Who’s Been Looking At Your Website?

And when & why did they leave?

By Brett Lloyd Abbott, MYM Austin Inc.

Your website is in a head-to-head contest with “referrals” as the best way for you to find new pool buyers.  No doubt, it would be great to thrive 100% on referrals. But most builders need an additional stream of leads, and your website is unquestionably the most cost-effective way to get them.  And since most of your referrals are going to want to have a look at your website anyway, it only makes sense to make sure your website is as powerful and compelling as can be.

But is it?  How do you know?

What if half of your prospects are taking one look at your website, and then leaving, saying “No thanks”? Would you like to know that?  If you knew, what would you do about it?

What about the people who decide to stick around, and explore your website further?  Which pages do they go to?  How long do they stay? When, why, and where do they leave?  And when they leave, is it because they decided “to go buy”?  Or because they decided “to go bye-bye”?

Suppose you knew the answers to these questions? Do you think you might do a few things differently?  Maybe fine-tune your website, “plug the holes,” and funnel all those prospects right over to your “contact us” page instead?

Well, the good news is, THOSE ANSWERS ARE READILY AVAILABLE TO YOU, and you can have them for FREE.

In fact, depending on who is hosting your website, that data may already be available to you. Call your web guy, and ask if your website has any “web analytics” built-in.  If not, don’t panic —You can start collecting that data immediately thanks to all the hard-working folks over there at Google.

The secret is “Google Analytics.” This amazing software package was built by the experts to track every move of your website visitors.  And it truly is totally free.  (Believe it or not, Google really wants your website to be successful. They figure the more money you make on your website, the more money you’ll have to spend on Google advertising.)

Check out this abbreviated list of statistics that are available to you when you install Google Analytics on your website:

• How did your visitors find you?
• What keywords did they use to find you?
• What percentage of your visitors “gave up” as soon as they saw your home page?
• What percentage of them explored further?
• What were their favorite pages?
• How many pages did they go to?
• How much time did they spend on each page?
• What page were they on when they left your site?
• Who is sending you the most leads?  Google?  AT&T?  Yellow book?  The BBB?

It’s all there, and much more. Here’s all you have to do to get it:

1. Go to the Google analytics website www.google.com/analytics
2. Open an account.  (If you’re already using Gmail or Google or AdWords, then you already have an account.)
3. They will give you some simple “JavaScript” webcode for you to copy and paste onto each page of your website. (You will probably want to ask your web person to do this for you.)

That’s it! This will begin tracking your web traffic, starting on the day you install it. You (and others in your company) can then access it anytime, anywhere.

Sound intimidating? It’s not.  Just check out this short and uncomplicated video from Google on the subject of Google Analytics: www.Google.com/analytics/tour.html

Here’s a quick sampling of a few statistics, and what you might glean from them:

These two summary charts above (call them “A” & “B”) from two different pool builders, with similar levels of traffic, tell us several things, including:

• Visitors to Website A are looking at more pages than website B.
• Website B is losing a lot of people on the home page.
• Website B is getting a higher percentage of new visitors, whereas Website A seems to be getting a surprisingly large amount of “repeat traffic.”

This pie chart below tells us that ~14% of the people are typing the website URL directly (or clicking a bookmark), while ~85% of the visitors are searching via Google (or other some other search engine) to find the site.

This detail shows you which search engines people are using to find you:

This chart, looking at the last 30 days, says that the investment in a Luxury Pools article may be paying off, as this builder has already received 29 visitors from the Luxury Pools magazine website in a month.

I could show you at least another 50 to 250 statistics, charts, goal-tracking and metrics that would continue to give you great insights for your website.  But in a newsletter like this, I would probably bore you to tears.  The point is this — with Google analytics installed on your website, you can dig as deep you want, and figure out what you need to do to make your website more powerful than the next guy’s. And since it’s free, and really not very difficult, you should do it right away.

Because even if referrals remain your number one source of leads, I’m sure you still want everyone to have a good experience when they visit your website. Am I right? So go get your FREE Google Analytics.

Best regards,

Brett