Website Data: How To Capture Valuable Data from Your Website

Your website receives many visitors, but how well do you know them? More importantly, how well do you use their data to improve your business?

Having a website provides several advantages for your business:

1. Generating leads
2. Helping you to interact with your clients
3. Enabling your customers to purchase directly from your site.
4. A website is also a great way to conduct research about your customers and prospective customers.

Needless to say, capturing data from your website visitors enables you to market and sell your products effectively. It also enables you to provide the best online experience because you understand how visitors interact with your website.

The main types of data you can capture from your website

• Social demographic data of your visitors
• Emails
• How visitors use the website

How do You Capture this Data?

1. Social Demographics

This includes the name, age, gender and location of your visitor. Knowing your visitors’names will enable you to personalize your communication with them. With age and gender you will know the type of people who are interested in your products. This will help in determining the best marketing and pricing strategies to use. The location of a person reveals where your visitors are coming from and helps you pinpoint which region you should target. Additional data can include education and income. The best tool to collect the social demographic data is online forms.
An online form is basically a tool that collects people’s data and any information that is specified. The forms are designed to store the data systematically in a database so that the website owner can retrieve the data and use it for research and analysis. When designed and applied properly they can reveal valuable and useful information for the growth of your business. To make the visitors fill the forms, you can offer an incentive. This can include making them to subscribe for newsletters, conducting a competition or downloading an e-book.
You can choose to code and design your own form or you can use an online form software. Using available software saves time and you will enjoy additional features provided. Whichever form you choose depends on your goals and the data you want to collect. The most popular online form tools that you can use are;

– Adobe Forms
– PHP Forms
– Wufoo
– Gravity Forms
– Leadin
– JotForm

 Read more about the importance of demographics in marketing. 

2. E-mails
   The most important data you need is your visitors’ emails. Having your visitors email means you can be able to contact them as you wish. An e-mail is very useful especially when you want to market a new product or give your clients updates when your organization is planning something. Even though you can get emails via forms, there are faster ways like using simple tools that are designed to only collect the email of the user. It saves them the time and effort needed to fill the details collected in forms. Such tools include;

   (a) Pop-Ups
   These are windows that appear randomly requesting the site visitor to enter their email. They can appear immediately when someone visits your website or after using your website for some time. They can also be designed to appear when the user visits another page on your site. You can use the following tools to set up Pop-Ups.

   – Pippity
   – Sleeknote
   – Opt-in Popup
   – List Builder
   – Optin Monster

   (b) Header Bars and Widgets
   These are sections in your website that remain stuck as the user navigates the site. They are less invasive compared to pop-ups. The fact that they are always on the site also makes them more effective. The tools you can use to create header bars include;
   – Hello Bar
   – Smart Bar
   – Opt-in Widget
   – PlugMatter
   – Inline Opt-In Forms

   
   3. Website Usage
   Website usage means all activities that visitors engage in while navigating through your site. This includes how long they stay on your website, how they are sharing your content, the links they are clicking, what they are uploading or downloading and so on. You can measure website usage using Google Analytics and Google Adsense.

   (a) Google Analytics
   Google analytics is the best and easiest way to capture website usage data. With it, you get to track, evaluate and conduct analysis on people’s interactions with your site. It is very useful in capturing features that are unique to your site. With this data, you will know whether your website is appealing, and serving its intended purpose. Google analytics is also able to show what other sites people visited while logged on your website. Apart from browsing behavior, you are also provided with the age and location of your visitors. This is a free tool and it is very easy to set it up. The reports produced are clear and easy to interpret and apply. Read more about Google analytics.

 
(b) Google Adsense

This is another tool that Google has provided. It uses data that has already been analyzed from Google analytics. Adsense is more of a marketing tool. It enables you to advertise your product to people based on their browsing behavior. Am sure you have visited a site then days later an Ad from the site pops up while browsing unrelated sites, that was Google Adsense. With it, you are able to market your products to your visitors wherever they go; even on their social media pages. It is free to apply for Google Adsense but you will only need to pay for the tool when you want it to advertise your products.

Whichever tool you decide to use, make sure it is a tool that gives you as much valuable information as you need. Also, ensure the tool does not disturb or harass your customers as they navigate through the site. If the visitors need to enter the data, make it an easy and fast process. Ensure the tool is visible for everyone to see. A trick people use is to place the tools in several parts of the website window or in several pages. Once you have the data, know how best to utilize it. We recommend you hire a data analyst to help you out.