How to diagnose your website.

Web analytics are a strategic way to find out who the target audience is based on the interactions with the content posted. According to the Bulldog reporter, “Consumers are harder to engage with today than ever before. Marketers should not be designing their personalization strategies as a series of one-off tactics, but rather as part of a cohesive experience that enhances each individual’s journey.” 

There are a variety of visitors that will visit a company’s website, if you review my blog post on visit characterization you can review the characteristics that can determine the effectiveness of a website. This post will highlight the metric components of the audience that will encounter a website. Visitor Characterization focuses on the actual people that will be visiting the website and the amount of times they return to the site. The components I will review over this blog post is the return, repeat, recent, and frequent visitors. The purpose of this blog post is to provide insights for a business to review and diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of their website to increase traffic. 

Building a successful website entails a desire to return to the site. For example, if your website has 1000 visitors in 30 days that does not determine the amount of times they will return. Visitor characterization measures the amount of times a visitor has come back to visit the site in any time period. According to Click Insight, “The returning number of unique visitors with activity consisting of a visit to a site during a reporting period and where the unique visitor also visited the site prior to the reporting period.” Whether it be daily, weekly or monthly the return visitors clearly find the site useful for repeating their actions.

In my professional experience, I have learned a great deal about the difference between recent and frequent interactions with a website. Recent interactions are about the time a visitor takes between the actions of the website. According to the IMC 642 lesson 1, “A visitor can only be counted as a new visitor if it is the first time to your site. So, if a visitor comes to your Website for the first time on Monday, and returns on Wednesday, that is counted as a daily unique visitor on both days, but as a new visitor only on Monday.” The being measured metrics determines the overall affinity of the website being reviewed. 

The frequency visitor is the amount of times an action is taken by the visitor on the website. According to Click Insight, “The frequency number of times an action was performed by a unique visitor.” Interactions however bring a stronger action to content as they make audiences connect with the website being visited. 

These characterizations identify and diagnose issues to improve the effectiveness of a company’s website. At the end of the day it comes down to what audience you are trying to target. Each website is different, but it is not impossible to create engagement with the visitors to create a desire for return.

Hay, L. (2017, February 7). Why you should be using analytics to inform your UX Work. Retrieved from: https://www.clickinsight.ca/res/web-analytics-definitions-3

Tietbohl, M. (2020). Lesson 1. Retrieved October 14, 2020, from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=150868_1&content_id=_7384399_1&frameset/Wrapped=true