Know Your Visitors
For today’s belated Traffic Tactics Thursday, I discuss the importance of why you should know your traffic using web analytics.
Who are your visitors? Who is coming to your site, where are they coming from and how are they getting there? What articles are they reading, or what links are they clicking? How many of them are purchasing services or products? How do you know?
If you don’t bother to use web analytics to track the traffic activity of your site, including activity within your site, then you will have no way of answering any of these questions!
Without answers to these questions, you won’t know what changes are needed to be made with your advertising sources, who is buying your products or services, or if you need to rearrange the content and pages on your site.
If you don’t analyze your traffic, it is impossible to know what is effective and what isn’t.
How do you analyze web traffic?
The best way to do it is by using tracking software. Tracking software will let you know some key information about your traffic. Free tracking is available with services like Google Analytics.
What is bounce rate?
One important tracking element is known as ‘bounce rate’. In a nutshell, bounce is base on how long a visitor stays on your site and if they explore further within the site before leaving.
If most of your visitors leave your site right away, it doesn’t matter if you are getting a thousand visitors a day. This will increase (hurt) your bounce rate and affect your site’s overall rankings with search engines.
There are a number of factors that influence bounce rate. You may need to concentrate on more targeted web traffic, that is visitors who are interested in what you have to offer on your site and stay there to explore it.
Perhaps the bounce rate on a particular page of your site is extremely high, while other pages draw more interest and have a lower rate.
With tracking software, not only will you know that this is happening, but you will also know exactly where it’s happening giving you a chance to fix that page (or remove it) so that it entices people to stay.
Where are my visitor coming from?
The next thing that your web analytic software should do for you is know where your visitors are coming from. It should provide data that answers questions like: how many typed in your URL address directly? How many used a link on a search engine? How many arrived to your site through a link on another site?
Why is this important? You may be paying for advertising on a site or service that is supposed to be creating traffic for you. With tracking software, you will know what isn’t working so you can cancel any advertising campaigns having a negative impact. This will save yourself some money along with reducing your aggravation.
On the other hand, you may see that you are getting a high amount of responsive traffic from another campaign or site. With this knowledge, you can then focus on similar campaigns or site in hopes of getting the same results.
Where do visitors go once they are on your site?
Are they arriving on the pages you want them to? Are they filling out forms or purchasing your offers? How many are returning visitors and how many come just once?
With this information that web analytics can provide, you can further figure out what it is that your site needs in order to convert visitors into subscribers or even buyers.
This is called the conversion rate. It is the percentage of overall visitors that come to your site to those who make a purchase or subscribe to your list. This is a critical element to know to help you build a successful website for your business.
In fact, it is the crucial reason for using web analytics in the first place, to carefully and accurately track your visitor’s activities and to raise your conversion rate as much as possible.
Final thoughts
The importance of tracking and improving your conversion rate starts with web analytics. Without this accurate information, you will not know the activities of your visitors. When you examine the activities of your visitors and compare the results to what you would like to see happen on your site, page by page, then you can make adjustments to improve those results.
After you make changes, you will continue to check those numbers using web analytics to determine what needs to be changed next. This way, you can stop wasting your time and money on ineffective advertising and SEO techniques that aren’t doing the job.
You’ll discover is what is working and stick with it to improve pulling in targeted traffic, turning visitors into customers, and customers into repeat customers.
I am always interested in your input. Is there something I missed? Or perhaps an experience or question you would like to share? Then l encourage you to leave a comment below, thanks! 🙂