Anonymous website traffic represent nearly 97% of all the traffic that comes to your website.
How do we know? Because the average website in the United States only sees a 2.7% conversion rate, as of the second quarter of 2018.
That means that you will only know less than 3% of the people who come to your website. Everyone else is an unknown and harder to reach and sell to.
If you want to increase conversations with customers, and thus increase sales, your goal should be fewer anonymous visitors.
Your Traffic Comes in Three Flavors
The traditional marketing “funnel” works well as an analogy for the types of visitors you website gets. To understand your traffic, realize the following three major buckets in which they fall:
Bots: Your “Bot” traffic represents the automated services that index your website. Popular (and unpopular) search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo can generate up to 52% of your website’s traffic. This is good if that traffic is aligned with good search engines, but bad if that traffic represents services and people who will never do business with you. This might include spam bots or search engine bots from countries you’ll never do business with, like China or Russia.
Seekers: A seeker represents a real person who interacts with your website but never identifies themselves. The good side of this traffic can stay on your website for several minutes and view several pages, making them a good opportunity to convert. The bad side of this traffic are those that are “seeking” something else. They usually leave quickly and view few pages.
Engaged: This is traffic that has connected with your content. The worst of this traffic stays onsite longer than average, reads your content and may even become your offline brand advocate. The best engaged user jumps the chasm between anonymous and known and shares their email or personal story with you. This traffic is known as “converted” traffic.
Connecting with converted users is the goal of your marketing efforts.
Let Google Show You the Way
To understand your traffic, you’ll need to visualize it with a product like Google Analytics. We’ll assume you have at least some background in Analytics and already have it installed on your website, but if you don’t, Google’s support site is a pretty good way to get help.
With Google Analytics available, however, you’ll need to know how to filter traffic so you can view the traffic from those three buckets.
A Funnel for Good Traffic
As goes the filter, then goes the funnel.
I made it up, but its sounds pretty wise. If you’re website’s analytics are filtering to watch for the good traffic in your website, then the way you create your website will change as well.
Take landing pages. A landing page is where traffic first arrives into a website. Yo measure a landing page by the number of people who convert from those pages (fill out a form or do some type of action) or by the quality of interaction after they first land.
Most landing pages are the website’s front page. If your bounce rate is high on your front page (as measured by Google Analytics), then experimenting with design on this page would make sense. If visitors are on the page for more than a minute and seem to show interest in the page, then help them convert by giving them a signup form on the front page.
Inside pages that act as landing pages are more difficult to fine tune because you will need to search for them in analytics. Once found, however, they can help raise your conversion and “time on site” goals by tweaking segments of those pages, watching for changes in activity and then tweaking those pages even more.
Finally, consider how you convert visitors. If you consider filing out a form as a successful conversion, then consider shortening that form to increase conversions. You may also consider placing the form higher on the page or completely redesigning the page.
Overall, identifying your traffic and how they interact with your website is a key goal in online marketing.
If you need help in your online marketing strategy, contact Visual String. We would love to help.