5 Tips for Measuring Your Customers' Digital BehaviorTools like Facebook Analytics for Apps can help you decide what key actions drive your success and how to maximize them.

The modern consumer interacts with a business across a growing number of digital platforms: desktop web, mobile web, native apps and more. If a business owner is going to grow their business and do it successfully, they need to do more than just build the platforms—they also need to understand how their customers interact with each one and why.

By tracking and measuring customers' digital behavior, you can identify where some people experience difficulty or friction and then optimize your platforms to avoid those issues, maximizing engagement and sales.

"If you believe, like we do, that growth comes from understanding user behavior, then it's critical that the customer experience is considered as a whole, across all of these platforms," Facebook Product Manager Josh Twist says. Facebookrecently added cross-platform analyticsto itsFacebook Analytics for Appsservice, which is 100 percent free for anyone to use.

Here's an example: If you run a news site, then your readers will likely start on your homepage and read multiple articles. From there, they may share an article with friends or sign up for a subscription."说你看到很多人点击“订阅w' button, but only a small percentage are signing up for a subscription," Twist says. "You can get to the heart of this 'drop-off' by running experiments with your pricing or messaging to see if it helps increase your conversion rate."

Twist says it's also important to know when and how your customers are interacting with your brand on the web versus your mobile app or other digital platforms, and to segment that info by type of user (age, gender location, etc.) All of this and more can be done usingFacebook Analytics for Apps.

Here are Twist's best tips for measuring your customers' digital behavior and optimizing your digital platforms:

1. Measure your customer journey.

Begin logging events in Analytics for Apps to describe the path people take through your website and app. Focus on the most important actions including purchase or registration, and log the events leading up to those steps. This will help you optimize people's experiences to drive real business outcomes, Twist says.

"Don't forget to log the most basic events like page views, app launches and app installs," he says.

2. Optimize your flows.

Twist suggests building out funnels to understand where people are abandoning key processes such as sign up or checkout so that you can reduce friction points.

For example, if you notice a large portion of people leave between your credit card entry screen and the purchase confirmation screen, this may indicate that you're asking for too much information. "Use this insight to optimize your user flows and improve the conversion process," Twist says.

3. Combine behavioral and demographic signals.

This is about the intersection between "who" (your customers' attributes) and "what" (your customers' behaviors). For example, you can build a funnel and break down the funnel conversion rate by gender and find out if women or men have a higher conversion rate.

"These insights can help you understand your product-market fit and how your growth efforts are working," Twist says. "Using this information, you can alter the content across your app and website, or update who you're targeting to better serve your customers."

4. Increase retention and lifetime value.

One thing all business owners want is more customers. Measure your retention to see how many new users are coming back on a weekly or monthly basis over time. You can experiment with tweaks to your on-boarding flows to see if you can make these numbers go up.

"For businesses that sell goods," Twist says, "you can measure lifetime value—how much total revenue you are getting per customer over time. See which segments are driving the highest lifetime value then focus your marketing efforts on acquiring more of those types of customers."

5. Grow your audience.

Advertising can be a powerful way to reach new customers.Facebook Analytics for Appsintegrates with Facebook Ads to help you market more effectively. Twist says that based on your existing customers' behaviors, you can leverage Facebook's lookalike audiences.

"This tool uses advanced machine learning to find new people that are similar to your best customers," he says. "By reaching out to them, you have an opportunity to grow your app and connect with high-value audiences."

Of course, online behavior varies from business to business. Measuring digital behavior is about deciding what key actions drive your success and connecting with people taking those actions.

To get started using Facebook Analytics for Apps,check out Facebook's Quickstart Guide today.