The ultimate guide to collecting, understanding, and acting on customer analytics

How do you learn more about your customers, their behavior, and what they love (and hate) about their experience with you? 

Customer analytics makes it possible for you to understand exactly how your customers engage with your website, brand, and product to give them what they want. Successful businesses use key analytics insights to improve the customer experience (CX) and, as a result, boost user satisfaction, conversions, and revenue.

But what exactly is customer analytics? And which metrics should you track to gain truly useful, actionable insights? We’ve put together a complete guide to help you understand the customer analytics process, what to keep track of, and how to get started.

What is customer analytics? 

Customer analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing information about your customers and their buyer journey. This process lets you better understand your customers’ pain points, needs, and demographics. 

Customer analytics also allows you to see how users interact with your brand, website, and product, what they expect from the customer experience, and whether they’re satisfied—so you can spot opportunities for improvement. 

The best customer analytics processes combine qualitative and quantitative data. 

• Quantitative data gives you hard statistics on how customers behave ('what' they do). This includes how many people land on your website, which pages they look at, what percentages convert, etc. 

• Qualitative data goes deeper into 'why' your users act the way they do, with rich, detailed insights on how customers feel and what they really want. You’ll get qualitative insights from surveys, customer interviews, focus groups, etc.

“Customer analytics will paint a clear picture of a brand’s customers, including where they spend their time, what pages of a brand’s website they visit, and at which touchpoints they best engage with the brand. This information lets marketers focus on the most effective channels and audiences for a campaign.”

Rich Hein

Editor-in-Chief

Why should you track and analyze customer analytics? 

Modern customers are increasingly in control of their buyer journeys. And with so much information out there, part of that journey takes place before they land on your website or speak to a sales rep. To attract and retain customers, you need to connect at the right time, with the right messaging, and through the right channels.  

To do that, you need to understand

• Who your customers are

• What they’re looking for and why

• Where they’re currently looking 

• What drives them to make a purchase  

Tracking customer analytics at every stage of the user journey tells you exactly what your customers are doing, thinking, and feeling before, during, and after they visit your website. This lets you intervene in the right way at the right time to guide them to your webpage, help them find what they’re looking for there, and convert them from visitors into paying customers. 

Tracking and analyzing customer analytics lets you

• Create detailed customer profiles to run targeted sales and marketing campaigns and enhance customer experiences

• Map user journeys and identify barriers to help UX, UI, and product teams improve experiences and boost conversions

• Pinpoint profitable products, channels, and customer segments to uncover new revenue opportunities

• Use real-time data from social media, surveys, and ecommerce to react quickly to trends and deliver what customers want

• Attract and retain customers by leveraging patterns in behavior to boost ROI and drive repeat purchases

• Align teams with user data to prioritize effectively, eliminate guesswork, and gain stakeholder buy-in for product or developmental changes

Gaining insights from customer analytics leads to an even greater range of benefits that drive business success:

• More efficient marketing strategies: by combining data and customer feedback, you can focus on the most effective marketing strategies and cut out unnecessary costs

• Reduced customer churn: customer insights help you spot issues early and take action to keep customers happy and loyal

• Higher sales: analytics show what’s working on your site, so you can optimize the user experience and boost conversions

• Lower customer acquisition costs: by understanding what drives your current customers, you can target new ones more effectively and lower costs

• Validated product updates and features: analytics help you prioritize product updates based on what your customers really want, saving time and resources

• More personalized customer experiences: customer data helps you create tailored experiences that resonate with users, increasing satisfaction and loyalty

• Better customer service: analytics reveal pain points in your service, so you can fix them and improve customer satisfaction

💡Pro tip: Contentsquare’s Surveys let users tell you, in their own words, what they like and dislike about your site and digital product. 

On-page surveys are a great way to gather first-hand 'zero-party' insights. With third-party cookies being phased out, you need to be able to rely more on your own website data instead of tracking users across the internet. 

With Contentsquare, you can configure surveys to launch on your website at the most appropriate moment during the user journey, sending them out at different stages of the customer lifecycle.

Contentsquare combines Surveys with Session Replay so you can see where dissatisfied users run into problems

Different types of customer analytics data to track 

Customer analytics are designed to measure user engagement with your product or service and your brand. So, which should you focus on? That depends on your unique organizational needs, customer profiles, customer journey touchpoints, and channels. 

"When visitors are interacting—liking, commenting, purchasing—they're more likely to be enjoying the experience. So when some pages have low interaction compared to others, it's probably because that page is slow to respond or has content that's irrelevant to your visitors," says David Attard, a digital consultant and web designer at Collectiveray.

Here are some common customer analytics to measure: 

• Google Analytics data: understand how customers research products and what drives them to your website by analyzing metrics like clicks on paid ads and referral traffic

• Email marketing metrics: track metrics like open and click-through rates to gauge customer engagement with your content

• Digital marketing metrics: measure engagement with blogs, lead magnet downloads, and contact or sign-up forms

• Event data: analyze registrations and engagement from online and in-person events to understand customer interest

• Website traffic and activity: review metrics like time-on-page, page visits, and bounce rates to identify how customers navigate your site and where improvements are needed

• Customer satisfaction and experience data: use tools like customer satisfaction surveys to gain quantitative insights and NPS® surveys for qualitative data on loyalty, satisfaction, and enthusiasm

• Cart abandonment rates: a high rate may indicate issues with navigation, payment steps, or pricing

• Purchase history: assess repeat purchase rates to identify retention challenges and refine your strategy

• Product usage and adoption metrics: understand customer engagement with your product to determine if feature adjustments or additional support are needed

• Social media activity: analyze user comments and community forum discussions to learn about customer expectations and experiences

• Call center and chatbot interactions: gain insights into customer questions and challenges to improve support and product development

How to gather and analyze customer analytics 

Collecting customer analytics and putting them to work for you starts with a solid plan. Develop a clear strategy that outlines the resources you need—tools, team, and time—and decide where to gather your data (like website analytics, surveys, or feedback). This way, your efforts are focused and aligned with your objectives, setting you up for success.

1. Define your objectives and resources

Answering these questions helps you set up your customer analytics process:

• What do you need to know about your customers and product experience? 

• Who will be involved in the project? 

• Where and how will you gather data? 

Use your answers to create a customer journey map that covers all stages of the buyer journey. The more specific you are about mapping customer insights onto specific journey touchpoints, the more laser-focused you’ll be on what to improve.  

See our guide to developing a customer analytics strategy for a step-by-step walkthrough of how to get started. 

2. Choose the tools that help you track

The next step is to set up your tech stack. Some of the most commonly used customer analytics tools include

• Contentsquare, to gather a range of customer-focused insights from your website and digital products—from experience analytics to direct feedback—with zero coding. It’s also user-friendly enough to be used by different team members without admin or data analyst support.  

• Google Analytics, or an alternative to gather website traffic and identify trends and patterns on how visitors users with your website

• Google Data Studio, to combine data from Google Ads, Analytics, databases, etc. and create data visualizations 

Check out our guide to customer analytics software for a full list of tools. 

💡 Pro tip: take full advantage of your customer analytics toolkit to understand your customers, their needs, and what their ideal customer experience looks like. 

• Watch session recordings or replays and see how customers interact with your site and digital product to find out exactly where they get frustrated, u-turn, rage-click, or drop off

• Analyze heatmaps to tell how far users scroll, and if any parts of your site aren’t attracting the attention they should. This lets your product, UX, and UI teams make small improvements—like changing the position of CTAs or contact forms—to boost conversions and offer a great customer experience. 

• Collect customer feedback by placing an unobtrusive widget at the side of individual web pages so users can tell you what they think at any time

Contentsquare’s Session Replay shows you how users really experience the customer journey on different devices

3. Collect customer data and insights

Once you’ve set up systems for tracking customer data, start gathering, storing, and organizing insights from sources like

• Your website

• In-store, web page, or in-app purchases and activity 

• Paid ads and digital marketing channels 

• Product searches

• Your sales, marketing, customer service, and success teams  

• Your customer relationship management (CRM) platform  

• Social media and online communities and forums  

4. Act on your customer insights

Finally, combine and analyze the data. Once you’ve identified opportunities for change and improvement, you may want to validate these findings via customer interviews and user tests first.

For example, an ecommerce business might see analytics showing high page drop-off or cart abandonment rates, and use Contentsquare to set up user interviews to get direct customer feedback and go deeper in understanding the user experience. 

They’d then use this mix of quantitative and qualitative insights to prioritize key decisions in collaboration with cross-functional teams (product, UX/UI, sales, marketing, etc.)—like running re-engagement or retargeting campaigns, offering promotions, or making changes to their website design or messaging. 

Invite participants, record interviews, and get AI call transcripts—all directly using Contentsquare

Customer analytics: your window into customer desires 

Customer analytics are a goldmine of information about what your customers want and how they experience your brand and product. Using a range of customer analytics processes will help you understand complex buyer journeys, react fast to changing demand, and improve your offering for happier, more satisfied customers. 

Collecting and analyzing customer data is an ongoing activity that involves using the right tech tools to analyze data from diverse on- and off-line interactions, and cross-functional team collaboration.

Make sure you put your quantitative customer analytics findings in context with deep, granular product experience insights and listen to what your customers are saying—in their own words. 

Frequently asked questions about customer analytics 

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