6. On-site activity (via analytics)
What are your users telling you without telling you?
Sometimes the best feedback is found when users are candidly using your product (and not being asked how they use it). To get a peek at these sorts of insights, you should turn to analytics that showcase how users are interacting with your site.
For example, let’s say you are using content as a form of customer service. You might see that thousands of people are visiting your content to get their questions answered. But have you looked at how they are using it?
If your FAQs section has a 0:09 average on-page time and an awful bounce rate, you know something is not being communicated clearly. People are visiting your support content but obviously not utilizing it.
In other instances, you might want to track how users who did not sign up for your product behaved. Brennan Dunn, founder of Planscope, recently discovered a weakness on his site by using the analytics tool KISSmetrics:
Without on-site data like this, it is very unlikely that a browser would come forward and explain why they abandoned the site (after clicking through on other pages). It’s sometimes necessary to see how people view your site when they don’t know anyone is watching.