Council Post: Four Tips For Using Website Visitor Tracking Effectively

If you’re like me and you started browsing the internet in the mid-1990s, you probably remember how wildly different things were. By far, one of the most amazing things for me is the amount of information that website owners collect nowadays for marketing purposes.

One of the ways you can get so much data is through live visitor tracking. I was one of the first to criticize this as an attack on our personal freedom, but over time, I realized there are thoughtful ways you can use website visitor tracking effectively.

As the president of a sales customer relationship management platform that offers visitor tracking, I’ve learned firsthand how to use this type of software. But first, I think it’s important to understand why some brands might find website visitor tracking useful:

What’s the case for website visitor tracking?

• Untangling your user experience: When you have an issue on your website and people seem to be bouncing for no apparent reason, figuring out why isn’t always easy. This is one reason I’ve observed some companies find visitor tracking helpful. If you’re bad at putting the dots together and figuring out what is wrong with your user experience and user interface, visitor tracking can help show you what to fix. On a more granular level, you can track individual visitors and watch the path they take from landing on your website all the way to making a purchase.

• Feeding your sales team the right data: Tracking your visitors just for the sake of seeing what they do is interesting, but not exactly useful. You can do much more if you can tie a specific visitor to the actions they take on your website. To tie visitor tracking to sales, use email marketing. When you send links to your email list, each email can contain a tracking cookie that is unique for that specific visitor. The moment they land on the website, your CRM will show that activity. In practical terms, this means that your sales team can see what a lead has done on your website before even making a call or reaching out in some other way.

• Getting up close and personal with your visitors: Numbers are great, but they don’t always tell you the full picture. Website visitor tracking can help you see every action someone takes once they land on your website. You can see each step they take and how long they linger on each page. In other words, you can find out more about your customers’ behavior and use the information to personalize your marketing approach and create unique offers for specific target audiences.

Using Website Visitor Tracking Effectively

Although you might see some benefits to website visitor tracking, it’s important to keep a few best practices in mind:

1. Decide whether website visitor tracking is a fit for you. The best way to determine if visitor tracking might be effective for your business is if you’re trying to find behavior patterns that aren’t immediately visible to you (such as if you want to find out why your customers are not converting at a certain point). If this isn’t your goal, this type of tracking might not make sense for your company.

2. Be transparent. If you are tracking your visitors, it’s a good idea to let them know you are monitoring their actions and collecting data. You can do this by using a pop-up where visitors can opt in if they want their data shared or not.

If you have a lot of visitors and customers from the European Union, it’s recommended to let your visitors know that you are collecting their data so that you can ensure you’re in compliance with the EU’s data protection rules, known as the GDPR. If you want to build your visitors’ trust, this would be a wise move to make. You’ll increase overall transparency, and your customers will have more trust in your brand.

3. Use your insights thoughtfully. Another tip for using visitor tracking effectively is to try out different lead magnets, offers, calls to action and other on-page elements to see what works best for your visitors.

4. Prepare for any challenges you might see. The biggest challenge to using website visitor tracking will be managing visitors from countries affected by the GDPR. Make sure you have a great FAQ section outlining what is tracked and how. The second challenge is interpreting the data you get from visitor tracking so that it’s not without purpose. Make sure you’re looking at patterns and making an effort to extract actionable insights.

Final thoughts

While you might get the impression that tracking visitors is an act of hogging data for no purpose other than knowing more, the truth is that both you and your customers have a benefit here. You get to learn more about how they behave and what drives them to take action, while they get a more unique, optimized browsing and shopping experience.