What are your visitors doing?
Hello again, dear Web Analytics user!
Assuming you have already mastered the basics of reporting in Web Analytics, it is about time you learned to apply your analytical skills for finding out what your visitors are doing on your website, or as I like calling it: visitor surveillance. If “conversion” is the ultimate objective of your site, the behavior of your visitors on it is one of the cornerstones of your strategy. If I may use the example of a shoe shop from my previous post: it is not just a matter of getting people to your shop, but offering them the right amount of quality content in the right form that will turn your “window shoppers” into customers.
This brings us to three main pillars of your website: content, design and navigation (usability). If one of them is unstable, the overall conversion of your site will suffer.
Why is visitor surveillance needed?
You need to closely keep track of your visitor’s behavior if you want to find more ways to increase your conversion rates. In Logaholic, there are a few ways to find out where visitors click on, where they go to and where you would rather have them go…
Top Click Paths
A click path is a common string of pages many of your visitors clicked through on your site until they left it.
An example: People came to my site, changed the language to German and went on to look for products in the catalog.
/cdshop/index.php/language/de/ -> /cdshop/product_info.php/products_id/97 -> /cdshop/index.php/language/de/
In your Top Click Paths report you will find the most common ways people moved through your site.
Click Trails
With the Click Trails tool you can get Logaholic to provide you with an overview of the exact click paths for each individual visitor on your website. Although you should not make any broad conclusions based on the click history of individual visitors, they are very helpful if you want to get a sense of what real people do on your site, rather than aggregated numbers.
Road to Sales
This report is called like that for a reason. Here your target files (KPI’s) play a key role. You need to select a target file first and then generate the report. What you will see is literally “The Road to Sales”: which pages your customers visited before they converted (accessed your target file). The “Top Pages as Percentage of Converted Users” is an especially interesting part of this report: it shows you which pages were “involved” in the conversion process. If you know the content of your site well (meaning, you are not looking at statistics of other person’s website) the Top pages as of Converted users report can be a real gold mine for you.
Top page
An example:
Let’s say you sell shoes on your site and your target file is the order page. This means that the Top Pages as of converted users report will usually contain the pages in the catalog, or the pages where customers fill in credit card information, because these are the pages immediately before the order page. However, one day you decide to place a video advertisement of your latest collection on your site, and a couple of weeks later you open the Top Pages as of converted users report. Surprise! A new top page is now listed in it: the page with the video. This means that quite a few people who ordered shoes from your site saw the advertisement before that. Your video page has become the top page in the Road to Sales report! So now that you know that this particular content has positive effect on the conversion process, you can make sure that more of your visitors get to see it, by making it more prominent or easier to find. Also, you might be inspired to create even more content like to further increase your conversion rates.
Click through rate
A key feature in any Web Analytics program is to see how your website’s design/layout facilitates (or complicates) your user’s experience. With the Page Analysis tool you can select any page on your site and see how many visitors got to this page and how many clicked through to another page afterwards, or the so called CTR (click through rate of the page). This is a valuable tool, which you can use to gain a better insight into the navigation of your site and how easily visitors can find your target files.
By selecting the Visual Mode your browser will show you the page as seen by your visitors, with Click Through Rate percentages displayed next to each clickable item on the page. Visual mode makes it easy to actually see where visitors click on your page and helps you find flaws in your design that can ‘misguide’ visitors. Subsequently, you can adjust your content so that your visitors are looking at the places you want them to look.
Internal site search
While most marketers focus their time and efforts on SEO (search engine optimization), or so called external search, too few pay attention to the gold mine that is the internal search engine (the search function on your website, if you have one). It is often assumed that once you have lured your visitors to your site, they can easily find all they want there. A lot of marketers place that empty Search field on their sites and hope that very few people would need use it. However, according to recent data by Google, 10% of the average website’s traffic is going straight to the Internal search field. So what does that mean for you? Internal search engines are becoming an important way of navigating your website, and you are probably ignoring that!
Fortunately there is an Internal Site search report in Logaholic, which enables you to find the most used search terms used by your visitors. This report is a great starting point for optimizing your internal site search. Be sure to run the Internal Site Search report on a weekly basis and check if the keywords used yield relevant results. A way to do this is by launching the Internal Site Search report, left-clicking the link that one internal search generated and from there launch the Page Analysis report. In the Visual mode you will see what percentage of the people clicked on which search results. If more people click on the Next button, it could mean you didn’t provide them with the right answers on the first page. But, the Internal site search report does even more than that. It shows you what visitors were really looking for, rather than just what they clicked on. It shows you the real intent of the user and that can be a great help in making your site even better.
I will end this post with the hope that you learned about some useful Logaholic tools to observe the behavior of your visitors. I can even recommend you an optimal “click path” in Logaholic Self Hosted Edition for visitor surveillance: Top click paths/The road to sales/Page analysis/Click Trails/Internal site search.;-)