CRO Guide > Chapter 3.4
How to Conduct Quantitative Research
Quantitative data is crucial for understanding how customers interact with your site, revealing objective insights into your customer behavior. Check out a few tools to gather this kind of data.
Table of Contents
The difference between quantitative and qualitative data
Qualitative data tells you the why behind your customers’ behavior. Quantitative data shows you how, where, and what.
Quantitative data is crucial for understanding how customers interact with your site. Instead of subjective responses, it yields objective insights into your customer behavior.
Quantitative data helps you answer questions like:
- What pages do my site’s visitors visit the most? How long do they stay on these pages?
- What entrance paths do my site’s visitors take to come to my site? What pages do they exit from?
- How many incoming visitors on a page result in a conversion? How many bounce off? How much time do they spend on the page before leaving?
- What links do they click on the most? What links and pages do they ignore?
Quantitative data is hard numbers and objective insight. It is exact figures instead of long responses.
This data can help you understand things like:
- How customers use your product.
- Where your traffic is coming from.
- Location of user abandonment in your conversion funnel.
With this, you can better understand your audience and come up with better solutions to their buying problems.
This is why it’s important to know how to conduct quantitative research! Here’s how to do it:
Tools for On-Site Analytics
Here are a few tools you can use for on-site analytics:
1. Google Analytics
2. Clicky
How to Use Analytics Data
It is important to filter and analyze only data that takes you closer to achieving your business goals. Since there is an abundance of data available in most analytics tools, it is important to recognize those that pertain to your end goals.
Here are a few key metrics you should be tracking inside Google Analytics (or other tools of your choice):
Traffic Acquisition: This shows what channels people are using to reach your site.
All traffic is broken down into these broad categories:
- Organic, i.e. search engine traffic.
- Direct, i.e. type-in traffic or traffic without a referrer.
- Referral, i.e. traffic from links on other sites.
- Social, i.e. traffic from social channels.
- Email, i.e. traffic from email marketing.
- Other, i.e. traffic from unrecognized sources.
Behavior: This shows what users actually do on your site, how long they stay on a page and the content they consume.
Conversion Analysis: These are metrics that show where your users are abandoning your site.
Two key metrics you need to focus on here are:
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of users leaving a page without performing any action.
- Exit Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave a page.
We’ll look at both these metrics in detail below.
Audience Analysis: This shows where your users come from, what devices they use, and what browsers they choose.
Now that you have data that has the potential to provide insights, you may be feeling overwhelmed on how to make sense of it all.
Explore helps you make the most out of your CRO efforts through advanced A/B testing, surveys, advanced segmentation and optimised customer journeys.
Test your insights. Run experiments. Win.
Or learn. And then win.
In the next section, we’ll help you understand how to make sense of this data. Read about interpreting quantitative data.
Like what you’re reading?
Join the informed eCommerce crowd!
Stay connected to what’s hot in eCommerce.
We will never bug you with irrelevant info.
By clicking the Button, you confirm that you agree with our Terms and Conditions.
