Your website can be a powerful tool in promoting your business and developing brand recognition, especially if you combine it with other marketing methods, including social media. But, how do you determine how well your website is working as a marketing tool and how many visitors have been converted to purchasing customers?
For your website to be truly effective and to convert visitors to customers, you must know what works and what doesn't so you can tweak accordingly. First, you have to decide which metrics to track on your website. You can track pretty much everything theses days, including:
- What browser your visitors are using when they visit your website
- Where visitors are located
- How many visits your website has gotten each day
- How many of those visits are unique
- The average time users spend on your website
- How many visitors click on links to your social media pages
- Total number of leads
- Number of leads each month
- Where the traffic is coming from (social media pages, search engines, etc.)
- Most viewed content
- If your visitors are viewing your website from a mobile phone
Once you decide what metrics you want to track - and it's probably best to track as many as are relevant to your website - you can then decide which tools will best help you. You have plenty of options that are both free and paid.
Extreme Tracking
Offering both free and premium versions, Extreme Tracking provides you with an in-depth look at the visitors to your website, including their IP address, how they landed on your page, who referred visitors, and the visitor's display resolution. The premium version goes a step further and allows you to view visitors' locations on a map, down to their street address, and shows you what draws visitors to your website.
Mint
For a flat fee, you can download Mint and use it to track the metrics of your website. Among the many metrics Mint tracks are the types of searches (image, web) done to get your website, the search engine visitors used to land on your website, and the content that is viewed the most. Mint also offers a tool called the "Bird Feeder," that assesses the strength of your feed subscriptions.
Site Meter
Tools like Site Meter provide you with instant access to your website statistics, including your average number of visitors per day and per week and in the last hour. The premium site meter requires a fee, although you can download the site counter for free.
Crazy Egg
Like the other tools we just mentioned, Crazy Egg tracks the traditional website metrics, but it also goes a step further. In addition to allowing you to identify who is visiting your website, Crazy Egg allows you to block IP addresses (if you have a message board on your website, this is a particularly helpful feature) and sends customized reports to you based on the metrics you want to track.
Finding the best tool to track your website metrics might be a bit of a challenge. You'll find the internet brimming with them, so research each one carefully before making a decision. Regardless of which tracking tool you use, be sure you use something. Without knowing what's working and what isn't working on your website, you're not going to get the best results in turning prospects into customers.