Statistical analysis of your visitors is key to understanding what they want

It's not enough to count your visitors, you must know what their intent was.

There is no excuse for not having a good visitor analysis package installed on your website now. Google Analytics has been free to use for several years and can be installed easily and quickly to most websites, but like many tools, the value is not in the tool itself, but in the understanding of what it is telling you. Google Analytics can draw you some very impressive graphs, and you can create some complex spreadsheets from the data, but at the end of the day you are measuring people and their actions and intents, and only once you can understand what the data tells you about that can you implement changes that will help your website gain the most from each visitor.

Appropriate Solutions have extensive experience in analysing the visitor behaviour on a range of websites, from brochure sites, to booking sites to e-commerce. Contact Appropriate Solutions to find out what value we can bring to your website.

It's not about hits any more

Ask a website owner how his website is doing and the chances are she will come back with a number based around the number of visitors they got that month or that week, but does that really tell us something meaningful? What if every one of those visitors found some issue with the website (wrong topic, inappropriate content, poor usability) and immediately left, does that visitor figure remain meaningful? What if the majority of those visitors read a couple of articles, or glanced at some products but didn't do anything about it, should the website owner still be gleefully quoting that visitor figure?

Sheer footfall is not a valid way of justifying your websites existence, in order to be successful you must have defined goals that you would like your visitors to achieve while on your website (sign up for a newsletter, complete a transaction, use the contact form). Only then can you measure the websites success at converting visitors into customers, followers or simply repeat visitors.

The Truth is out there

The good news is that all the information you need to find out what is really happening on your website is actually available to you right now. If you have installed Google Analytics correctly (there are some good ways and some bad ways to set up Google Analytics, contact us if your not sure which is which), and it's been running for at least a month if you have a reasonable amount of traffic (10,000+ unique visits per month), or for longer if you have less traffic, then you have the data to start answering your questions now.

Using this data you can start to answer the questions that will provide insight into who your visitors are and what your visitors want:

"How many unique visitors do we receive a week?"

"How do our visitors find us, where do they come from?"

"What was the intention of their visit, what did they hope to achieve?"

"How long did they stay for, which parts of the site did they explore?"

"Was there something on the website which caused them to leave?"

Investigation of the answers to these and many other questions should be seen as the starting point of a process of improvement that allows you to refine your visitors experience over time.

Evolution not Revolution

Gaining an insight into what your visitors do and how they perceive your website (and by association your brand) is a launch pad for a process of ongoing adjustment that should allow you to make the most out of all your visitors. Once issues have been identified solutions can be planned and implemented. If there is ambiguity about the problem or around which solution would work best, then  A / B Testing (a process of showing each visitor a version of the page randomly drawn from a collection of variations, then monitoring how each version is reacted to, better or worse than others) can help to settle any doubt.

Over time your visitor experience will improve, your conversion rates (the proportion of visitors who complete your goals) will increase and so your cost per acquisition will fall. All of this starts by understanding your own data, Appropriate Solutions can help you to start understanding what your visitors want, contact us to discuss what we can achieve for your website.