If you have a website, you should know where your website visitors are coming from and what they do on your website.
These data should be available to you easily as numbers and statistics. We love using Google Analytics for our clients’ websites – it’s third party and transparent. Plus clients can have the option of getting the data emailed to them in a readable PDF regularly.
Of course numbers isn’t always what they seem but that does not mean we should not bother with who visits our websites and why.
The first thing most people do is look at HOW MANY people visit their website. While an increase is good, it’s not what we look at. We look at what webpages are getting interest.
(As a company which focuses on using websites as marketing tools, we walk our talk too. We don’t have a marketing team so our marketing tool is our website. From our experience, we get clients through our website and through word-of-mouth. Our aim is to keep improving these two proven methods, for ourselves and for our clients.)
When we know the data we need, we can improve these pages.
Which pages are not getting looked at and why? Are these pages too ‘deep’ and need too many clicks to find? Are visitors getting what they need without looking at these pages? Are they asking intelligent questions when they write to us via the Contact Form or do we need more lucid pages?
For our own website, we know that many people love looking at our web design portfolio.
This is evident from the data that comes to us from Google Analytics. To back this up, we also ask new clients and prospects what they like most or what catches their eye the most when they visit our website. Many have said that they are captivated when they land on our web design portfolio page which show them that our designs are truly one-of-a-kind.
Just last week, we asked a client how he found us.
“I googled you guys,” he said,”and when I saw your portfolio, I knew I’d found what I wanted immediately. I then asked my assistant to contact you!”
Have Questions Ready Before Looking At Data
When you have data, you must have the right questions to ask. Just looking at data without a proper context of what you want to find is simply a waste of time. We look at the data and we tweak our own webpages based on what the visitors want to see when they first land at our website.
If you want to get more visitors organically via search engines, is your data telling you that a majority of your visitors come via search engines? If not, work towards that goal. Your website designer should be able to provide useful tips and suggestions to help you move towards organic search.
Or if you want your visitors to get to you via direct referrals (it means someone has linked to your website or mentioned your website somewhere), are you getting these direct referrals? Are you keen on direct referrals in the first place? Again, it is all about your marketing strategy.
Also, look at the keywords people are using to find your website. Are they the right keywords you want to be associated with? When we saw that many searches were done with the keywords “redbox studio”, we knew that our efforts in promoting our company were bearing fruit. In the past, it used to be “website designer”. We are moving away from that term because we are more than just website designers – we are your marketing strategists, using your website to help you market better and smarter.
So the next time you get your data, stop agonizing over the number of visitors and focus on the real answers behind the data. Data is supposed to help you improve your website.
If you have a question about websites, design, marketing or copywriting, drop us a comment below. We’d be happy to help you answer them!