Visitor Profiling: Why Buyers Aren't the Only Valuable Visitors (Part One of Two)

By Jennifer Laycock, Editor-in-Chief, SearchEngineGuide.com

One of the most challenging aspects of building an online marketing plan is figuring out where to spend your time and efforts. Not all advertising campaigns are created equal and the reality is that some of your most valuable traffic probably won't be tied directly to a campaign. With the Internet becoming more and more competitive, it's becoming absolutely essential for business owners to learn how to think outside the box when it comes to campaign tracking and campaign planning.

In part one of this two-part series, I'll talk a bit about how to use ClickTracks to help develop meaningful user profiles, and the impact these profiles can have on your marketing decisions. In part two, I'll delve a little deeper, suggesting more advanced user profiling and giving hints on what to do with the data once it's been collected.

Are Buyers and 'Hot Leads' the Only Ones Who Matter?
Most business owners understand the general concept of return on investment (ROI) and work to track the return of their various campaigns. Unfortunately, when companies focus too closely on campaign ROI, they tend to lose focus on the value of the visitors that might not be making a direct purchase or becoming a lead during any given session. Campaign ROI also tends to discount the value of visitors that come in via "free" marketing channels like blog links, discussion forums, product reviews and other forms of consumer-generated media because there is no cost associated with the visitor acquisition.

That's why it's essential that good marketers learn to think beyond traditional campaign ROI and learn to understand ROI in terms of visitor profiles. It's not enough to simply know that a single campaign sent X amount of buyers—marketers need to know what it was about those buyers that prompted them to buy. They also need to find a way to understand the value of other visitors based on the way that they interact with the web site. This is where behavioral profiling and visitor labeling comes into play.

Creating Simple User Profiles
While visitor profiling can quickly become a highly complex endeavor, it's important to remember that even simple profiles can go a long way toward providing a marketer with visitor insight. The idea behind simple profiling is to outline a handful of desirable behaviors related to your web site and to then group your visitors so that you can study them accordingly.

A great case to examine for the idea of user profiles is a web site called The Lactivist (http://www.thelactivist.com). The site consists of three primary parts: an informational web site that talks about breast milk banking and breastfeeding, a blog that discusses current events related to breastfeeding issues and a store that sells pro-breastfeeding shirts and hats. When it came time to do some evaluation on The Lactivist web site, it was fairly easy to divide the site's users into three primary categories: there were readers, shoppers and buyers.

Why Readers are Important
Since the Lactivist site had a heavy focus on blog content and information, there was a definitive group of visitors that would show up and spend time reading content. These visitors tended to be repeat visitors that came to read the latest information and news stories. For the sake of tracking, readers were defined as visitors that entered the site through the blog or other content areas and that then spent at least two minutes on content pages.

While those in the reader group didn't make purchases, they still provided value to the web site on many levels. First and foremost, readers were the ones most likely to click on advertising that ran alongside the content, thus providing small bits of revenue for the site. These readers were also the most likely to end up becoming affiliates of the t-shirt shop, thus promoting sales and new visitors from their own web sites and blogs. Finally, the readers served as a powerful focus group since many visited the site on a regular basis and regularly left comments in response to blog posts. Those comments often allowed for testing in terms of new shirt ideas, discount offers and future content directions.

Why Window Shoppers are Important
The next group of profiled visitors was shoppers. This group consisted of anyone that came to the site from any destination and ultimately viewed at least one product page. These were not people that ended up making a purchase—simply the ones that took the time to browse through the store.

Despite the fact that this group was also a 'non-purchasing' group, there were still two primary ways in which they benefited the site. First, there was the distinct possibility that they would return to the site at a future date to make a purchase (or that they would request one of the products as a gift from someone else, also resulting in a purchase.) Second, analysis of referrals to the site showed that many of the consumers that were spreading the word via blogs and discussion forums were visitors that had viewed the products, but not yet purchased an item themselves. This made shoppers especially valuable since they were effectively marketing the product for free.

Why Buyers are Important (Of Course!)
The final group is probably the most obvious profile to set up and is the one that is most traditionally tracked by marketers. The buyer group consisted of the visitors that actually added products to their carts and headed into the checkout process. It's fairly obvious that the primary value of these visitors lay in the revenue generated by their purchases. That said, it's also important to note their value in terms of future sales since they were likely to actually wear the shirt in public (where it could attract interest and attention) and to tell others about the site.

Building the Profiles with ClickTracks' Visitor Labels
The Lactivist site relies on Clicktracks for all of its web analytics—and profiling was accomplished through the use of the visitor labeling tool. The advanced visitor labeling feature of ClickTracks allows companies to isolate site visitors based on specific behaviors, referral types or page visits. That makes it the perfect tool to use to track both the actions of each type of visitor and to examine the way that those visitors arrived at the site. This can be incredibly useful information when it comes to forming new online marketing plans.

By using the advanced labeling features, the marketing team for The Lactivist was able to build out multiple groups of users that fit each profile. In some cases that was as simple as using a preset label—in others it required quite a bit of customization and label stacking.

For example, the buyers group was isolated by using the "visited a certain page" label and dubbing the checkout page as the "certain page." That provided a quick and easy way to examine the actions of one of our three profile groups.

The shoppers group, on the other hand, required a bit more time and energy to put together. Since the product pages could be viewed on two different domain names and since each domain contained two variations of the product page, it was necessary to set up four different visitor labels...one label for each type of product page on each of the two domains.

A fifth label was then created using the "combination of other labels" option so that the four previously created labels could be grouped into one label.

This same process was used to stack several visitor labels together in order to create a third profile group for the readers. In essence, labels were created based on entry point and time on site and then stacked together using the combination option.

So now you have an idea of the benefits visitor profiling, and some basic tips on how to make ClickTracks help your profiling tasks. Tune in next month, where I'll tell you about how to use keyword referrers and link referrers to squeeze even more valuable insights out of your data.

continued >>