More than ever, small businesses view their Web sites as a way to interact with their customers and expand their business. However, many businesses still don't track or understand how well their Web sites generate traffic or encourage visitors to view information, products or services.
Fact: More than 50% of Web sales are lost because visitors can't find content. - Gartner Group
Fact: More than 40% of repeat visitors are lost due to a negative experience. - Zona Research
There are many reasons why you might want to analyze your Web site's user traffic. At the lowest level, you want to determine if anyone is coming to your Web site in order to justify the site's existence.
Once you have determined that people are indeed visiting your Web site, the next step is to identify which pages they are viewing. After determining what content is popular and what content is ignored, you can tailor your content to satisfy your visitors.
A more detailed analysis of your Web site traffic will assist you in increasing the traffic to your Web site. For example, by determining which sites are referring visitors to your site, you can determine which online marketing activities are most successful at driving traffic to your site. Or, by combining your Web site traffic data with other data sources, such as your customer databases, you can determine which banner ad campaigns, for example, generated the most revenue versus just the most visitors. This allows you to calculate the return on investment (ROI) on specific online marketing campaigns as well as get detailed information about your online customers and prospects.
What kind of information can be obtained about your Web site visitors?
Quite a bit, actually. First, you can determine who is visiting your Web site. From this you can tell:
- What companies are visiting your site
- What they are reading and for how long
- Why your customers are visiting the website
- How your customers find your website
- The time of day they prefer visiting
- Where your online visitors are geographically down to the city and state
As you can see, you can discover a great deal about your Web site visitors-and we only touched on a few.