Website Visitor Analysis

Visitor analysis is absolutely essential if you want to discover which of your internet marketing activities is proving to be the most valuable for your business. By tracking which websites are providing you with most traffic, knowing which websites your users are visiting prior to your site, which websites they are leaving your site for, and which inbound links are providing the most valuable visitors, you can target specific areas and focus future marketing campaigns.

Here are just a few of the things that you should be finding out about your website visitors: • Where did a visitor come from? • How long did they stay when they visited your site? • Which page or pages did they visit on your website? • Have they visited your site before? • Can you improve your conversion rate? • Did they complete a specific action on your website? (i.e. buy a product, complete a service enquiry form, download a free report) Perhaps some of your visitors opted out halfway through an order process? Is so, that’s essential information.

Hopefully you will understand the valuable nature of this information. If you’re looking at it from a business efficiency perspective then by paying attention to which of your marketing activities is providing the most high-quality visitors, then you will know where to concentrate a lot more of your energy in the future. If you’re thinking about this from a marketing managers’ perspective, then by being aware of where your website visitors are coming from and what they do will be able to justify a greater investment in certain areas in the future.

Google Analytics The most popular method of gathering good quality visitor analysis data is to use the free analysis software from Google called Google Analytics. All you need to access the Google Analytics service is to have your own free Google Account – you will already have one if you’re started a Google Adwords pay-per-click campaign.

A small number of businesses or other organization aren’t comfortable with letting Google have access to their website’s and their visitor’s data. Unless this is the case for you, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t install the Google Analytics code on your website. At least then, even if you decide to go for a paid alternative you’ll have some alternative data to be able to compare against your preferred visitor tracking software.

Setting up your Google Analytics service Having registered your website with Google Analytics, the first things to do is to insert some tracking code on the footer of each page on your site. It’s fairly easy to do. Google provides you with a step-by-step guide of how to get things going. They also provide an excellent help section should you get stuck.     By: Francis David