Tracking Your Website Visitors

Dennis Snider

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If you want to really get to know your customers and the types of goods and services that they will be interested in, website tracking is an essential tool. It can help you see where your customers live, what demographic they fit, where they are coming from (have they googled you, for example, or come from another site?), what demographic they fit into, and what interests them or does not on your website. Research has shown that only around 2.3% of visitors to the website will actually give that website any business; if you want to buck that trend, you need to be tracking and analyzing visitor activity.

Website tracking can show you exactly how your visitors move around your website, what catches their eye, what they miss, and what they’re looking for. With certain types of tracking you can gain a good deal of detail about your visitors, possibly write down to the company they work for and their email address, which you can then use for personalized, customized sales approaches. These can be extremely effective: if you know exactly what a person came to your website looking for and what they found of interest when they were there, you can then approach them with special offers that fall right in the middle of their area of interest.
Visitor tracking technology works in a number of ways: the reverse domain name system collects information regarding visitors’ IP addresses, so you have a basic idea of where they’ve come from. If you want more detail, you can have scripts built into your website that will provide you with the address, social media details, and contact details of people in the company who have visited you, allowing you to make “warm” approaches instead of cold calling.

One thing to be careful of when using visitor tracking on your website (there are many different forms of software available, Google Analytics being the most popular) is that you don’t fall foul of Europe’s GDPR regulations. These regulations state that no visitor can be tracked without giving explicit consent to the website they are visiting, and if this is not obtained a business can face extremely severe financial sanctions. These apply even when the visitor is in Europe and visiting a US-based website. There are so such regulations in the USA, although the FTC recommends that your website should inform visitors of any information that you are harvesting about them and obtain their consent to use it where appropriate.