For years, you have been lied to. Marketers have been made to believe that before installing your marketing automation software’s website visitor tracking software that they will first have to uninstall Google Analytics. Lies!
Tracking software and Google Analytics can work side by side. In fact, their services compliment each other and will in no way affect how each of them operates individually.
Website visitor tracking supplements traditional web analytics by the placement of cookies on the visitor’s computer hard drive to track details and contribute to lead generation. When using Google Analytics on its own to track activity on your company’s website, you have access to the following information:
Visitors: How many visitors are on your website at any given time and what countries those visitors are in as they peruse your website content.
Pages: Google Analytics tracks statistics on each website page. This tells you which pages get the most hits (visitors per page) and how many visitors left after one page view (visitor bounce rate).
Visitor behavior: How many pages visitors viewed during one session on your website (visit depth) and how many of those visitors came back to your website for additional sessions (returning visitors).
While this helps marketers see how much traffic is on their website at any given time, they’re not learning anything about those visitors. Sure, a lot can be implied – pages that visitors sit on the longest and come back to most often probably intrigue them. But, accessing that information took a lot of manual effort instead of automating the behavioral process.
If you have to guess what website visitors want, you’re probably guessing incorrectly.
Website visitor tracking software fills in the gaps left by Google Analytics. Depending on Google Analytics as a stand alone website tracking tool is like gossiping – sure, you’ll hear bits and pieces of a juicy story, but you have to put everything together yourself. Implementing website visitor tracking software lets you see the story unfold firsthand.
Website visitor tracking software gives you access to the following information:
Identified visitors: Website visitors are identified through online form completion. Once they’ve completed this form, all previous activity is now associated to the identified visitor.
Where visitors work: Not only have we narrowed down the country (thanks Google Analytics!), but now we can pinpoint and identify a visitors location through a reverse ISP lookup. These are often identified by company name.
Pages visited: Specific web pages looked at and in what order. It’s important to note, you’ll get the data associated with the visitor’s location, but you may not know which specific visitor it’s associated with. So, you’ll see that this activity is tied to someone in Georgia, but not who in Georgia.
Downloaded content: The goal of any website is for visitors to engage with content. Of course, many visitors are just window shopping – hopping from page to page getting a feel for your branding and message. But, once they’ve downloaded a whitepaper or recorded webinar, we want to know for follow up and engagement purposes.
Taking it a step further, website visitor tracking software will send an alert out when an identified visitor returns to the site. This lets the Sales department know that a high value lead is engaging with your company content, so it’s time to act! Sales can call the lead, armed with: previous website activity, downloaded content, name, company, and title.
Remember, website visitor tracking’s cookies track visitor details and contribute to lead generation. Then, the collected information is integrated with your CRM to drive the sales-related processes.
So, remember, you don’t have to drop Google Analytics. Use this valuable information in tandem with the robust website visitor tracking to best utilize your website traffic information and start increasing conversions at higher rates.