The further you move into the world of e-commerce and digital website marketing, the more detailed and complex it becomes.  Needless to say that the most professional webmasters will be able to tell you from where their visitors come, what they do on the website, where they go, what they look at and what % of them decide to buy from their website.

It’s this level of detail that has made well-known websites into corporate giants of the modern world.  You often hear people talk about the psychology of supermarkets – positioning impulse buy products on the gondola ends, positioning the bread aisle at the back of the store so people have to walk through the rest of the store to get their essential bread, piping the smell of freshly made bread through the store to make people feel hungry when they are shopping – all these are tactics that are closely monitored and implemented by the large supermarkets....because they work.  For a ‘typical’ customer, supermarket professionals will be able to almost map their walk around the supermarket before they even walk in!

It’s very similar in the online world.  Website analytics allow us to understand what advertising platform generated the user in the first place, how long they spend on the site, what they are looking at and so on.  You often hear webmasters talking about ‘hot spots’, ‘conversions’, ‘cookies’ and ‘bounce rates’ – all this information is available to digital marketers to understand their visitor behaviour.  Understanding behaviour, in turn, allows you to present the right information and offers to your customers, at the exact point in their customer journey through your website, enticing them to buy your products.  Working at this level of detail, of course, requires a huge investment, and this is why the large online giants are so good at it.

For the rest of us, understanding where our customers come from, what they look at on site and what percentage of users make a purchase is pretty much all we need to know, and this is perfectly achievable through a variety of tracking software out there on the market.   And for those of you wanting to know, the standard conversion % you should be looking for is around 1.5-2%.....that is of all the visitors who come to your site, you should expect to convert 1.5-2%.  That leaves around 98% of users who don’t make a purchase, which you can then also target through re-marketing....but that’s for another time.

Suffice to say that professional digital marketing agencies such as MultiChannel Creative, for example, are in prime position to be able to help you understand your market, your industry, your competitors and your on-site visitor behaviour.....all part of our package.