There’s a crowd pouring in through your store’s front entrance. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of customers browsing shelves and buying stuff has to be a good thing, right? Well it would be, except that the same people keep coming and going, changing outfits between visits, and others are just sleepwalking through the joint with no intention of actually doing anything.
Image credit: wikipedia
Not exactly ideal.
Repeat traffic, spambots, and other online irritants can obscure what’s really going on with a website’s traffic patterns, inflating numbers way beyond reality. In a brick and mortar store you could post a bouncer by the door to check IDs (and maybe knock a few heads), but on the Internet you’ve got to dig into the only resource at your disposal: the data.
Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
Knowing who’s visiting your website is Business 101 stuff; you can’t operate effectively without that knowledge. It’s trivial to track the number of times a given page is visited or a given link is clicked, but trickier to track how much of that volume is constituted by unique clicks, which is to say by genuine human visitors interacting with your site for the first time. It’s sort of like trying to tell which nuns are blondes just by watching their body language; you’re going to need to get creative.
Image credit: wikipedia
Email registration, reinforced by a unique phone number requirement and a robust captcha test, is a proven way to identify and authenticate discrete users. Even if someone logs in via different platforms — from a tablet, a laptop, and a phone, say — their unique ID will prevent these separate visits from generating redundant information. The time eaten up by authentication can be a mild turnoff for casual visitors, but it’s standard practice for most reputable websites.
The Fly on the Wall
Authenticated user bases not only make traffic trackable and readable, they also open up whole new realms of data for use in generating leads and targeting advertisements and suggestions. A site’s webmasters, or even its automated protocols, become flies on the wall, observing user habits and collecting other useful information.
Amazon’s automated suggestions feature is a great example of what you can do with the information authenticated users generate. The site monitors purchasing and browsing habits and uses keywords attached to viewed pages to generate lists of suggested pages which should, over time, track a user’s interests.
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It’s not enough just to know who’s visiting your site. That knowledge in and of itself is of limited use, but by authenticating users you can start the ball rolling on getting users to market to themselves. In addition, packets of authenticated users become valuable in and of themselves as saleable leads.
Raw website traffic stats are like slurry from a mine. You’ve got to sift out the gunk and scrub off the money, but once you get the trick of it there’ll be no stopping you.
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