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Do you know who your website visitors are? What are the most visited pages on your site right now? On what social networks are your visitors most active? How do you know that your visitors are getting what they wanted to when they visit your site?
These are just a few of the questions that keep many marketers up at night. Even if you have a $0 marketing budget, there are tons of things you can do to gain valuable information on who is actually visiting your website.
The biggest challenge for many companies we talk to is either:
The biggest challenge for many companies we talk to is either:
- "We didn't know that these things existed!"
- "We don't see the value of the things you're suggesting."
- "...Wut?"
Regardless of which category, here's what's important. All of the things I'm going to jump into in this post are either free or pretty low priced. So, in other words, unless your compliance standards prevent you from utilizing these items, nothing is stopping you from implementing them!
So let's jump in.
Google Analytics
If you have a website, you need some sort of website-analytics platform. Google Analytics is a great place to start. This is the free website-analytics staple that any site should have. If you don't know if you have analytics installed on your site yet, ask whoever manages your site or download this extension to scan your site using a Google Chrome browser.
Google's free and premium versions of this software allow you to collect anonymous data of visitors on your site, at what pages they look, from where your website traffic comes and how long your visitors stay on your site.
You can also set up advanced functions, such as goal and event tracking, which allows you to monitor how many of your website visitors complete important actions on your site. These actions can include completing a contact form, downloading a PDF, clicking a "buy-now" button, etc.
The more advanced abilities of Google Analytics allow for the creation of "audience" segments of different website visitor groups that may either have visited a certain page or taken some sort of specific action on your site. With these custom audiences you can choose to enable a remarketing campaign at a later date to deliver ads on the internet specifically to those visitors, reminding them to come back to your website.
Facebook Custom Audiences (Free)
Facebook provides any Facebook Business page-owner with a unique strip of JavaScript code that can be installed onto any page for which you want to collect insights about visitors who are logged into Facebook on their browsers.
This strip of code is called a "Custom Audiences Pixel."
Once it's installed on your site, the pixel will immediately begin collecting anonymous data on the visitors to your site. Facebook will then format its findings into a neat area for you to explore called "Audience Insights." There you'll learn things such as how many of your viewers are men or women, their age ranges, their income ranges and more.
Even if you aren't advertising with Facebook, the data will be accessible to you for you to explore and learn more about your website visitors.
Here's the cool part though - at any point after this pixel is installed, you'll also be able to create targeted remarketing ads specifically for visitors to your website, or even certain pages of your site.
Twitter Custom Audiences (Free)
Twitter literally provides the same type of JavaScript pixel that translates into an insights dashboard for you to explore. It's pretty interesting to compare the differences between Facebook Insights findings vs. Twitter's and discover core similarities between both.
Hot Jar
Hotjar is a leader in a new website-insights trend called "website heat mapping."
Once installed on your site, these platforms begin collecting click data and churning out a visual heat map of user engagement of webpages across your site. A picture of where someone is clicking on a webpage can tell us a lot about where people are dropping off in a website's conversion funnel.
It can help designers and developers make informed decisions on updates or changes to a page's layout and content to help optimize what you're trying to achieve on each page.
We're just scratching the surface of what's out there. There are a variety of different tools available that allow you to capture data on your website visitors. Ask yourself, "Do I know if my site is achieving its desired purpose? How do I get more information about my visitors?"
When you begin asking yourself those questions, give us a call.
