Reasons you should know who is visiting your website.

Many businesses still rely on services like Google Analytics to track activity on their website. While such top-level analytics play a role in the online marketing mix, they do not offer the type of detailed, qualitative data that tells you which companies have been viewing your website and what they might be interested in buying.

Caspar Craven, Co-Founder and Director of Trovus, makes a case on why SMEs should know who’s visiting their website – and how this valuable knowledge can turn browsers into buyers and interest into real revenue. 

In today’s economic environment, it is more important than ever that every pound you spend in your business delivers tangible ROI.   And for many businesses, their web activity constitutes an expensive brochure ware website showing little tangible return.

Everyone knows that the web should deliver more value and that it has to be a core part of the marketing mix, but what is the easiest way to maximise your company’s web presence?

A new generation of web analytics software could be the answer. Most businesses use tools such as Google Analytics which tell them how many people have visited their web site, what search terms they have used to get there and what the most popular pages are.

However, the latest generation of analytics tools goes even further and looks to identify the organisations who have been visiting your site, how they found it and what they are looking for.

Why is this valuable and how does this help you deliver ROI for your business? A good question and there are four key reasons why your business needs to know who is visiting your website and why:

• Understand who is visiting your website

Are they your potential customers, your clients, new recruits or just competitors? Who are the actual people who you want to arrive at your website – for many businesses, potential customers are the main target, but are they finding and looking at your website? By using an analytics tool which tells you the “who and why”, you can have a much greater understanding of how your site is working.

• Who is responding to your marketing messages?

As a business, it is likely you are pushing out lots of marketing messages through routes such as PR, Direct Mail, email marketing, web marketing and trade shows. The first port of call for many people who react to your messages will be to your website. However, do you know from your analytics package which organisations are responding to these marketing messages?  If you have this information then you can immediately see who has reacted and it is clear who to follow up with and why.

• How does your business “show up” on the internet?

Are browsers on your website just finding you through your brand terms (your company or product name) or are they using more relevant generic traffic patterns on your site, such as keywords that match to your products and services.  How much more value can you get from understanding how people move around you site, when you can see which organisation they represent?

• Search for particular organisations

Does your analytics package let you search for specific organisations ‘who’ have been to your site? If you are interested in particular companies, can you easily track them down and find out how they found your site and what they found of interest?

The new generation of analytics tools provides businesses with far more information than before.

They ensure you improve your marketing effectiveness and increase the return on your marketing investments by letting you understand who has visited your website and why, even if the visitors do not register or fill in a ‘contact us’ form.

By having simple intuitive analytics tools for non-technical users, SME’s can be empowered to align their online and offline marketing campaigns – and to run highly effective targeted marketing campaigns which deliver real ROI – by turning browsers into buyers and interest into real revenue. 
 

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