When businesses first started using the web, websites were simply one-way communications pieces AKA brochure-ware. Now, when visitors come to your website, you can find out a lot about them.

Google has a free software tool called Analytics. It tracks the traffic in detail:

• Geographic origin
• Technology of the web browser and computer used
• Time of arrival
• Time on the website
• Landing Page that’s first visited, other pages in order, Exit page
• And much more.

The amount of information available and variety of reports can be very confusing if you aren’t familiar with Analytics and don’t have specific Objectives.

What’s most important:

• Where your web visitors are originating from? You probably only care about people in the immediate region, not other cities or countries. This website gets traffic from Europe and Asia, and the North Shore and Fraser Valley.
• What pages your visitors are viewing? If you publish online information that deals with the issues your clients have, that has high value with both them and with Google Analytics, over time, will teach you what people are searching for, and what they spend time on.
• How did they find your website? They could find you from direct (somehow they learned your web address and typed that into the browser address bar), Google or other search result, social media links, links put into an email, link from a magazine article you wrote, and more.

If you have lots of web visitors from a close-by city, and you recently gave a seminar there, it’s reasonable some of that traffic came from seminar attendees. If you’ve written about a practice area you’ve very knowledgeable in, then you might see searches based on those key words. Perhaps you have a paper available so people with specific interests will sign up for a regular email piece you do. But beware, if traffic to some pages has a high ratio of “bounces” (visitors seeing only 1 page then immediately leaving website) that page has a problem somehow, probably with the content. That’s a page that needs managing.

Google Analytics is free to all website owners, and is very powerful. With patience and a plan you will learn about your visitors and your website strengths over time.

Talk to us at Gap Management about the appropriate marketing tools for your practice, and how they can guide your budget and focus your practice.