Using Your Website's Live Visitor Traffic Information to Your Advantage

The way in which a customer interacts with your website, can provide you with incredibly useful information. Our new Live Visitor Traffic feature gives you instant data about the landing pages being visited, the referral site the visitor came from and by clicking on 'View Detail', you can see their country of origin too. The question then becomes, what can you do with all of that data?

What Information Does My Live Visitor Traffic Provide?

To see your site's Live Visitor Traffic data, on your welcome page in the CMS, choose the button View Recent Visitors. This will then open a page which lets you see the information we have collected for you about the people who have visited your website. This includes:

• the date and time they arrived on your site
• the URL of the landing page they arrived at
• the URL of the referring domain
• the pages they also viewed during this visit
• the browser they were using
• the length of time they were on your site
• their country of origin

Additional information you can see is the IP address of any anonymous user, a number allocated to their visit, and if the visitor  is identifiable, because they login, register, purchase, or follow a link in a newsletter, then the report will identify them by name.

We have removed any personal details like session IDs and passwords that may have been visible in the logs. While the IP address is visible, you must only use that data for legal compliance purposes. For example, if someone commits fraud, you would supply that information to an investigator. However, you must not use the IP address to cross reference any data for which the customer has not consented to.

We believe we have struck the right balance of providing very useful traffic diagnostics, while complying with the GDPR. The information we collect is based on short term browser session IDs and we do not store any permanent cookies on visitors computers. Therefore, they did not need to give any consent for the data seen in the Live Visitor Traffic reports. Currently this data is only stored for one day, but this may be extended to a week once we have investigated how much data we need to store and manage.

As well as this, reports on your top visited products are now available in the shopping reports area again. We intend to further develop this live data diagnostics to provide further benefits to our merchants. For example, we will soon be offering a "scarcity message" encouraging customers to make a purchase before the miss out. E.g.  "5 other people are looking at this product right now, we only have 3 items left. "

The question then becomes, what can you do with all of this information?

How to Use Your Live Visitor Traffic Data

Like with anything, it's the doing which counts. As useful as your live visitor data is, if you don't know how to use it to your advantage, it's worthless. However, here are some ideas on what you can use it for:

• see which of your advertising campaigns is the most effective - when you run a marketing campaign, create a unique landing page for it. Then direct people to this page from your advertisment to show you how effective it has been at attracting visitors to your site. For instance, with a Facebook ad, have the URL set to a unique landing page specially created for the audience you are targeting.
  
  
• learn where your visitors are located - if you only ship within New Zealand, but you are seeing a lot of visits from audiences in Australia and the USA, you could consider adding those additional countries to your shipping list. You can also use this information to decide which countries you will target any advertising campaigns at.
  
  
• identify your top referring sites - you'll be able to see which websites visitors arrive at yours through. Often this will be a search engine, but you may find that other sites which link to your site are used regularly too. This can help you in knowing the types of sites which get visitors who are interested in your business. You can use this knowledge to help you pick which websites you could approach to ask if they would be interested in linking to your site from theirs.
  
  
• check when your site is busy and quiet - you can use this information to help you time any website maintenance or editing to ensure minimal disruption to your visitors. You can also use it to plan your time effectively, being available to assist customers via phone or email during those busy time periods.
  
  
• see visitor movements - if a visitor views more than one page, by selecting View Details, you can see the list of pages that visited. This lets you see which pages have a low or high bounce rate. You can use this information to stengthen your calls to action and improve your website navigation to retain visitors for longer on your website.
  
  
• monitor your social media performance - by seeing which social media platforms people are clicking through to your site from, you can adjust what you post onto those platforms to get better click through rates.
  
  
• view length of stay - ideally you want people to stay on your site for a long time as this results in a higher conversion rate. By seeing which pages they visit and for how long they stay, you can adjust your page content to increase that time period.
  
  
• see where people abandon your site - are they leaving once they reach the shopping cart and see the cost of shipping? Or do they reach the checkout but don't like any of your payment options? While these are only guesses, by seeing where people leave your site, you can adjust those pages accordingly.

 Make sure you check out our blog, where we regularly add new articles on ways you can increase traffic, improve your SEO, increase conversions and improve the design of your website.