Counting People: How to Track Web Traffic

By Stella Orange | Comments Off on Counting People: How to Track Web Traffic

There’s a common statistic that gets trotted out in website conversations that goes something like this: “The average visitor to your website is there only for 45 seconds.” (Or 33. Or 67. You get the idea.)

Interesting enough, especially when a lot of business owners and service providers out there are seriously considering spending a fair chunk of change to plow more traffic to their sites.

There are plenty of strategies to do this, from keyword SEO or a social media package specially designed to help bricks & mortar businesses ramp up online attention.

These are perfectly viable methods, provided you already have a charming website that’s already above the under-a-minute visit average. (Odds are, it’s going to take people more than 60 seconds to locate a buy button, let alone go through the process of convincing themselves it will help solve their “wake up in the morning” problem.)

The thing is, you need to use the right words in the right order on your website if you want to sell something with any success. Even if you’ve got a gazillion people being sent to your site, if you haven’t organized well, or haven’t written words that resonate and get them fired up that you’re the one to help them out of their latest & greatest pickle, they’re out of there. (This goes triple for sales pages, where you’re selling one product, program or event via long form written sales process. More on this next month.)

You don’t want to just be throwing words up into the wind here. Effective communication is like sonar… you send out a sound, and listen to hear what comes back to assess your position. You want as much insight as you can get to get a picture of what’s working. And what you need to tweak.

Now, I’m certainly not going to argue that there’s some magic length of time that people need to be on your site, but I’ll bet my brother Eric’s left arm it’s longer than 45 seconds. Especially if you’re educating, selling, and building authentic “I know what I’m talking about and I’m not going to jerk you around” relationships through your website. Especially if you’ve got a sales page or two up.

So what now? Sign up for google analytics. Look, I’m no techie-type, but I did it. (You can absolutely figure it out as you go. Commit to 5 minutes a day, just click buttons and play around with making sense of the data. Don’t let the fancy “analytics” word fool you: this is the digital version of a guy with a “people counter” sitting by all the doors to your site.) It’s free, and it will help you see where people are coming from, what they’re looking at, and how long they’re staying. It’ll also help you test out copy on your site so you know what works, and what’s deadweight. Let me know what you find out.

Stella Orange teaches her clients how to effectively market their business by telling a better story in their marketing— the story of the hero answering the call to more. A professional copywriter whose writing has generated millions of dollars in sales, Stella knows that the story we tell in our marketing matters a whole lot, because on a fundamental level, it shapes how people think about themselves and what’s even possible for them. Three times a month, Stella hosts a 90-minute Shut Up And Write session via videoconference for members of her Write Club community. She is based in Buffalo, New York, where she lives with her husband, the Philosopher, and their dog, Chachi. Get a copy of Stella’s position paper The New Marketing: How to Create Clients Without Feeling Gross, Icky or Manipulative at www.stellaorange.com/newmarketing.

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