People regularly look up businesses online.  They’re finding out more about your business before stepping through your storefront or hiring you for your services. It’s a two way street, though.  Having a website means that you can find out just as much about your customers as they can find out about you. 

With website tracking, you gain insights into which pages are being visited, where your traffic is coming from, and even who is visiting your website.

Here is how to use website tracking to learn more about the people who want what you have to offer:

3 Small Business Friendly Website Tracking Tools

Google Analytics is a popular free tool that allows you to track your website analytics.  Not only is Google Analytics free, but it’s also fairly easily to install without the help of a programmer or web developer.  

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With Google Analytics, you can get super simple, yet game-changing information, like:

  • How many people are visiting your site each day
  • What channels (SEO, Paid, Direct, Referral) traffic is coming from
  • How many pages visitors are viewing per visit
  • The average amount of time people spend on your website
  • Which landing page people are entering your website from
  • Which pages are getting the most traffic

As a free app from the most popular search engine, Google Analytics is a must-have when it comes to website tracking. But there are other tools in town that can help you track your visitors and make the most out of your website traffic.

Crazy Egg heat map technology shows you how people are digesting content once they get to your website. You can get information like:

  • Which buttons visitors are clicking on your webpage
  • How far visitors scroll down on different webpages
  • Where the best location is for important items like form fields, banner ads, buttons and more

crazyegg

For small businesses, it’s often not the volume of traffic, but the quality of traffic that matters. When every person that hits your website counts, heat map technology can be a pivotal tool.  With heat mapping insights, you can optimize your most important web pages to keep more visitors engaged and convert more of those visitors into leads for your business.

With Google Analytics and Crazy Egg, website visitors are tracked anonymously. Marketing automation tools, however, can give you an additional layer of knowledge about your prospects and customers.  Marketing automation web tracking tools can actually put a face and a name to the visitors on your website.  With Hatchbuck, for instance, once a website visitor fills out a form, we pull in information like their name, email address, and even pull in a photo from the social media sites that they’re on.  Then, you can see their activity on your website.  

hatchbuck

This type of tracking is helpful for your salespeople or your customer success team. They can see what a prospect or customer is interested in before they pick up the phone to call them. So instead of calling a stranger, the stage is set to feel like a call with a colleague or friend.

So you know that you can track website visitors, but how does this information really work to help you deliver a better customer experience?

3 Ways to Use Website Tracking

As an example, let’s say that you own a landscaping business and want to know more about the visitors who are hitting your website.

Identify Key Traffic Sources

First, you install Google Analytics on your website.  Through Google Analytics, you can see that a good chunk of your traffic is coming to your website from your Facebook page and landing on your home page.

Traffic from your Facebook page is most likely quality traffic.  After all, if they’ve been on your Facebook page, they have a good idea what your business is all about. It’s safe to assume they’re looking for more information on landscaping.

Optimize Landing Pages

Now you want to see if your home page is doing it’s job to convert that quality Facebook traffic into leads for your landscaping business, so you install Crazy Egg on your website.

On your homepage, you have a form to subscribe to your monthly newsletter, “Landscapes and Lawns.” It’s a great lead magnet for your website.  But, it’s pretty far down the page.  After tracking for a few weeks with CrazyEgg, your heat map shows you that most visitors aren’t scrolling far down enough to get to the form.  So you test moving your subscription form further up the page, and are happy to see more people subscribe to “Landscapes and Lawns” than ever before.

Identify Leads

Now that you’re actually converting website visitors into leads for your business through your subscription form, it’s time to look into marketing automation.  You connect your “Landscapes and Lawns” form to Hatchbuck.  When a new lead fills out the form, Hatchbuck pulls in their name, their email address, the links to their social media profiles, and a picture.  

In an instant, this person is no longer just another “lead” on your email subscriber list.  Now you know them as Thomas.

Once Thomas is added to your database, Hatchbuck website tracking monitors the pages he visits on your website. Thomas visits your blog, and hits several blog posts pertaining to maintaining greens on a golf course.

Now, when your sales team reaches out to Thomas, they know what he’s interested in, and are prepared to talk golf, fairways and greens.

With website tracking tools, you can better understand the online behavior of your prospects and customers. As a result, you make sure you’re targeting the right channels and serving up the content they want in a format that’s helpful and friendly – getting the right customers in the door.