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07.20.06
Measuring Visitor Engagement And Behavior
 By
Manoj Jasra
Are you Measuring Visitor Engagement and Behavior? When visitors arrive on your
website, what are they doing? Is it what you want or expect them to do; or are
they aimlessly wandering around and not finding what they came in looking? Are
your potential customers abandoning your site just seconds after their arrival?
If you are puzzled because you don't know what visitors are doing, or why, then
how can you ever create a decent strategy to offer your visitors a better experience
on your website?
The means of engaging users is unique to each website. The Sports Illustrated website does it by displaying only the latest sports headlines and providing the actual content a click thru away; content like writer's opinions, the NBA Draft and, of course, their own swimsuit issue - giving the user navigation control and also increasing valuable inventory through page views.
A site like Yarn Market , on the other hand, offers crisp, high resolution images of every single product which makes it simple for their visitors to view the colors, quality and intricate patterns of the various types of yarn. Again, giving the user control and increasing conversions.
It's important that as a site owner you find your competitive advantage and unique selling proposition so that you can offer your visitors a tailored experience that will keep them coming back; however, your constructed experience has to be built to your specific audience's needs and wants. You cannot push and audience that needs to be pulled, or pull an audience that needs and expects to be pushed.
If you really want to gain success, your website should be built from the audience back; and although I do not advocate giving your audience complete control over the navigation and reigns of your website - through tailored construction you can definitely create a perceived control that should always increase sales/conversions/page views.
In the rest of this article, I will talk about why it's important to track user behavior and metrics that are helpful in deciphering how well your website is doing in keep your visitors engaged.
Why it's Important
No one understands the metrics that matter better than the site owners themselves. The key is not getting lost in a mountain of numbers, but really zooming in on the few key metrics that really affect the bottom line, rather than all the other hundreds of metrics that contribute to measuring online success. The concept is simple; keeping users engaged will help to retain visitors, increase conversion rates, and consistently help deliver more revenue.
There are a multitude of reasons that owners should track visitor behavior, here
are a few:
• Pinpoint areas on the website that need to be improved.
- Analysis of visitor paths vs. dead content (content that gets visited infrequently) shows sites owners that either the content should be presented in a different fashion, be moved from the current area or possibly even deleted from the website entirely.
• Further promote popular reviews/articles/products.
- By recognizing areas of a website that are frequently viewed and requested, site owners can simplify the paths to these popular sections by making them more accessible.
• Test new products/ads/conversion triggers.
- Using A/B testing and analyzing visitor's reactions to new features can help a website offer the most optimal combinations in terms of ad/conversion trigger placements.
Observing your visitors' behavior will help you address the actual pains they
are having with your website. If they are bored, entice them with rich content
and media. If they don't know where to go, simplify their path by removing roadblocks
and bottlenecks. If they can't find what they are looking for, analyze internal
search terms and modify your site's search functionality. And, if they are too
quick to abandon, give them a reason to stay online by offering a free product/download
or competitive pricing on your latest product(s).
Read
the Full Article
About the Author:
Manoj has been working in the search engine marketing industry since 2002. He
started out as a software developer but now provides in-depth web site analysis
using web analytics. |
