I hear it all the time no matter if it is a brick and mortar business or a webmaster looking to monetize website visitors, “I just need more visitors”. While that is a very true statement it is not the complete answer to growing your business online or offline. In the paragraphs that follow we will explore how a business should measure their website engagement and traffic numbers.
In today’s digital world a website is likely the cornerstone of the marketing resources for a business. A properly designed and optimized website can deliver an endless flow of phone calls, chats and form leads as well as actual foot traffic through the doors. Often overlooked is the effect digital marketing has on the consumers that walk through the door and make purchases. It can be difficult to connect the dots between anonymous consumers browsing your website and the consumers that actually make a purchase.
The goal of every business should not just be to grow their website visitor count but to grow the quantity of quality website visitors. A quality visitor consumes the content of the website and takes a positive action. The obvious actions are to call the business, submit a form, start a chat or make a purchase. Other activities that indicate an engaged visitor include scrolling through images, sharing the content on their social profiles, watching videos etc.
There are several stages that shoppers go through when they are shopping online or looking for information to solve an issue they may have. The path to a purchase these days normally begins online. Even when shopping for a product or service from a local business, consumers will use the internet to research the products or services they need. They will use a web search for relevant information including reviews, pricing, availability and to compare items and services.
Google often refers to this process as micro moments and businesses need to be visible to be successful. During this phase businesses can be included or excluded from a consumers intended list to make a purchase. A successful business needs to have a complete web presence to win during these micro moments. Some of the characteristics a business needs are included below.
- Positive Online Reviews
- Showing Up in the Google Map Pack
- Strong Organic Search Rankings
- Performing Well in Voice Searches via Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa and Cortana
- Website Experience that is Easy to Navigate Especially on a Smartphone
This process is pretty similar for just about any kind of purchase we make now days. Our lives are so connected to the internet we tend to consult the internet for all kinds of purchases and information. If you are considering having plastic surgery you will probably spend hours online researching the pros and cons for having elective plastic surgery. Once you decide to have the surgery you will search online for reviews in an effort to find the very best doctor near where you live.
If you sell products online or you acquire customers through your website you are going to want traffic from people in all the stages they go through in making a purchase decision. The question is how to find those in market or targeted visitors and get more of them to your sites. One of the first things you should do is study your analytics to discover what your current quality visitor looks like.
Mining Google Analytics for Quality Traffic
If your website is designed to allow you to track conversions like purchases and submission of lead forms your analytics can provide you with lots of valuable information. You can also configure your analytics to track phone calls from mobile devices. If you have this type of tracking capability you can see what types of visitors take the most actions that you desire. Some of the things you can analyze in your reports are time on site, pages viewed, conversions, locations of visitors and more.
This information is extremely valuable especially if you are buying any traffic. For example if you are paying another website for a banner on their site to drive traffic to your site you can see in your analytics how many visitors came from that banner and how many of them converted. This is a simple but powerful method to evaluate your advertising expenses. Just because a website drives a lot of traffic to your site does not mean it is worth buying. Remember we want quality website visitors that lead to conversions.
If you are buying keywords on search engines you can also analyze the search queries that drive visitors to your site. This can allow you to optimize your ad spend focusing on the searches that deliver the results you are looking for. If you are using Google Analytics and Google Ads you can sync the two up and gather a plethora of information to help you get the most from your ad budget.
Using Google Analytics synced with Google Search Console you can even do the same kind of analysis on organic search engine traffic. When you analyze the keywords that people are using to find your site pay attention to the conversion rate, bounce rate and time on site. This will help you to determine the quality of the traffic the search query generated. Spend some time to group the keywords together that are producing good results and look for patterns. There could be similar keywords that you could go after that would also produce solid results.
The internet offers businesses of any size the ability to find customers online and convert them into sales. The internet also offers you a method to track your online advertising dollars to measure your ROI. Once you learn how to measure the quality of your website traffic you will be on your way to maximizing your online presence.
The next time someone says I can send you hundreds or thousands of website visitors every month I want you to think quality not quantity.