Capitalising on the psychology of your site's visitors

©Maxim Evseev via 123RF

You need to look at the behavior of your visitors. Your site is recording their activity. This information is the hyped analytics which is basically data that has been analysed and summarised for you. Every business owner understands that data is an important asset - it is vital for website owners as well.

What do your visitors want?

In order to handle a website redesign project, the tools that you use should provide qualitative as well as quantitative information about your visitors’ experiences between pages and in pages. Each one of your visitors has their own agenda when they come to your website. It is essential to understand the reason for their visit, what they love most about your site, and where they are visiting your site from.

Understanding this information will help you improve the design of your site and help to enhance the experience of your visitors. You should question how you can improve their experience as they tour your website.

Bring in the analytics

This is where the analytics come into the equation. For a really long time, the primary focus has always been on the analysis of the click path of the online visitors. This is known as the clickstream analytics. It enables an online business to get quantitative information concerning the traffic to their site including the number of page views plus the number of visitors and the average time that they spend on a page.

Among the most important quantitative metrics are the conversion rates. It does not matter whether you are running an e-commerce website, a non-profit organisation or a media outlet; there is something that you are targeting. There is some activity that you want your visitors to engage in. This could be something like having the visitors sign up for your newsletter or making a purchase. Once you have defined the most important conversions on your site, you can then proceed to monitor changes over time.

The clickstream analytics will not provide much information about the customers’ experiences on your site. They only give details about the traffic. The experience that your visitors have on the site can only be determined through the analysis of the visitor engagement within the web pages themselves. To add onto the clickstream analytics, there are some additional tools that must be used for tracking of page activities.

In-page analytics

Today, websites owners need more tools that will provide insight on the in-page experience of their visitors. The in-page analytics give you reliable feedback concerning the usability factors within your web pages. Every time a visitor will click, hover, scroll or simply hesitate with his mouse, he is communicating lots of rich qualitative data about the text, ads, links, images, banners and where they are placed on the web pages.

There is an 84% correlation between the mouse movement and the eye. This means that you can learn vital information concerning the content your visitors are checking out. It will also provide information about the specific elements that your visitors are interacting with plus how far down on a page they scroll.

These analytics allow you to compare the online behavior of:

• first time visitors versus returning visitors

• converted customers versus the visitors who abandoned
• visitors from varied nationalities speaking different languages

• search engine-generated traffic versus campaign traffic

Monitoring the conversion funnel

Since everything from the placement of images and multimedia on a page to the content is important in the conversion of visitors, the clickstream and in-page analytics are vital tools for monitoring the conversion funnel. The most effective tools for analytics put both the in-page and between-page solutions together. The conversion funnels reveal a lot about how your customers are browsing your site and where they are converted (or drop out), what pages have the highest conversion rates and which ones cause the highest abandonment.

When you monitor your conversion funnels properly, you will be able to extract crucial conversion data as well as be able to maximise your conversion rates. An increase in conversions is very good for SEO. It shows that your visitors have been captured by your site and they will be returning in the future. It is therefore up to you to make sure that upon their return they find something that will interest them once again. To get a good conversion rate, you will have to keep your pages updated with content. They should also make the user experience great. This is a function of the web design.

Monitoring your site's analytics can provide you with a lot of information about the design of your site and how search engines as well as your visitors experience it. A good conversion rate is an indication of a well-designed site. With high conversion, you can be sure that your site will rank highly in the search engines as well.