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Are Your Visitors Lost?
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Most web site owners would like visitors to spend more time on their website but getting people to stick around your website and look at your products or services is not always the easiest thing to do. Many site owners simply don’t understand why no one is buying their product online or why they don’t receive business referrals from their site. In fact many don’t even know the 5 W’s of their visitors: Who they are (Demographic information), Where they came from (referring site/search engine), What search term they used (keyword(s)), Where they went on your site (Visited pages) and What time did they spend on your site (Bounce Rate/Visit Duration).
If you want to know more about your site and your site visitors you need to know your W’s, and using an analytics package to do so is the first step. Every client we do SEO work for is required to use our analytics package because the information you collect is vital to gage your visitors, the effectiveness of you design, landing pages, search engine visibility and much more.
Being able to understand analytic or statistical information and act on it can make a huge impact on your site visitors and your bottom line. All the information can be used to optimize your website. And an Search Engine Optimizer or Marketer can help you make changes and affect your bottom line positively.
Who they area:Looking at your demographic information you can view your visitors by cities, regions, states, and even countries. Use this information to understand your visitor, gage advertising and make adjustments, identify weak spots in your marketing reach and more.
Where they came from: Your referring source is one of the best analytic information you can get your hands on. The referring source will tell you the referring website or domain that lead the visitor to your website and/or the search engine that served your listing to that visitor. If your doing any online advertising you are going to want to track your ad sources. Find out weather your ad dollars are a waste or the best money you spent.
What search term they used: Find out if you are loved by Google, Yahoo, and others and weather you have a high relevancy for your targeted keywords by looking at your referring search engine and keywords used to bring visitors to your site. If you or your SEO have done your keyword research, and optimized your site correctly you will see in time that you will be begin showing up in search engines, and depending on how important your site is and how relevant your the content is to your chosen keyword(s) you will show higher or lower than your competition.
Keyword search terms can also work the other way, let’s say you make pudding in 3 flavors, vanilla, chocolate, and butterscotch but every time you look at your analytics you see that 25% of your visitors are actually looking for pistachio pudding. Since they don’t find it, they leave. This may be presenting a great opportunity to give them some pistachio pudding and increase sales, proof is in the pudding.
Where they went on your site Your analytics should show your navigation or visited pages. Gage your most popular products or topics with your visitors, or identify dead pages or pages of little interest. But wait, just because a page seems dead may not be your visitors telling you that the page is of no interest. It may be entirely your own fault; poor navigation, bad linking structures or just bad design could be at fault, maybe the page has errors or broken links. Analyze these poorly preforming pages, fix any errors, and make some changes then look at the new data after time to see if your changes were effective.
What time did they spend on your site Your site Bounce Rate and visitor duration can be another tool that is useful in gaging effective website planning. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who viewed only one page, think of them as the channel flippers of the internet. It is a good indication that they came they saw and didn’t like it. For the most part this is good information, you also should cross reference this against all the site visitors as well. Again, time on your site may mean that your site is not “sticky” or visitors don’t stick around. This can be a combination of a few things.
One possible culprit is poor keyword research and usage, you might be capturing visitors that are looking for a term that means something else in another industry either by on site text, keywords or titles and descriptions or in online ads like Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search, or other PPC or advertising programs.
Poor design, boring or just plain dull, advertising mediums need to capture your attention, a website is an advertising medium as well as informational. Neglecting the design and concentrating on the content is not effective and neither is the converse. The difference being is that with design and effective ad copy you can entice people to read on, navigate through etc. getting people to take a look and capturing someone interest is a good first step to a purchase or sales inquiry.
Slow loading pages can tank you site as well. In the land of quick and easy people will not wait 15 seconds for your page to load unless you are their only hope. Excessive page load times because of improper site design architecture, overuse of technologies, or poor hosting can cost you visitors. A lot of people have branded Flash as the demon, this is not so, use of technologies can actually keep visitors on your site, just plan to use them within reason and always keep page load in the back of your mind.
Bad landing pages. You have the option to designate which page visitors land on when running an ad campaign or setting up your site for search engines. Many people are making big mistakes when it comes to the landing pages used for PPC advertising. I have seen some advertisers send people to a contact page to fill out a form. In my opinion this is death, you would be better off sending them to your home page. The last thing I am going to do is fill out a form to a company that I know nothing about. Some advertisers are targeting their product in their ad, let’s say Pistachio pudding but when people click on the ad they go to the main store page and are forced to preform yet another step. Don’t make your visitors search for the pudding, you may be loosing customers.
Analytics is just one part of a great marketing strategy for your website. Many analytics packages offer many great features, this is just a sampling of all that is available, and ultimately it depends on your specific needs. But I will equate not using a good analytics package (in combination with keyword research) to submarine warfare or even guess work. If you would like to learn more about analytics or how your website, business or organization could benefit from its use contact us and we will be glad to go over
