Imagine you own a brick-and-mortar store and you are behind the cash register. You see your customers moving in and out, and you can contact them in two ways:
1) When she checks out, you might start a simple dialog, at the end of which you will know if this customer is satisfied, and why she comes to your store.
2) You can leave the counter and walk over to the customer, asking if you can help him find what he is looking for.
You get the picture. There’s a lot of important information available if you start asking.
But how can you do this on your website? You don’t even know who is on the other end of your Internet connection;
it could be a dog that sniffs out your page!
Before going into the topic of how to ask questions of your visitors, you need to do your homework. You need to find out the 6 basic statistics of any website.
These facts are:
- How many visitors are coming to your website daily?
- How long do those visitors stay?
- What percentage are repeat visitors?
- How much money are you making on every item your
site sells? - What is the average cost for one visitor to your
website? - What is your visitor-to-sales ratio?
What happens if you don’t know these facts?
If you don’t know how many visitors coming to your site, you are standing behind your “counter” blind. At least get someone to tell you who is in the store. You are also blind if you don’t know how long visitors are staying on your site, or if visitors are just poking their heads through your door and leaving without ever entering. If you were behind that counter, I bet you would jump out from behind it and ask these potential customers, “What’s wrong? Why are you leaving my store, is there something not OK here?”
If you don’t know if your customers are coming back, it’s like you had an accident and got amnesia. Bob comes every day, buying his newspaper and a box of cereal. You keep using the generic, “Hello how can I help you?” After several times Bob just doesn’t come anymore because he realizes you just don’t recognize him. He is going to the store on the other side, where every employee greets him in the morning with, “Hi Bob, here’s your newspaper, do you want cornflakes or granola today? Thanks for shopping
at our place, see you tomorrow.”
If you don’t know what the average profit is that you make on your site, you may be giving your product away too cheaply. It’s as if you put a new price sticker on because the other store dropped its prices by 10%. You are just reacting, instead of being proactive. Also, you won’t know how much money you earned every month.
If you don’t know a customer’s worth, you don’t know how important it is to treat him well. For example, let’s say you purchased a banner ad in the newspaper, and you realize more people are coming to your store, but you don’t count them. If you don’t count them, how do you know the banner was worth it?
This fact is one of the most interesting. At a brick-and-mortar store, it is very hard to track these new customers. On the Internet, however, there are tracking tools. You can know exactly how many new visitors are coming from which particular ad, and also how many sales you made. Deducting the cost of shipping and handling, you know precisely whether you made or lost
money.
Let’s touch on every fact in detail to give you more insight. Knowing the number of visitors to your site is essential for improving sales. This is the first critical step in tracking. Learn the difference between tracking visitors, hits, pages, and requests. With the right tracking tool, you can analyze your visitors daily and compare months, weeks, and days so you have an overview of trends.
Check the visitor flow over time. During an average sales day, which hours are the busiest and which are the quietest for the number of visitors on your site? If you have a Toll-Free number, this information can assist you in planning your hotline or sales team better.