Knowing exactly who is visiting your website can give you a lot of insight into the best ways to communicate with them. It can tell you which pages on your site people like and don’t like, it can tell you what kind of audience you are attracting, and it can even tell you about what they are thinking when they land on your site.
Here’s how to find out more about who is visiting your website.
Bounce Rates, Return Rates and Length of Stay
These statistics will tell you a lot about what people are thinking about your content. If a lot of people land on your pages and leave right away, then you are probably not catching their attention. If a lot of people land on certain pages and stay for a long period of time, then that probably means that your visitors like your content and are staying to take it all in. If most of your visitors just visit once and never return, then that probably means your content isn’t really appealing to your customers. If they return often, then that means they like your content and want to come back for more.
Keywords
What keywords are people entering to get to your website? If you run a finance website, but find that most of your visitors are landing on your website through keywords related to refinancing credit cards, then you might want to do a special article series about credit card refinancing. The keywords people land on your site with can tell you a lot about what kind of information people are looking for when they come to your site.
Most Popular Pages and Posts
Which pages on your site get the most traffic? Again, this will show you what kind of information people are most interested in. If a page is often referred to or revisited, that probably means it is the kind of content that your users want to see more of.
Traffic Sources
Finally, look over your traffic sources regularly. If other websites are sending you traffic regularly, see if you can get in contact with those sites. If smaller search engines are sending you traffic, see if you can optimize for those search engines. If a lot of people are coming from direct type-in traffic, that probably means your offline marketing or branding efforts are working. Find out what is working, and then put more time and energy into making it work even better.
These are just a few ways to use your analytics and data to figure out who is coming to your website and what they want from your site. Review this data regularly as it can change quite a bit in just a short period of time.