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15 Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking: A Complete Guide
Did you know that the average website conversion rate is only 2.35%?
Getting people to your website is only half of the battle. Not only do you need to keep them there, but you need to convert those leads into sales and satisfied customers.
To do this, you need to know your customers first. The best way to do this is through website visitor tracking.
While Google Analytics may come to mind when you think of visitor tracking, it's not the same thing. Google data analytics help you to measure the activity of your website visitors, while the purpose of tracking is to identify visitors to your site so you can generate leads.
Tracking website visitors not only shows you who's been on your website, but the actions they take, what source brought them to your website, and more.
Are you ready to boost your business revenue? Then keep reading for our guide to the top 15 benefits of website visitor tracking.
1. Learn Your Visitors’ Demographics
When you think of customer segmentation, one of the first things that come to mind is visitor demographics. This is also one of the first things that come up in your website data analytics.
Demographics help you to segment your audience according to their wants and needs. This in turn helps you to improve your marketing efforts. You can also save on your marketing budget because you’ll be targeting specific groups within your audience.
The primary segments for demographics are:
- Age
- Gender
- Education
- Occupation
- Income level
You can further divide your visitors’ demographics by geographic location, consumer behavior, and firmographics (a target company’s industry, size, location, and revenue).
Imagine if you didn’t look at demographics and sent everyone on your email list the same email. Chances are, not everyone on your list has the same wants and needs. When you try to appeal to everyone, you often end up appealing to no one, which wastes your company’s time and money.
Visitor demographics are important because they help your company identify your target customers and the best ways to market to them.
2. Learn Key Details About Your Site Visitors
Besides demographics, website visitor tracking software like CANDDI helps you learn key details about individual site visitors. These include their industry, location, how many times they’ve been on your site, and how long they’ve been on your site.
With CANDDI, for example, you can view each site visitor’s profile. This profile not only tells you a visitor’s location and contact information but their company profile.
This way, you’ll be able to see which industry this contact is in, making it easier for your marketing team to reach out to the most qualified B2B sales prospects.
On CANDDI, you can also filter your data so you can find the leads that are right for your business. Plus, you can see which site visitors have already been converted.
These key details give you a more complete profile of each person who visits your website, which helps you create more targeted marketing efforts.
3. Discover Your Traffic Sources
Knowing where your website traffic is coming from is fundamental to making your marketing strategy more efficient.
For example, let’s say you’re looking at how many leads come to your website from your email list compared to how many are finding you via organic search or through social media.
If most of your leads are coming from organic search, then this could show that your SEO strategy is working.
This could also show that you need to change something in your email strategy, whether this is the frequency of emails or their content, as something is not resonating with your audience.
Leads That Convert
Don’t forget to also look at how many leads convert from each of your traffic sources.
This information could help you point out where to focus your future marketing efforts.
If you’ve gotten a lot of leads that convert from a guest post on an industry website, this could show that you’ve hit an ideal target market. It would be worthwhile to examine the audience of this website and consider partnering with the site again in the future.
4. Create a Personalized Experience
One of the best benefits of data tracking is that it lets you figure out the best way to personalize your communications to potential and current customers.
Given how much information we’re inundated with on a daily basis, your marketing communications need to stand out. This includes your emails to your audience, your advertising, and making sure your website displays the correct language, currency, and region.
You need to be able to segment your audience to send them personalized communications. While this may seem like it takes a lot of time at first, it will benefit your business in the long run by increasing the chance that leads will convert.
One way you could do this is to offer new customers a special discount on their first purchase. For current customers, you could offer them a loyalty coupon instead.
When you give all your leads a personalized experience, you build trust because they feel that your business sees them as a person, not just a number.
5. Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Campaigns
No matter how good you think your marketing campaign is, you won’t know how effective it is until you track it.
Before you track the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, you need to decide on your KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs are quantifiable measures that show how well you’re reaching key business goals.
Some examples of KPIs include:
- Profit/cost
- Average time needed for conversion
- Customer acquisition cost
- Customer retention
- Number of product defects
- Number of times your ad was clicked
KPIs vary depending on your company goals and your industry, but tracking visitors to your website can help you see how many people are coming to your site as a result of your marketing efforts.
If your company started a new ad campaign, for example, you want to measure how many visitors clicked on these ads to get to your website. This way, you’ll be able to see if your campaign was effective or if you need to make any changes to your ads, such as with wording, placement, or location.
6. See Which Pages Convert
Even if you’ve spent hours on your website’s design trying to make it as intuitive as possible, you can’t tell if the page will convert judging by appearance alone.
Make sure you also look at how long it took for the lead to convert. If they converted in a few minutes, this could indicate that your page is written in a persuasive way and that your sales page was easy for customers to navigate.
But if they converted after a few years, you’ll want to find out why. This is why tracking your visitors is so important, as you might notice trends and whether certain pages or deals work the best to convert leads.
Since time alone won’t tell you why a lead converted, you need to check other visitor data, such as whether they’re a new or returning customer and whether they were already looking for your product.
7. Identify Pre-Purchase Behaviors
Pre-purchase behaviors refer to the actions that potential customers take before buying your product or subscribing to your service.
These include gathering information about different brands, determining the quality of a product, and looking at variations of a product.
When you track visitors’ pre-purchase behaviors, you’re seeing which pages users are navigating to on your website. For example, are they often looking at different versions of your product or struggling to pick between two similar payment plans?
When you know what kinds of pre-purchase behaviors your leads are engaging in, you’ll be able to create pages that better help them convert.
Take care to separate existing versus new customers here and take note of any patterns.
If you find that new customers have similar pre-purchase behaviors as existing customers, focus on nurturing new customers. You want to catch new customers at the right moment so that they don’t go to your competitors.
8. Reach the Right People
If you’re a B2B business, you know that reaching key decision-makers is vital to getting new customers.
Even if you are managing to engage a lot of people, if these people aren’t managers or aren’t able to make decisions for the company, then you won’t be able to get a sale.
And as opposed to B2C, B2B decision-makers are often more than one person. Luckily, software like CANDDI tells you exactly who your visitors are, including their role in a company. Plus, their profile often lists the person’s name and contact information if you need it.
Filter Your Data With Ease
The ability to filter data means that you can concentrate your marketing efforts on managers and executives who have purchasing power.
CANDDI automatically filters your site visitors and assigns them a score in the form of a letter grade. This means that you don’t have to waste time searching through hundreds of pages of data.
Instead, you can focus on targeting the most promising leads first instead of randomly targeting people in the hopes that they’ll convert.
9. Learn Where To Optimize Your Site
Even if you think your site’s navigation is intuitive and seamless, you need to track your site visitors to get the right view of whether your site is actually optimized or not.
Remember that what’s intuitive to you may not be intuitive to potential customers, especially if they are new to the industry.
Of course, if only one or two out of thousands of website visitors navigate away from your product page, this could mean they went with a different product. But if more than half of your site visitors leave the page, this could mean there’s a problem with your site.
It could be that the pricing of the product is too high, that the product description isn’t clear, or that people can’t see a photo of the product. You’ll need to conduct further research to find out the problem, but knowing where users get stuck is a great start to optimizing your site.
You can use website visitor tracking to identify these issues. Try adding some custom filters to see if you can find any patterns. Then, figure out how you can optimize the pages of your site that users stumble on or click away from the most.
10. Get New Content Ideas
Seeing where users stumble or leave your website can also give you great ideas for new content.
For example, let’s say you have a blog on your website as part of your business’s SEO strategy. You can use user tracking to see how long users were on that page for.
If they were on the page longer, you could assume that they actually read the blog post. Always check your blog post comments as well to see if people are letting you know that they got value from your content.
As another example, let’s say you notice a significant drop-off in your customer journey right before checkout. You take a look at your website and notice that the sales button is difficult to find. So, you decide to create a new sales page to bridge the gap.
And when you see what content on your site is the most popular, your marketing team can produce more content like it.
11. Rank Higher With SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) doesn’t only refer to adding relevant keywords to your content. Google’s ranking factors include over 200 signals that the search engine uses when deciding which pages to rank at the top.
Remember that when Google is analyzing a site, it wants to make sure that it can a) make sense of the purpose of the site, and b) that the content will be useful to site visitors.
So, an effective SEO strategy also includes optimizing pages of your website that confuse visitors or that don’t have a clear purpose.
For example, you might have combined your “about us” and “contact” information on the same page. Although you think this page is fine because it doesn’t have too much writing on it, you notice that visitors are clicking off of this page more than half the time.
In fact, Google favors pages that have a good amount of contact information on them because it sees these pages as more helpful. So when you use visitor tracking to see where you can fix certain pages, you’re helping both your potential customers and your site’s SEO rankings.
12. Give the Right Pitch at the Right Time
To increase your conversions, you need to be able to pinpoint exactly where users are about to make a purchase. This is where website visitor tracking comes in.
Giving the right pitch at the right time can either refer to passive strategies or active strategies. With a passive strategy, you want to put systems into place that will pitch to customers at the best time.
This means using visitor tracking to see if you can include any automated pitches, like a pop-up window with a special offer.
For a real-time strategy, you can track who’s on your site and set up systems like real-time chat to assist users with purchasing decisions.
And since CANDDI operates in real-time, you’ll get email notifications every time a user conducts an important activity on your website. This includes every time the program notices a new visitor on your website or when they complete an identifying action.
This way, you can reach out directly to the potential customer the moment you know they’re on your site, such as with live chat or through email.
13. See Where You Lose Customers
Not only do you need to see where you’re making sales, but you also need to find out where you’re missing out on sales.
One way to do this is to take a look at your bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who come to your website but who leave instead of looking at other pages on your website.
You can use tracking to see exactly which pages your users are seeing on your website and then think about why this might be the only page they visit.
Once you have this data, you can use strategies to reduce your bounce rate, such as including links to your relevant blog posts or products.
Test Your New Strategies
When you start implementing some of these strategies, you can test if they work using A/B testing. A/B testing is when you show users a different version of your website or webpage to see which performs better.
For example, let’s say your goal is to get more sales for your new product. You could test whether you get more sales when you include the “buy” button at the bottom of the page or at the top of the page in a bright color.
All this data comes back to your leads and the needs of your users, so it’s vital to understand your audience through tracking before you start changing any of your web pages.
14. Save Time
When you track visitors, you get clearer data while saving time.
First of all, you save time because you don’t have to dig through and sort thousands of bits of data. Imagine getting thousands of visitors to your website every month and then having to sort all this data by hand, including demographics, industry, and the number of website visits.
While you have to spend an initial amount of time figuring out your ideal customer and the KPIs you’ll start with, you shouldn’t have to spend thousands of precious hours sorting through all your data.
Plus, when you save time with your data, you have more time to spend on marketing. And a smarter marketing strategy includes automating your marketing wherever you can.
When you save time with marketing and increase your marketing automation, you end up with more time to grow your business and give the best customer service possible.
15. Learn Your Buyers’ Journey
At the end of the day, one of the best ways to increase sales is to learn your buyers’ journey. And this is exactly what you can do with website visitor tracking because you’ll be able to track these stages in real-time.
You’ll also have this information to analyze later as you assess your marketing strategy and website content.
The buyer’s journey refers to the stages that a potential customer goes through before he or she buys your product. The typical buyer’s journey goes like this:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
When you use visitor tracking, you can see which step of the buyer’s journey people stop at and pivot your marketing strategy as needed.
If it’s awareness, you might need to work on your SEO strategy. If it’s decision, you might need to alter your prices or add more value to your offer.
Having effective systems in place for all three stages of the buyer’s journey ensures the highest chance of success that your leads will convert.
Amplify Your Sales With Website Visitor Tracking Today
Website visitor tracking is the ultimate tool for getting to know your customers at a deep level.
And when you get to know your customers well, you’ll be able to keep them happy and coming back time and time again.
At CANDDI, you have everything you need to turn your website visitors into customers. Our tried-and-true software helps you learn who your visitors are and where they’re coming from, helps you reach out to customers at just the right time, and so much more.
Ready to get true visibility for your website? Sign up for a free one-month trial with CANDDI today.