Visitor tracking system

One clear advantage you have as an online business is that, by using a visitor tracking system, you have far greater insight into customer behaviour than you could ever hope to expect as a traditional high-street retailer.

Visitor tracking gives you access to details about where your visitors come from, what pages they visit on your site, how much time they spend there and, if they arrived by means of a search engine, what keyword terms they used to find it.

You’ll then be able to use this intelligence to pick out trends in visitor behaviour and improve the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts with better-targeted ads and organic search keywords and by fine-tuning your content for better sales conversions.

But all this means being able to understand and interpret your website statistics properly. So how exactly do you use the information that visitor tracking systems provide?

The total number of visits gives the number of times your site was visited over a specific time. You are usually able to break the figure down hour-by-hour, day-by-day or month-by-month. This total includes repeat visits from shoppers who have been to your site more than just the once.

By contrast, the total number of unique visitors records the number of different visitors over a specific time and ignores repeat visits from users who have already visited your site during that period.

A high total number of visits in relation to total number of unique visitors is broadly encouraging as this suggests that people like your site and are returning to have another look.

More importantly, however, is the ratio between the total number of visits and the number of purchases. This represents your sales conversion rate and you should use this figure to gauge how well your pages are converting visitors into paying customers.

By seeing which pages attract the most visitors, you will then be able to identify areas that need more attention and where the most important places are to focus on cross-sells and upsells.

And if some of your more popular pages do not convert into sales as successfully as you expect then you should investigate further and find out why.

How long visitors stick around on your store is a good indicator of the quality of your site. If visitors abandon your pages and leave your site within a matter of seconds then this is a sign of an underlying content or design problem. If the majority of your visitors leave a page within

the first 30 seconds then consider whether your pages are properly designed and structured or actually provide the information that your target customers are looking for.

People can find their way to your eCommerce website through a number of sources. In visitor tracking software these sources are generally known as referrers.

The number of referrals from search engines is clearly a good pointer to how your SEO campaign is performing. Likewise, the number of visitors arriving through pay-per-click ads is a useful factor in gauging the relative success of your Internet advertising.

Other referrers may be direct links from other sites. So if, for example, you promote your eCommerce store using social media then you should closely monitor how many visitors you get from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

For visitors that come to your site through search engines, the query terms they use will reveal whether you’re getting the right kind of traffic to your site.

If they’re finding you with search terms that don’t accurately reflect what your proposition is about then you’ll need to optimise your site for the keywords that attract the visitors you do want.

But remember that traffic from keywords that you hadn’t expected may also throw up an opportunity to add new products to your range and cash in on a previously unexploited demand.