21

Aug

How Website Analytics Can Help You Think Like Your Customer

Posted by: Jeremy Reither

When you speak your customers’ language it’s so much easier to sell. The challenge is that when you’re an expert on something, and you’re trying to sell that something, there’s a good chance your customers aren’t as familiar with it as you are, and may use different words to describe it than you do. That difference in terminology can really dampen your sales pitch. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what words consumers are using to describe and search for your offerings (especially if your competitors aren’t yet targeting those words)?

Web analytics reports tell you almost anything you want to know about how many people have visited your website, how they got there, and what they did while they were there. Because there’s so much in there, like surfing the internet, browsing web analytics reports can be addicting and time consuming. But also like surfing the internet, web analytics can help you uncover valuable nuggets of business wisdom – such as identifying the unexpected ways that your website visitors think and act.

Analytics keyword analysis – that is, viewing the keywords and phrases that people type into search engines to find your site, or into the search box on your site to find specific content – is enlightening in this way, because people type words that give you a glimpse into the ways they think. Chances are those keywords they’re using that you hadn’t thought of are a little less pervasive than the keywords you’re already targeting…but they are probably also a little less competitive. That means you have a better chance of optimizing your site for top rankings on the search engines for those terms…which could mean better ROI.

What do you call this thing?

If you were selling the item on the right, what words would you use on your website to describe it? Last year at an internet marketing conference, a speaker asked this of the audience. Some people called it a “thumb drive;” others called it a “flash drive;” still others said it was a “USB drive” or even a “zip drive.” The point was that there were a handful of ways to describe this product (not to mention the brand name or trademarked terms) – and as a marketer it would pay to know which ones your consumers were using most.

You can either wait for the customer to learn your language – or you can learn theirs!