Behavioral data
Behavioral data records what people actually do, such as the pages they visit, the tasks they complete, what they buy and how long they take, as opposed to attitudinal data, which records what they say they think or feel.
How it works
Behavioral data comes from observation and instrumentation: product analytics, A/B tests, usability tests, eye tracking, purchase records and field studies. It is typically reported as counts (visits, downloads), rates (conversion, task success, bounce) and times (time on task, time on page).
Its strength is that it does not depend on memory or self-report, and what people say and what they do often differ. It has two practical limits. It covers only the events someone chose to record, so a behavior nobody instrumented leaves no trace. One number can also have several causes, since a long time on page may mean interest or difficulty.
A worked example
In a survey, 71 percent of a meal-kit company's subscribers say they rarely skip a delivery. Delivery records for 2,000 of those same subscribers show 840, or 42 percent, skipped at least one week last month, most of them within a day of that week's menu going live. The team moves the menu release two days earlier and tracks the skip rate rather than the survey answer.
Related
Automate this in Pulse
Behavioral data logs what customers clicked, and Pulse's video insights add a different kind of behavior, a participant's expression and gesture while describing what they did.