Ask The Expert

How Do I Track Site Visitors?

Q: “How do I know who's coming to my website, and where they came from?” — Sheila Lansome

A: Talk of “web analytics” gets tossed around a lot, but you often don’t hear about the basics of monitoring your website visitors. I’ll give you a rundown of how it works.

When people hop on the internet to visit websites and conduct searches, they leave behind a trail of actions. While personal information about the user is private, the actions they take — what ads they click on, and the paths they take to find a site — are available to track. You can bet this data is a goldmine to marketers who need to know which campaigns are performing the best.

Knowing what your visitors are doing once they actually arrive at your site is important, too. If you’re not keeping an eye on visitor behavior, you’ll have no idea where people are getting stuck on your site. Are there certain pages that seem to cause large numbers of people to exit your site completely?

In a recent test, one website was turning away 76% of their visitors from the home page alone! That meant that most people were leaving the site that got there, after all the effort was being put into getting them there. After a redesign, they saw the drop off go to only 17% - a massive improvement.

Tracking your site’s visitors doesn’t have to be costly. Google Analytics — formerly known as Urchin — is a free tool offered by the search engine giant that’s easy enough for beginning website marketers to use.

With Google Analytics you can see which pages on your website get the most traffic — and which ones are stumbling blocks for your visitors. You can also set up tracking to show you how people are moving through your site and how they’re going from “visitor” to “lead.”

If you’re just looking to get your feet wet, some content management tools come with built-in tracking features that let you see how many people are visiting your site and when. You can also track repeat visitors, and where people are entering and exiting your site. If you’re new to the idea of analytics, this can be a great way to get started.

As far as knowing “who” is coming to your site, analytics will give you plenty of numbers to play with, but the only way to capture personal information is to give your visitors a way to “opt in.” This can be as simple as a “Contact Us” web form, or a more sophisticated tool like a quote engine.

- Jeremiah Desmarais, Vice President of Marketing - Norvax

Questions or comments? Email him at jdesmarais@norvax.com

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