Keeping Track of Website Visitor Traffic
If you have a website that is either selling products or providing online value, you should have a good idea of how much traffic you are getting to your site.
If you’re not already doing this, let us point out a few things that should help you understand just how important it is to keep track of your website visitors.
Businesses tend to focus a lot of their attention on sales driven metrics, such as products sold, turnover and profit.
But these values are much easier to understand if you can put them into the wider context of the behaviour of your customers.
Why Are Visitor Traffic Reports Important?
Say for sake of this example you have a lemonade stand.
At the end of the day you are very pleased to have sold 10 glasses of lemonade and you have made a little bit of cash.
You knew that a few people came and went, and a few even had their money out ready to pay but dropped out at the last minute, but you don’t think very much of it.
The thing is, you didn’t realise that throughout the course of the whole day, 100 people stopped by your stand, and of these people 50 were considering a purchase, and 20 actually picked up a glass to buy, but changed their mind.
These numbers actually tell us a lot of what is going on with our business.
For example, the Click Through Rate here was 50%, as 50 out of 100 stopped by and had a look at the product.
The Bounce Rate was also 50%, as 50 out of 100 people stopped briefly but weren’t interested in staying.
Our Conversion Rate was 20%, since 20 people picked up the product ready to buy.
We lost 10% to Cart Abandonment, since 10 out of these 20 gave up right before purchase.
And we are left with our final 10% of Sales, the 10 out of 100 people that bought a lemonade.
Using Visitor Traffic Reports To Improve A Business
Once we put it all together, we realise that we could have done better that just 10% in sales, if we improve our bounce rate, secure our conversions and minimise cart abandonment.
Traffic reports allow businesses to see the gaps in their sales funnel and secure more interest by streamlining the user experience and improving the overall buying process.
One thing that drastically affects the online buying experience is friction.
Friction refers to anything that a web user experiences that slows them down, leaves them frustrated or just feeling not fully catered for.
Friction can occur at the start of the buying experience, for example if they don’t have enough information to make a decision, or it can happen at the end at the checkout for example.
Global cart abandonment rate is a whopping 60%, and usually happens when a user has to fill in lots of details at the checkout, get redirected to another payment facility, or they just aren’t sure about the payment itself.
User Flow Reports
Imagine that your website is a map with roads running through it that lead to the pages of your site.
These roads are what we refer to as ‘user flow’ – the paths that users follow to move through your site, and some of these paths are well used, while others are not as popular.
By examining these routes, we can see where people are dropping off and find out what can be done about it.
Remember that these routes to be as frictionless as possible so that you don’t lose anyone along the way.
Websites need to be easy to navigate and flow in such a way that allows visitors to effortlessly move through the pages and get what they ultimately want out of it in a fast website page loading time.
Check out this flow report from our website:
We can see all the different pathways that visitors take, including the drop off rate in each place.
We can see our initial drop off rate for our Homepage is quite high, which is always unavoidable and can be put down to users that quickly navigate away because the website is not what they are looking for.
However, most visitors who stay then navigate to the SEO page, which has a very good drop off rate of around 30%, and the majority of users then continue on to another page of the site.
We can plug in a number of variables to get more indepth understanding about the behaviour of our users, for example the user country, what keyword they searched for, if they came from an ad and more.
Detailed Visitor Reports
There are a whole host of in depth reports that we can give you on website to help you improve your services, which include:
- Audience demographics
- Audience interests
- Audience flow
- Audience country
- Audience source
If you are so inclined, we can even give you individual visitor reports so you can see exactly what a certain visitor did when they came to your website.
You can see what pages they visited, how long they stayed for, what device they are using and the date they first visited your site.
If they coming back regularly to your website, it is a good sign that you are keeping your visitors engaged, and return traffic is always a good thing.
This hopefully means that they are moving their way down through the sales funnel and towards making a purchase decision.
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