Use Web Traffic Data to Evaluate Marketing
By Julie Mason

Many marketers think that building Web traffic is the object of an online campaign, but that's only the start. Do you know who's perusing your home page, who's clicking to your sales pages and how to distinguish a ‘wrong turn' click-through versus a tire kicker versus a potential purchaser?

If you want to start a relationship, you need to know who you're interacting with before you can devise a plan to keep them coming back. Identifying Web site traffic is a multi-stage process that involves close coordination between your marketing team and IT department.

Collection
If you want to start a relationship, you need to know who you're interacting with before you can devise a plan to keep them coming back. The most detailed results will be generated from online surveys and from building a registration section into your site. A general user registration page, which requires all visitors to register, will cull targeted and detailed demographic data about each site visitor. To avoid hassling visitors by asking them to register or login each time they visit, build a cookie into the registration process.

Avoid turning visitors away by setting this page to pop-up when a user clicks through from anywhere on the homepage, allowing visitors to see the basics but requiring them to pony up a little demographic information before going deeper into the site. This also will let you distinguish a tire kicker from a true visitor. General visitor registration pages are not beneficial to every Web site, however, and if you're not careful about how you implement them you may actually turn visitors away.

Strategically placing registration sections on your site will avoid this problem but often reduces the volume of information collected. For example, putting a white paper or access to data sheets on your site and into your marketing material will drive qualified contacts to the site, boosting traffic while building your contact database.

Posting a registration page on the site before allowing any of these offers to be downloaded gives you the opportunity to collect some valuable data. Since this portion of the site traffic is motivated by the ‘free information' offering, visitors are more apt to give up more demographic information, but be careful not to ask too much, or they will go away.

Evaluation
Just as important as registration pages, paying attention to internet provider (IP) addresses for your site's traffic will reveal a lot of valuable information about who's visiting the site, what pages are getting the most traffic and whether they are intended or accidental clickers. A visit to your IT department will give you an idea of what your systems' capabilities are and how to leverage them to see useful information - making life easier for you.

Through the eyes of your IT department, you'll be able to ‘read' IP logs and see that they appear in either one of two ways – either as a company-specific ID or as an internet service provider (ISP) identifier. For all those logs showing a company ID, geographic location will be apparent, which may be a useful demographic. What to look for? Frequency of visits, length of time spent on the site and page click-throughs. A visit of more than a minute is a good indicator of a unique visitor and not a tire kicker. When compared to total traffic numbers, this filtered data will highlight meaningful traffic numbers, geographical information and even some specific companies the sales team might not have on their radar.

Another useful bit of information IP logs show is referral traffic, or how each visitor came to the site.

What does all this mean for your business? Collecting traffic demographics via controlled registration pages adds continually qualified contacts to your database without having to rent or buy lists. Controlling the registration questions ensures you will be able to slice and dice that list any way you want. Monitoring traffic patterns and details provides benchmark data to evaluate marketing and advertising campaigns, traffic trending data and Web page evaluation. After all, a Web site can be an integral part of any marketing and sales program if used effectively.

Julie Mason is the director of general manager for Kellysearch.com, a comprehensive online buyers' guide and search engine, www.kellysearch.com.