people navigate between pages and highlight potential bugs, issues, or pain points they experience across the journey.

Sort your audience based on the information you get

Every website or platform has several types of users who act differently when on your site. Segmenting or sorting your audience can improve your marketing strategy. With the help of behavioral analytics, you can determine critical segments based on how they behave on the site. Once you know these segments, you can identify ways to getting more leads.

Look at your objectives at another angle

For marketers to successfully apply behavioral analytics in business, they must have their business objects clear in their mindset and look at every angle to succeed even more. By understanding every aspect of your business goal, you will be able to pick trends which you cannot easily pick up. You can also plan to reach secondary goals.

Knowing how people interact with your website is a good start, but to level up you’ll want to understand why they are taking the actions they take—and that’s where user feedback tools give you a wealth of extra insight:

On-site surveys placed across your website will help you collect in-the-moment responses from users about what they’re actually looking for.

Feedback widgets on specific pages will bring you hyper-targeted visual feedback about what people are loving and hating.

Email surveys will let you reach targeted customer segments and investigate their experience in detail.

Determine a specific viewpoint to understand all your collected data

Marketers often find it difficult to understand data when they use various platforms to collect user data. Sometimes, they spend a lot of time trying to collect data in spreadsheets and looking for ways to connect things.

Once they need to decide on a particular action, they will spend more time looking through various spreadsheets to make a decision. As a result, they may end up with an insufficient response.

With behavioral analytics, you can optimize your data from various platforms to one critical data that can help you identify what action you can do next. Behavioral analytics also provides a unique platform where you can view every data you need in one dashboard.

Customize and automate how you get your reports

For marketers, it can be a nightmare to organize their reports. Utilizing behavioral analytics allows marketers to organize their dashboards to reflect what clients and the company need to see. Sort out how panels will look like for various users based on what data means to them. With the right information at their purview, they can understand the trends better.

Getting started with behavioral analytics

Now that you know how behavioral analytics can benefit your business, you need to know how to apply it to your business. To help you get started, here are some steps you can do to start using behavioral analytics.

Know your business goals and objectives

Every business and its employees must have goals they are trying to reach. Do you want to get a strong following for your products? Do you want to expand your reach? When you determine your goals, think of ways on how you can reach your goal and pick the right KPI that will help you to your goal.

Know which paths can help you reach your goal

In various platforms, there are several paths on how you can reach your goals. If you are running an e-commerce website, the critical path to achieve your goals would be “Search – Products – Add to Cart – Checkout – Confirmation.” Once you have the main

Sort out your event taxonomy

Every successful behavioral analytics must have an extensive event taxonomy. Event taxonomy involves a series of events and actions users can do within your platform. It must be correctly adjusted because it will affect how accurate your analytics will be when you read it.

Usually, teams use spreadsheets to keep track of their event taxonomy and user data. However, some platforms can reduce the possibility of errors when designing your event taxonomy. .

Know how user information gets its unique identity

When you use an analytics platform, you will need to identify what identifier you like to use in their API to track users coming in and out of your platform. These identifiers enable you to look at the data and determine what a particular user did during their time visiting the platform. Their identifier must be unique, and it must not be permanent.

However, you must take care of checking logs regularly because some analytics platforms also count “anonymous” entries to the platform. It can be difficult to determine these logs if the platform you use cannot sort these logs from the rest.

Find out if you need more behavioral analytics

If you are featuring your site in various channels, you will need to decide whether you should collect your data in one place or keep them separate from one another. In this case, you need to study your product to see if you will need to get another behavioral analytics to determine the trends seen in each platform. Some platforms do allow cross-platform instrumentation to help users understand how their clients behave in these channels.

Check user behavior

Once you have your behavioral analytics all sorted out, its time to check your user behavior data. With your behavioral analytics, you must be able to understand how users react to the platform, what things to adjust to get them to stay in the site and explore what other avenues you can use to expand your marketing strategy.