Online Marketing

Say you have a web site. You have optimized it for search engines, made sure the content is written for the human eye, used software to determine keywords, and just plain worked yourself to the ground to be able to pull it off. Now your web site stands proud and you earn quite well from revenues and sales the first few months. Then after a while, you become complacent with merely updating the web site every now and then, and then you notice the prominent drop in the visitor statistics. You ask yourself, “Where did I go wrong”? Let me tell you where.

Planning and doing preparations for site launching is good. But it isn’t anywhere near enough. Put in analogy with Hollywood, you don’t strive for a one-hit wonder — you strive for an enduring star which could last in the limelight more than just a few months. If you want to make this happen, first thing you should consider doing is analyzing visitor behavior.

Visitor behavior analysis measures different aspects of your site statistics such as:

1. Unique and repeat hits
2. Entry and exit pages
3. Referral page
4. Pages browsed
5. Time spent by visitor
6. Location of visitors
7. Keywords queried which lead to your web site

Newer web analytics software could also monitor:

1. Browse-to-buy ratios which means the percentage of visitors which actually purchase something from your web site.
2. Conversion rate which is the percentage of visitor inquiries which turn into actual purchase.
3. Customer acquisition cost which is the expenses shelled out to market for new customers over the number of new customers.

Do you see the logic behind it now? Trends change and you need to follow them. By analyzing the above statistics, you could change your strategies as you go along. Incorporate new keywords, employ new marketing strategies, or even do a revamp if necessary. Analyzing visitor behavior could make the difference between a has-been and an up-and-rising or enduring web site.

Filed under: visitor behavior analysis, web analytics