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

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

<< begin with Part 1

Last month, I told you about user profiles and why buyers aren't the only visitor group that should matter to your site. This month, we'll be exploring advanced visitor profiling via keyword referrals and link referrals and learning even more about the value that non-buying visitors can add to your online efforts.

Analyzing the Profile Group Data
When we left off last month, we'd successfully separated visitors to The Lactivist web site into three distinct groups--Readers, who didn't make a purchase; Shoppers who visited a product page but didn't make a purchase; and Buyers, who did make a purchase. And while it was easy enough to use the three labels to look at simple things--like the number of visitors from each type of group, or the amount of time that each group spent on the web site--the real value in this type of labeling was in the ability to dig into the sources that produced each of these visitors. This is where both the search engine keyword and the link referral reports can come in extremely handy.

Keyword Referrers
Since organic search marketing is one of the best sources of "free" advertising, it's important to understand what types of keywords are most effective in sending each type of visitor to a web site. With that in mind, the visitor labels that the marketing team set up for the three profile groups were used to compare what keywords sent visitors to the site over the course of a week.

The data in this area is pretty straightforward and not terribly surprising. Keywords that contained words and phrases related to t-shirts, shirts and clothing were the most likely sources of traffic to the shoppers and buyers groups, but it was interesting to note that certain topics, like "exclusively pumping," "extended breastfeeding" and "milk banking" were also likely to send shoppers and buyers. That made it clear that there were certain topics that created more interest in the shirts than others and also helped make it clear that future expansion of the shirts could easily be influenced by those interest levels.

Analyzing the keywords that sent visitors in the reader category was also an effective way of judging what topics were of the most interest to readers and which topics might be good candidates for more in-depth articles or commentary in the future.

Link Referrers
Perhaps the most essential area to look at when breaking down log file data by user profiles is the referrer data. After all, the referrer data can tell you if a visitor came from an ad campaign, from a search engine, from a blog, from a product review, or from any number of other locations. Figuring out what types of sites and what specific sites are most likely to send each type of visitor is a great way to tailor your future campaigns and your future link building efforts.

In this instance, it's important to look at referrer numbers in regards to both the individual profiles and the overall traffic to the site.

By examining the differences in referral numbers between the various profiles, you can start to get a loose, but very real understanding of the "conversion rates" of each of the three visitor types. For example, a look at the overall stats of The Lactivist site shows that Google sends 22% of all the visitors to the site. By looking at the profile data, we can see that Google sends 15% of the buyers. On the other hand, the site Mothering.com (a parenting forum) sends just 2.2% of all site visitors, but accounts for 3.5% of purchases. That makes it fairly easy to see that a Mothering.com visitor is more likely to make a purchase on the site than a Google visitor, all without setting up complicated ROI tracking for every single referral domain.

This type of analysis can work for finding the best sources of the other two profile groups as well. For example the LaLecheLeague site, (a breastfeeding support group) sends just 0.3% of all visitors, but accounts for 1.3% of readers. This shows that information sites like LaLecheLeague are a great resource for drawing in new readers to the blog and content areas of the site. Data also shows that a certain discussion forum in the D.C. area sends 0.7% of visitors, but makes up nearly 2% of shoppers. As more of these comparisons are made, trends start to emerge that show which types of sites are the most likely to send which types of visitors. That's valuable data when it comes to forming future marketing plans.

How to Put the Data to Work
Putting this data to work is as simple as following the existing pattern in future link building and campaign building efforts. Since data makes it pretty clear that certain search engine keywords are a strong source of buyers, it makes sense to continue putting efforts into improving rankings for the phrases that send the most sales. That also implies that purchasing paid search advertising for those phrases is also a route worth testing. Analyzing the lists of which sites refer the most buyers can also play a role in deciding where future advertising dollars should be spent and in what types of relationships need to be built in terms of requesting product reviews, sharing article content or striking affiliate deals.

The moral of the story? 'Buying' is only one of many ways in which visitors can create value for your site. Understand that alone is a huge step toward embracing a new way of marketing a web site online. By learning to recognize the many different ways in which a visitor creates value and by then taking the time to track the sources of those visitors, most businesses can dramatically improve both their online marketing plans and their bottom line.

<< back to part one