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5 Tips On How To Best Track User Activity On Websites In 2022

In General
September 05, 2022
Best Track User Activity

Data is the beating heart of any online business, and there is no more important data than details about how your users are acting. Understanding their habits and patterns can be extremely important if you want to track, predict, and reel in potential customers.

But how do you track user activity effectively? Here are five tips on ways to pin down their habits and get a better grip on what they are likely to do next.

Understand Your Target Audience

You can’t track your users well if you do not know who your users actually are. Look into anything that can give you a better grip on your target audience – device information, locational data, or even other interests that they might share. The more you know about their demographics, the better.

Target audiences rarely stay the same forever. Be sure to keep double-checking your demographics to see if your site is appealing to a new group, one that you might not have started marketing toward yet. Staying stagnant is the easiest way to miss out on a brand-new target audience.

Use Common Sense

Think about who your demographics are and when they are most likely to be active online. 

For example, people in office jobs are usually going to work a 9 to 5 shift, so you are more likely to get data from personal visits outside of these hours or during the most common hours scheduled for lunch breaks.

Use Specialised Tools

Tracking users through a platform like Google Analytics is infinitely more effective than trying to do it by yourself. Even if you come up with some way to feed user data back to your own servers, you would have more success using these kinds of tools and the many benefits that they can offer.

Do not be afraid to use multiple overlapping tools, either. Sometimes gathering two sets of data can provide you with more information than if you just used one tool since certain platforms might catch information that others will miss.

Learn Coding Basics

A lot of user tracking tools rely on inserting code into your website – something that you can easily do yourself if you know how. However, you also need to understand where that code goes since putting it in the wrong place will nullify the tracking benefits.

Take some time to learn basic coding principles if you have not already. Even basic knowledge of how a page’s code is structured can make a significant difference.

Understand Your Limits

User tracking can only go so far, and understanding these limitations can make it much easier to compensate for the things you can’t track. This Verfacto article about how to track user activity goes into a lot of detail about what tracking can actually offer and the kind of techniques you can use to squeeze more data out of your users.

The more you understand about user tracking, the better you can modify your own tracking methods to gather even more user information. Having realistic expectations ensures that you will not overextend or pool too much of your budget into a single tool.