What Can You Learn by Tracking Website Visitor Behavior?

One of the most challenging tasks you’re responsible for as a B2B marketer is data analysis. There are so many numbers and sets of data to make sense of, and unless you’ve clearly matched your key metrics to goals, that data can look especially confusing and overwhelming. The fact remains, however, that monitoring and analyzing website visitor behavior is one of the most vital responsibilities of your job.

From seemingly trivial spikes in traffic on certain days of the week to the site pages with the highest bounce rates, there’s a wealth of knowledge to be gained by tracking and analyzing your visitors’ behavior. Let’s take a look at some of what you can learn from the actions of your website visitors — and why it matters.

If you’re not tracking your visitors, then you (and your bottom line) are in for a world of hurt. Forty-two percent of B2B marketers agree that the biggest barrier to their lead generation efforts is a lack of data. Understanding how visitors and leads interact with your site can give you incredibly rich data to help optimize your design, improve your content strategy, and generate leads.

It’s good to remember that what works for contributors at online publications and bloggers on popular marketing sites won’t necessarily work for you. You can’t solely rely on external data and campaign statistics to guide every part of your marketing; it’s up to you and your content marketing team to keep an eye on what’s happening for your company, specifically, through your back end. Here’s what you should look for:

1. Identify your most popular posts and pages.

Knowing the most popular posts and pages on your website can clue you into what type of content is most engaging for your readers. So if a particular type of landing page or blog post worked well in the past and works well now, you could deduce that it will probably continue working in the future.

In fact, you could make that popular, effective content perform even better when you have all the pieces of the puzzle put together and can optimize your content.

2. Find out where your website visitors are coming from.

It’s helpful to know where website traffic is coming from, especially if you’re targeting customers and clients in a specific location. If your products or services appeal to people in a country in which your offerings aren’t available, those 100,000 page views aren’t that valuable for achieving your lead gen goals.

Try these proven methods to generate targeted traffic from a specific location:

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Local online and mobile ads, as well as local social media group campaigns
• In-store advertisements, like email newsletters or text message marketing opt-in
• Google My Business

By analyzing where your visitors come from and what content leads them to your site, you can better track your content ROI, learn more about how effective your efforts are, and create more of what your visitors find most valuable.

3. Leverage these behavior analytics tools.

Now that you’ve got an idea of what you’re looking for, it’s time to find it, track it, and analyze what it means for your efforts. Some tools work better than others to help you accomplish that, so try these to make the most of your behavior analysis processes:

• Google Analytics: GA is the industry standard for website analysis, and it can be integrated with most of your other marketing tools.
• Jetpack for WordPress: If you don’t need as much visitor information as GA provides, Jetpack is a great tool for you, and it’s free to use. This system will give you insights into which pages receive the most traffic, where the traffic is coming from, etc.; it also helps you make the most of your WordPress site.
• HubSpot: This all-in-one marketing and customer relationship management platform tells you exactly what people are doing and exactly who they are. Once registered, HubSpot can automatically pull information, like the Twitter profiles and websites of your visitors, based on their email addresses.
• Shopify: This content management system is built for e-commerce professionals. Inside your website dashboard, you’ll automatically be able to see some of your user behavior data, but you’ll want to integrate Shopify with GA for the ultimate experience.

Marketing today requires professionals to use data to make better decisions and drive results, and you can’t do that if you’re not paying close enough attention to your own site visitors. Look for the most popular content to optimize and continue using to engage future visitors, understand where your visitors are coming from and what they’re looking for, and use the right tools to amplify your efforts.

These are just a few of the endless insights you can uncover by tracking website visitor behavior. What visitor behavior data do you devote the most attention to?