So, probably by now, you have a website, getting a bunch of traffic to it and you’re implementing some tweaks to your site along the way. And yet you’ve got this nagging feeling that you’re not making the most of your website traffic.
Despite the many tools out there, I find that most of us have a similar sentiment.
The nagging feeling stems from the fact that our sites bring in tons of traffic of all sorts: prospects, customers, partners, competitors, friends, wanderers, etc. There are many different tools to help us analyze these different types of traffic. It can get pretty confusing when you start to throw all of these tools into the mix. And it certainly seems that even with all these tools, we can still be left guessing about some of our traffic.
So, what are some of the tools that help us make sense of it all? I’ll share a few off the top of my head:
Google Analytics is great to help us systematically tailor our message to attract the prospects we want. With Google Analytics, we’re able to monitor the pulse of conversions with their stellar Goal Tracking abilities. Heat maps, multivariate testing and extensive SEO efforts are great ways to target more ideal prospects and cultivate more educated customers. The goal in using all these features and tools is to obtain actionable data that you can make decisions with.
But what about mining your site visitor activity for prospect data that your sales reps can act on? You can use custom code and various triggers if your IT team can put it out on the site and maintain it, but I’ve found that a simple tool like LeadLander is a better, easier way to go. Your reps can get notified when someone is visiting the site and they can see reports in real time to find out who’s really kicking the tires.
LeadLander is also pretty good for providing insight on the competitors that are snooping around your site. You can see what pages people visited, what they did on your site and what time they were there. This data is useful competitive intelligence, but if you want to take it a step further (and cough up more dough), CI Radar is a great service to really keep tabs on your competitors.
All of these tools offer great value. I’ve used these tools, as well as a few custom tools to capture site visitor data, and yet I continue to have the nagging feeling that we’re not learning enough about our website traffic.
The more I talk to folks about this, the more I realize I’m not alone. What are you using to analyze your website traffic, how do you act on that analytical data and do you still have that nagging feeling?
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About the Author: Clate Mask is the President and CEO of Infusionsoft. He loves to turn small businesses into big businesses. In addition to running the day-to-day operations of Infusionsoft, Clate also writes at the Infusion Blog about marketing and entrepreneurship topics.
I see the same thing working with our users. Right now I would say that most analytics programs gather more data than people can process and turn into actionable items. To determine what data is helpful, try to put yourself in the users shoes. If you’re a prospective client coming to the website for the first time, what are you looking for, what questions do you have and how is the site delivering on those questions?
Even a basic software like ClickTale will show you videos of people interacting with your site. Make the process smoother for users; more intuitive. Do this for every segment of traffic that you find valuable.
Do you have page that does an exceptional job of conveying your value proposition and has a great conversion rate? Look at your analytics to see how many people get to that page, what page they came from and what source the original visit is attributed to. To borrow from Flint McGlaughlin “You’re managing a thought process”.
Clate,
Thank you for sharing Heatmap with us. That is a really slick tool that I wasn’t aware of before reading your article.
Jarrod Morris
Good post. I’ll check out Leadlander – I like the idea of ‘real time’ information. Often the biggest problem with analyzing site statistics is the time it takes to analyze, compare, develop strategies, etc. Everyone wants to build traffic – particularly targeted traffic – but it takes more work than you think when you start out!
Thanks for sharing some great tools here. I still question the accuracy of Google Analytics. Regardless, though, you’ve got to have faith and be able to make use of the data that you analyze. Thanks for pointing out LeadLander.
John Sternal
@sternalpr
Google Analytics has been amazing for us once we coupled it with AdWords. I think most people miss the power of AdWords. It’s not just for drawing traffic, but quite educational in teaching you what keywords and phrases draw people to your site and keep them there.
Thanks for sharing the post.
Consistency is always the key for me. Using Google analytics you can see trends emerging and also look straight at the latest traffic.
One thing I have done is look at our traffic ranking on Alexa.com in conjunction with Google analytics to get an idea of how much traffic we need to generate to be a site of significance and also how much traffic our competitors are getting.