Pulling off quick user research with Google analytics and social media analysis
By: Silvia Podestà
Tags: Marketing, User Research, Design Research, Google Analytics

How can you get an understanding of your users when extensive field study or in person interviews are simply not viable?

During my recent speech at the Web Marketing Festival, I was asked: “how do you pull discovery phase off, when you have basically no budget, tight deadlines or poor management commitment?” I would add also: when a pandemic limits your field research!

My answer: follow your users’ trail on digital touchpoint and social media.

Websites, e-commerce and social networks are places we attend every day. Although they may give us only a partial account of our perspective users, still they are good at providing some sort of insight.

Of course, they can’t fully make up for the missed opportunity to carry out extensive research! But still, I find them a good place to start.

1.Google analytics

Being a UX researcher/designer, you have to be interested in knowing what users are doing on your website, where they are coming from, how long they get engaged, and the ways you can improve conversion. The way people behave on digital interfaces can provide hints on who people are, what are they looking for and their needs and requirements.

For years, Google Analytics has been the most powerful tool to measure people’s behaviour on websites and apps.

But today there is this gigantic trend of users taking back control of their data. Measuring users is becoming trickier for marketers.In this context we can place Google’s recent release of Analytics 4.

I am going to cover the topic in a following post, but for now it is worth mentioning one major novelty which differentiates Google Analytics 4 from Universal Analytics (the older version), which is the integration of machine learning and predictive modelling.

Although we are just in the early stages of this revolution, the new service is set to provide marketers and researchers with radically new tools to understand their audience, in a world where collecting data about users will be more and more regulated and complex.

Google Analytics 4 comes about as a tool for marketer in world of imperfect data, with the promise to improve predictive analysis.

We’ll see how all this will pan out, but for now let’s just say that universal analytics and Analytics 4 are invaluable ways to grasp insights on humans’ behaviour online, especially powerful if you are interested in:

understanding how and what users search, how users navigate through pages, how deeply interact with your content.

2.Social media

The universe of social si so layered and multifaceted -thus it’ s very easy to get lost.

But consider these spaces as primary tools for your target audience to express themselves, mingle and follow back.

There are many software and platforms on the market, like Nextatlas, that allow you to scout relevant trends and analyse user social sentiment. These platforms gather quantitative data on a large scale, thanks to sophisticated algorithms.

If relying on such solutions is off the table, you can still perform some kind of patient and manual research.

For example, if you are interested in finding clues on a particular theme, it can be worth using a social platform like Instagram, as a search engine ( many users do that, actually!) . By typing in relevant hashtags, to see how many people are posting about that topic, you can also verify if there are interesting sub-themes related to a macro topic.

You can also do some manual content analysis. For example, you may want to compare user attitude toward a product or service. You can pick up a pool of companies who sell the same type of stuff and examine how people respond, what formats and messages (es. live video, carousels, pictures featuring people ) drive the highest engagement and so on.

3.E-commerce/forums/ websites reviews

Want to know what are the aspects customers are mostly concerned with, when choosing a product?

Interested in segmenting your audience according to what they say about your offering?

Head to the feedback section on Amazon’s product pages (or other e-tailers!). Look up at different reviews and feedback, on competitors’ products and on substitutes, which can give you a glimpse of what people think, want and need. For example, you may discover a different product you didn’t know before, which people do consider as a possible solution to solve a need.

4.Google Autocomplete

When you type in some character in the search engine’s input field, some queries are displayed in a dropdown panel below.

These are suggestions provided by Google on the basis of what queries users search the most. Hence, you may want to use this workaround to check related search intents which can be interesting to explore further.

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Carrying out user research amidst budget, time and other type of constraints can be extremely daunting. Still, you can make the most of simple workarounds to get some interesting haunches about users’ behaviours, feelings and preferred topics, by considering the “breadcrumbs” they disseminate on the digital environments they attend everyday.

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In the convergence series I explore different topics related to both marketing and design, under the common angle of user behaviour.