9 essential reasons for tracking visitors to your company website

Having the best company website in the world counts for nothing if you can’t track who’s visiting. Be you the managing director, or part of the sales and marketing team, knowing the where, why, when and what of your website is essential.

Tracking visitors to your company website

When I build a company website, I have a list of prerequisites, one of which is installing options to track and monitor visitors to those websites. Without an understanding of your visitors, you run the risk of steering your website into rough seas, less trafficked than the calmer waters more popular websites are to be found sailing through.

Here are some of the top benefits of gathering web statistics for your business website:

know how many visitors you’re getting daily, weekly and monthly;
see where those visitors are coming from (such as other websites, search engines, or typing your web address directly);
if you’re getting visits from the search engines, like Google, you’ll see what words they searched for;
see how long each visitor spent on which web pages, and what they did next;
monitor downloads of things like software, PDFs, white papers et cetera;
if you have a search tool on your website, you can track what people are searching for and which web pages they’re visiting.

They are but a small selection of the things you’ll be able to do once you start tracking visitors to your company website.

Using web statistics to improve your sales & marketing

But you don’t just want to accumulate all of this data. You want to put all of this data into action. So here’s some ways you can make use of your visitor data, which include:

track marketing campaigns, which include campaign codes;
use your web statistics to build a demographic profile of your visitors, which will help your sales & marketing team target their campaigns with more precision;
spot recurring trends, such as visits from particular web pages or articles, and use those sources to hone your marketing activities.

So the next question is, now? I use a number of tools, but the main two I use and recommend to clients are Google Analytics and Clicky Web Analytics.

Web analytics software

Google Analytics is free. All you need to sign up is a Google Account, which is also free. As well as a huge wealth of data at your disposal (far too many options here to cover in any real detail), you can also add profiles for different people, like colleagues and perhaps your own clients, as I do.

Clicky Web Analytics is a paid service, but there are some very unique features particular to Clicky what you won’t see in Google Analytics. For example, Clicky has a Spy feature, which allows you to see visits to your website live. The advantages of this might not be immediately apparent, but over time, you’ll appreciate being able to respond to currently active marketing campaigns in real time.

Clicky really comes into its own once you have a business blog. There are options to track buzz, such as who’s talking about you and your brand on Twitter, for example.

In both instances, Google Analytics and Clicky Web Analytics require you to install a small portion of code into each web page for them to do their magic.

So what have we learned? Data is good! Data can give your business a critical edge, one perhaps not shared with the competition…