Get to Know Your Website Visitors

Yes, bow down to me, though not too far as most people sit on chairs to view their computer screens, so if you bow down, you won’t be able to see it, get up! I suppose I’m asking to you to do this because I’m a self confessed genius. I guess this game to me when looking at this website, Wuup… How can I get to know my visitors? Easily, use everyone else’s ‘forms’ of genius to help me, thus making me a genius. Now we’ve got that cleared up, lets have a look at what I did, and what you can do too.

Overview

Why is it important to know your visitors? Some cynical buggers will argue it isn’t, but thats because it’s their job to be synical, and the whole argument again me, and the point that this article is being written… But the reason why it’s important is simple. If you know your visitors, you know how to please them, and if you know how to please them, you know how to get more visitors, and after all, we all want to reach a wider audience.

Simply Anal

Firstly, it’s not as bad as it sounds, but I’m sure it certainly gained your attention, I hope so, because I’m cheap like that – yup cheap thrills. But what I’m waffling on about of course is Google Analytics, it’s free, and we poor web designers do like free, but like anything free it’s not perfect. But you have to consider, if you never had anything before, then it’s got to be better!

What Google Analytics offers, is the essential web traffic stats, plus much much more, basically I’d compare it to a nice lovely multilayered chocolate pudding, but some times you can have too much of a good thing! Since Google Analytics new look, its also a lot easier to use a cleaner & more crispt ‘taste’, however I’m going to have to stop the food euphemisms -it’s making me hungry. The headings we enjoy are ‘visitors’, ‘traffic sources’, ‘content’ & ‘goals’. However, unless you’re website is an online shop, you’ll spend most of your time in the traffic sources & the main dashboard page, and the rest, dipping into occasionally when your bored or looking for something specific to tickle that statistic fetish you’ve been hiding from everyone… anyway.

Have more than one source of stats, for example, I use Googel Analytics & on this Wuup site, I combine it and compare it with the stats generated by StatPress, a plugin from the archive on www.wordpress.org – just look for the extend section and do a search.

Ask Mr Anonymous

Lets go back to basics, a nice questionnaire, a poll! Jesus Christ, hunt them down and ask them what they think – it’s easy, just get a poll on your site. A little tip, if you have a quest like:

Do you like my site? Yes or No

There’s only two options for this, and thus, the stats are ok, but you’ll find that they won’t be entirely accurate because someple will just choose no for the hell of it. Fun? No? – What I like to do is add an additional funny answer, which would move most of the element of ‘funny people who choose no for the hell of it’ to choose it. Example being :

Do you like my site? Yes? No? There are too many options in this poll!

Although you will find a lot of people wille choose it, you’re left with more reliable stats, also don’t hesitate to put a few dummy stats in, to get people started, no one likes being the first.

Click Tale

A website which borders on being creepy, yet extremely useful, I’ve only had a little play with it, and its basic version is free, so go ahead and check it out, www.clicktale.com – this site which has a bit if a buggy log in system, provides a valuable tool. It records a percentage of your visitors, and show’s exactly what they do in a replay fashion. Showing clicks, some typed information etc, it’s invaluable, especially to find out what your visitors are doing. I quite like the heat map feature too, which allows you to see the attention span to different sections of different pages on your website.

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