RIGHT ON TRACK JONNY ROSS Right on Track
Online engagement strategist Jonny Ross explains why it is important for retailers to track traffic to and from their website.
Tracking traffic to and from your website is something that all businesses should be doing, regardless of whether you are an e-commerce site or not. As a retailer, the importance of tracking traffic is even more prolific.
Without having a sound understanding of the way in which your website is operating and the way visitors are interacting with your website, you will be unable to make informed decisions or alterations for improvement. Without a clear idea as to how traffic is moving on your website all the other work you are carrying out becomes slightly devalued.
For a webite the key goal is to drive traffic and then subequently convert this
traffic into sales. So how do you ensure that your webite is achieving its goal if you do not track it?
So why bother tracking traffic?
Your website is ranking well, you are appearing high on Google for keywords and you gain great engagement on your social media pages. But why aren't you converting this into sales on your website? What could be going wrong? Are there any other techniques that can be implemented that may help?
Unfortunately, many retail sites will look to spend an even larger portion of their budget applying more techniques in order to gain more sales from their website, without taking the very first step of implementing tracking.
For a website the key goal is to drive traffic and then subsequently convert this traffic into sales. So how do you ensure that your website is achieving its goal if you do not track it? The long and short answer of this is that you don't. Spending a small portion of your budget, mainly through investing time, to set up tracking such as Google Analytics on your site can really have a huge impact on the results you are receiving.
Tracking allows you to see if your website is working efficiently, which therefore allows you to make changes that you know will have an impact on your results. As an e-commerce site that relies on making sales, it is crucial that your website is efficient.
Analyse visitor experience
Using Google Analytics is the best way to monitor the traffic your website is receiving. It allows you to analyse data to really see what journey your visitors are taking. For example it can tell you that a visitor lands on your site after clicking through from a link on Facebook. They then land on a product page and begin filling in the order information. However, before they click through to put in their payment details, the visitor clicks off your site.
This information is crucial as it allows you to make some assumptions as to why the visitor didn't complete their purchase. You are then able to make informed changes to your site, possibly carrying out some testing until you find the real root of the problem.
Where is your traffic coming from?
Tracking traffic also allows you to see where your visitors are coming from and what pages they are most commonly landing on. For example, you may be spending a lot of resources on your Facebook page in order to drive
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