Visitor Goals
Take-home message: visitor website behaviour is goal-oriented. People who visit websites are usually trying to accomplish something. Your job, if you work on a website, is to facilitate this. There are some essential questions to ask:
- What are people who visit your website trying to accomplish?
- What are you doing to understand them?
- What are you doing to help them?
What the Data Shows
By studying traffic statistics for the past ten years across thousands of sites, we have learned that website behaviour is increasingly goal-oriented. In the past, people seemed to do more surfing for 'fun' — visiting company websites out of curiosity. That era is largely over. Modern visitors arrive with intent and leave quickly if they can't accomplish their goal.
How to Improve Visitor Experience
- Know what goals your visitors have — use analytics to see what pages and paths they take.
- Focus what you are offering — provide what people want, not what you want to show them.
- Reduce the number of clicks needed to reach a goal.
- Make the process easier — test your own site as a first-time visitor.
The Changing Reading Habit
Surfing behaviour and the average time people spend on website pages has changed dramatically. The vast majority of internet pageviews last just 1 or 2 seconds. Pages of text have been replaced with paragraphs. Paragraphs have been replaced with sentences. News websites like BBC and CNN continuously redesign themselves based on how and where millions of daily visitors click.
Reverse-Engineer Your Website
The practical application is simple: use traffic information to improve your website. Specifically, reverse-engineer your website from a user-experience point of view. Figure out what people are trying to do, then make sure they can do it quickly and easily. Opentracker gives you the visitor-level data to understand not just what pages people visit, but what journeys they take and where they drop off.
Conclusion
Every visitor to your site has a goal. Your analytics should tell you what those goals are. Your website design should make achieving those goals effortless. The businesses that get this right see measurably better conversion rates, lower bounce rates, and higher customer satisfaction.