Cre8tive Flow

In Web Analytics II we were talking through learning a little about good traffic to your website. I’d lay money that many of you looked at your referrer reports and saw at least one source of traffic you’d like to get better results from. If you didn’t, take one more look :).

When I’m trying to figure out how to get a certain group of visitors more interested, I almost always start with the question, “What are people expecting when they get to this website?”

Visitors generally arrive with a question, intention, or goal. Perhaps they are seeking information, comparative pricing, a “reputable” site to do business with, or a quick answer. They come to your site expecting that you can help them achieve their goal. Quickly showing a visitor how you can help is, in my opinion, the primary way to increase interest in your site.

How can your web visitor data tell you about the goals of your visitors? Like last time, let’s start with a simple report that is available in almost any decent web analytics tool. Find the report that tells you which keyword searches visitors used to find your site. If you run PPC campaigns, your PPC admin interface probably has this data as well.

To discern visitor goals, start looking for patterns in your keywords. If you had to put your keywords into 2-4 groups, how would you group them? 2000 keywords are a bit unmanageable, 2-4 groups are much easier to consider. Some groupings I often find useful:

• Brand aware (“Sony TV”) vs. non-brand aware (“big screen TV”)
• Searching for a product (“nasal strips”) vs. searching for information/solution (“stop snoring”)
• Generic (“raingear”) vs. specific (“Gortex men’s large rainpants”)
• Seeking core content on your site (”choosing a digital camera”) vs. peripheral content (”fixing red-eye in digital photos”)

Once you have some of your keywords grouped, try to put yourself into the shoes of someone who just typed that search. What do you think the person who googled “stop snoring” was looking for? Will they find it easily on your site? Advanced data tinkering – take a look at what page these searchers land on – how well does that page meet their expectations?

So, now you have a group of visitors you want to get more interested, and an idea of what their expectations are when they first arrive. How can you help them quickly decide your site is a good place to stay a while?

• Offer a landing page more appropriate to their interests and needs, or use SEO or PPC techniques to assist them in landing elsewhere.
• Look at page titles and ad content - do they match the content of your landing pages, or are you creating expectations the page doesn’t meet?
• Modify current site navigation to provide clear signals to visitors with these expectations, e.g. a friendly link on the home page to where they might want to be.
• Add interesting site content specifically targetted at these visitors.

Some searchers are just lost causes – you can’t or won’t want to meet their expectations. The rest, however, are potentially valuable traffic, and often well worth wooing.

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