Website Market Research: Understanding Where Your Customers Are Coming From

Knowing the behavior of your customer is key

Knowing the behavior of your customer is key. Knowing the viewing and traffic patterns of visitors to your website is probably the key to the success of all web-based projects, be it entertainment, e-commerce, specific content or even just a company's corporate web-presence. Knowing the preference and profiles of your visitors and site users helps you design and focus your website, your marketing campaigns, and your products to match user preference and increase your company or website's chances of success in its goals.

Google Analytics is probably the most usable and popular tool used for website analytics and marketing research. Google Analytics provides a basic set of statistical tools for the novice user, as well as, the type of advanced analytical reports that most marketing firms salivate over. Google Analytics provides reports on:

1) About Visitors this gives you the basic rundown (geographical statistics, repeat visit statistics, loyalty to product or company, time spent by visitors, etc).

2) Trafficthis allows you to view the trends of traffic (whether or not they are coming directly to your website or through referring sites, or if they arrived via search engines and/or other online advertising and marketing campaigns).

3) Contentthis report allows you to better understand which are the more popular pages on your website so you know where to place ads or promotions.

These are but the basic reports, but many more can be created if you know your way around the tool. There are plug-ins for social media, like how many of your visitors arrived due to a "Tweet" or via Facebooking, Digging, Reddit, etc. In fact, this tool is not only free, but its wide use has created a whole bunch of free code and plugins out there so that companies can be sure that you are using their products. Flash? There's a plug-in. Want to see tracking on an image? Plug-in. There are even plug-ins for iPhones so that you review your reports while checking out jeans at The Gap.

Perhaps the best aspect to the remarkable tool is the fact that it's free. Yes, free. Free looks at who is coming and going. Free statistics on what people do on your website. Free, free, free, free, free. So if your site needs work and you can't afford a marketing guru, know that there is help out there for you.

Social media is a the latest web phenomenon. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and other social media sites and tools have become a vital conduit for web traffic, creating a huge demand for any data that is related to social media and social media outlets. Every web owner wants their site to be the one that people "Digg" or "Tweet" about; they want to know where these chatty users are coming from, what makes them tick, and what topics or issues will excite them enough to Tweet home about it. Knowing this will make the difference between a successful web venture and something that tanks a year in.

No one wants a to own the website that no one talks about; no one wants to sit on top of a failed social media campaign. However, it is such a relatively new field in marketing that there isn't a history of trends and analytics yet to create a campaign without help. If you don't know where to start, or you're not sure yet if you want to invest money in SEO or Social Media experts just yet, then it's probably best to download Google Analytics.

Google Analytics has some of the best free tools to assist you with gathering and analyzing social media statistics. Before setting up your plug-ins and reports you should probably try to understand what it is, exactly, that you will want to track. It is hard to succeed at something if you don't understand your own goals.

If a goal is creating a buzz about your website then you will want to understand how netizens share information. Do your hits come mostly from search engines? Have you been Tweeted about? You may even want to look at analytics for popular websites and model your response around them. Are you interested in better understanding the trends that are related to social media or net memes? If you are, then you should know that each one of these will require a different set of tools and focus. Will you track traffic statistics via social media sites like Twitter, or will you be tracking campaigns by Tiny Urls? Do you want to see the results of good "Facebooking" and what it can offer you? All of this can be accomplished within Google Analytics if you know exactly what you want.

Prior to using Google Analytics to measure social networking results you will want to make a list of goals that you want to accomplish from your marketing campaign, and then figure out what statistics you need to gather to make that happen.

Website Market Research: Understanding Where Your Customers Are Coming From

By: Brian Scott

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