Where do your website's visitors come from? Is your website “attracting” the right or the wrong types of customers? Is your website equipped to provide what your content offers? If you own or manage a business or informational website, ask yourself these questions and then don your detective garb and start thinking:
When it comes to improving your website, is there a surefire way to measure your “next-step” priorities?
“Elementary My Dear Watson”
Your website priorities will usually include the tasks it takes to get qualified customers or informational respondents to your website. In order to do this, it is important to know what the right online visitors are looking for and whether or not you are making your information available to as many qualified visitors as possible. How can you do it? “Elementary my dear Watson.” Start with web analytics.
Start with Web Analytics
You can find clues to the origins and buying habits of your website's visitors if you know what to look for. Many web analytics solutions are affordable even for small-scale e-commerce sites and can provide visual maps and diagrams of your online visitors' habits. Generally, website analytics solutions are also reasonably priced and the Google Analytics solution---though perhaps not the most sophisticated quietus (what solution really is?)---is at the very least free and effective in terms of providing valuable visitor data.
A Website Analytics Disclaimer
A disclaimer for website analytics solutions is that they certainly can't take the place of you and your ability to plan well. All website reforms based on website analytics data should naturally focus on meeting the goals (whether monetary or informational) that you have for your website, and should in addition assist and prompt website visitors to take some sort of online and measurable ACTION.
Tip 1: Marketing More Effectively with Website Analytics and Keyword Origins
You don't always have to know where your visitors are coming from if you know what they are looking for. A website analytics solution allows you to gain a glimpse of the wants and needs of your online (and very invisible) customers. How does it work? A website analytics solution provides keyword traffic source information. This information when applied to SEO (natural or organic search optimization) or PPC marketing campaigns can be like data written in gold!
Look for a web analytics solution that provides the following keyword origin data:
* Keywords and keyword phrases used (via search engines) to access your website
* The amount of visits that originated from each respective keyword phrase
* The average time that visitors spent on your site in relation to each respective keyword
* The number of pages viewed per visit
* The percentage of those visitors who bounce (leave the website after only one page view)
* The percentage of those visitors who are new visitors
Some website analytics solutions may include additional features that can be beneficial for your website but those features mentioned above may be all that you need to make some well needed changes. Theses changes might include the creation of new keyword based landing pages (or articles), or the redesign of pages or content that are specific to any given keyword.
Tip 2: Marketing More Effectively with Website Analytics and SEO/PPC Management
A keyword campaign is like a kid. It has to be watched. If your keyword campaign, like many, is a conglomerate of both PPC and natural (organic) search marketing techniques, you can use your PPC campaign as a doorway to faster revenue, while centering what remaining revenue you can spare on the generally more reluctant natural results marketing, which in the end is actually designed to create more perpetual and more lucrative ROI. The origin markings within a website analytics solution application for organic or natural result referrals may look something like this:
* yahoo/ organic
* google/ organic
* msn/ organic
Understanding PPC origins can be a bit trickier. For instance, they may include origins that look something like this:
* pagead2.googlesyndication.com / referral
Within the Google Analytics website analytics solution for instance, they will in fact be marked as a referral (not “paid”) but you must be cautious because the term “referral” can indicate any number of online origins. Sometimes, recognizing PPC referrals simply comes with time, experience and a bit of research (i.e. “Google” (this is a verb) portions of the origins data to find out more).
Even if your website is for purely informational purposes it's important to stay abreast of website analytics information. It provides clues to the origins and habits of your online users and provides road maps (once deciphered) to website improvements that can help you achieve the goals you have for your website.
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