Why Track Your Visitor's Behavior

by Sally Falkow

Since web sites first appeared, people have analyzed what was happening on their sites. It started with simple counters on personal pages to track the number of visitors. Now we have sophisticated software that can tag and compare visitors from different referrers so you know exactly what they're doing on your site.

In the days of the dot com boom there was a perception that you could put up a website and millions of people would flock to your site. You could make a fortune in a year!

Sanity has returned and we are back to the tried and true strategies for real people running real businesses online. Analyzing your traffic has assumed a new importance. In fact, stats are THE essential tool to measure and manage a business or a website successfully.

So where do stats fit into all this?

Lets' say that you put up a website. You're not sure if you have the right content on your home page. You do get some business from the site, but it could be better.

Should you change your content? Without actual data and solid information it's all guesswork. Try this - oh that didn't work. Try that - I got more orders. Good! Let's put this on the site - Oh dear the sign-ups went down.

You have an idea why, but you aren't really sure. You need to KNOW.

What stats should you be collecting?

The biggest pothole in this road is to make sure that the metrics you use are necessary and useful to your business. It's not so much what you have, but what you can do with it. You need to work out what your objectives are and what metrics you need.

A one size fits all is not possible in web metrics. Knowing what you want to achieve, who your visitors are likely to be, and what their objectives are, will lead you in the right direction.

The Basics

The first number you need to know is how many people are coming to your site. Most hosting companies can give you basic metrics like this. Make sure you're getting a figure for unique visitors - and not page views or hits.

The next important stat is "where did they come from?" In most programs this is the referrer report. You want to know which search engines are sending you traffic and which other websites have a link that sends people to your site.

You also need to know what search terms brought traffic to you. Look for a "search terms" section for this information. Search phrases are more helpful than search words.

When you have a report that tells you what search terms are producing the highest rate of traffic from the SE - and you can track which of those are producing the highest number of visitors reaching your goal pages and taking that all important revenue producing click - you can adjust your keywords and your content so that you get more and more visitors coming on those terms.

Now we get into visitor behavior - what do they actually DO once they are on the website.

Behavior has always been considered the best way to predict future actions. If you can find out what your customer is doing, how they behave and how they buy, where they click in a website, what content they read, what they click on and which links they follow, you can work out how to improve your website to better meet their needs.

Finding a software program that can actively track your visitor's click path on the site is the only way to do this.

There are many on the market. Some are easy to use; some are very complex. Some are affordable for entrepreneurs; some cost an arm and a leg.

Depending on your level of technical expertise and your time and interest - you can buy one and install it yourself, or outsource it to a metrics consultant who is an expert in this field and can interpret the stats for you.

The investment will pay off. A redesign and rewrite based on usability and visitor behavior increases the results on average by 135%.

A simple program that is very affordable is www.webstat.com.

One that offers an easy to follow and visual overlay on your own site, so you can see the results on each link is http://www.clicktracks.com

One of the most important stats to track with visitors is how often do they come back, how long is it since they were last on your site and what action did they take. This is called frequency and recency.

Recency is the number one predictor of future behavior. So having a way to entice them back to your site is VITAL.

Tracking your visitors is the way to a successful website.

Why does all this matter? Because it has been shown over and over that past consumer behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Past behavior is a much better predictor of future behavior than demographics ever will be.

Which would you rather know?

• Customers are women, married, with school age children, earn in excess of $100 000, live in an upscale neighborhood, and read Cosmopolitan magazine.
• Customers who are women, married, with school age children, earning in excess of $100 000, live in an upscale neighborhood and read Cosmopolitan magazine appear to be disappointed with our content, because a high proportion of them haven't visited the site in the last 30 days.

A visitor or buyer who repeats their behavior is more likely to continue repeating it, meaning their future value to your business is high.

Once you know data like this, you can do user testing to find the bugs in the website content and rectify it.

Learning about your visitors and using this information as a guide is the best way to make sound marketing decisions. It directs how to generate the right content and dramatically increases results from your website. No matter what web stats software you use, it can't help you if you don't review it on a regular basis, so make it a habit to start viewing your stats on a regular basis.

Sally Falkow is a Web Content Strategist, and author of WebSense and the Content Strategy Workbook. This article first appeared in the Successful Sites Newsletter.

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