Your Website is Speaking to You – Are You Listening?

Do you know who your website visitors are? How they found your website? How long they stay? Which pages they read or land on and exit without reading? This kind of information can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your website, individual web pages, online and offline marketing campaigns, keyword search terms, and the techniques you use to drive traffic to the site.

Many website owners look at the number of hits and believe that their site is attracting much more traffic than it actually generates. A hit merely indicates the number of files sent to a user when the user lands on the page. So, a single visit to a page which contains ten separate graphic files will show up as ten hits. However, tracking hits over a period of time may indicate whether your website is attracting an increasing or decreasing number of visitors.

Here are some other statistics that can assist in determining the strength and weaknesses of your website and the changes required to attain your company’s marketing and sales objectives.

You can obtain a breakdown of the total visitors to your site by unique visitors and returning visitors. An effective search engine marketing program will enable qualified new visitors (those potentially interested in purchasing your goods or services) to find your site, provide reasons for repeat visitors to come back to your site, and encourage all visitors to advance in the sales cycle (i.e, make a purchase, request additional information, fill out a registration form, etc.).

By examining your visitors’ paths through your site, you can find out the number of pages viewed, the order in which they were viewed, the time spent on each page, any actions taken on particular page (such as clicks on specific links), and the entrance and exit pages. If you examine the data carefully, you might find that patterns emerge, such as a specific landing page that attracts most visitors. Where are you losing your visitors? How sticky is each page? (Stickiness refers to the amount of time that visitors spend on your web page). How many visitors landed on a particular page and then exited immediately? How many visitors exited from the same page? All of these statistics are highly relevant in evaluating the usefulness of your website in your marketing and sales mix.

Another important issue is where your traffic originates. Web analytic software indicates whether your visitor came from a company or an Internet Service Provider such as ATT or Comcast. It can also indicate whether your traffic came from a search engine, which specific search engine, the terms that the visitor used, and where you appear in the results for that search. Sometimes you’ll find some peculiar results. For example, in one search that I found, the number one result for the search for Rob Jones was Rob Smith of Jones & Co.). Although I changed Rob’s last name and the name of the company, you can see how search engines can sometimes return unexpected results, and it’s good to know about these potential deviations when developing your keywords.

Free basic statistics are available from a variety of sources including your web hosting company, Google analytics (www.google.com/analytics), StatCounter (http://www.statcounter.com/), and Gostats (http://www.gostats.com/). Companies such as WebTrends (http://www.webtrends.com/), Index Tools (http://www.indextools.com/) and OneStat (http://www.onestat.com/) sell more robust software that can provide in-depth information. I suggest that you take advantage of trial offers and compare several software applications before you purchase.

While this article includes only a brief overview of the information available from your web analytic statistics, the following books provide more complete pictures of how you can best monitor your website usage.

Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions

Web Analytics For Dummies (For Dummies (Computers))

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning

PURLs –The Newest Treasure of the Internet

What may be hotter than Web 2.0? Personalized URLs (PURLs). Although they have been around for several years, they are suddenly exploding and take one-to-one marketing to new heights. Consumers have seen their names on digitally printed newsletters, postcards, letters, and other similar materials. Now, they can have their names on their own Internet page populated with their information and containing items especially designed for them.

PURLs don’t come in gift wrapped boxes. They are generally sent via direct mail or email. In this age of digital printing or mail merge, each recipient can receive an individual PURL in a letter, newsletter, postcard or other printed material. It is also easy to generate dynamic emails with a link to each person’s PURL in the message.

PURLs are rapidly becoming the gems of the Internet because they provide:

1. Higher response rates with better quality leads
2. Lower cost per lead
3. Opportunities to provide customized offers
4. Real-time statistics about consumer behavior
5. Integration with CRM systems
6. Better insights into consumer behavior

The uses of PURLs are limited only by your imagination. They can be used to obtain email addresses, to update or verify consumer information, for surveys, for special offers, to provide customized coupons, as triggers for certain events such as a reminder to renew a subscription, and to provide relevant content. The uses are almost without limit, depending on a company’s creativity and knowledge of its markets.

Here are some examples of PURLs that you might find interesting:

Sample direct mail piece that delivers the PURL http://www.powerpurl.com/images/email_lg2.gif

A magazine subscription offer with audio https://www.expresslandingpage.com/TrackingSystem/AG_938/TMP_1016/VERIFYPAGE.aspx

A b-to-b marketing PURL with an incentive http://powerpurl.l2soft.com/images/webpub.gif

If you have a particularly interesting example of a PURL, you can email the link to me at nwolpin@hotmail.com.