A Lesson from Peeping Tom…
September 11, 2007
What are the visitors on your website doing… right NOW?
Do you know?
Sure, you could look at your web server logs to answer that question. But untangling a visitor’s path through your site… WHAT they looked at, HOW often and in WHAT order… can be pretty tough.
And even if you were willing to spend the time to do all that–you’re STILL living in the past. Looking at what happened LAST month, or LAST week.
But what about NOW? What is your market doing right now? That might be different than what they were doing last week.
The great hockey player, Wayne Gretzky, didn’t say, “A good hockey player plays where the puck WAS.”
He said:
“A Good Hockey Player Plays Where
the Puck Is. A Great Hockey Player
Plays Where the Puck Is Going To Be”
And the same goes for your market. You’ve got to know where they are to understand where they’re going.
Let me explain how you do this…
One of my clients is in the middle of testing with a tool that lets us watch web visitors as they go through the site…
Nothing new about that technology. It’s been around for years. But most people don’t use it. (Something like LivePerson)
But it only took us about 10 minutes to see we were losing a lot of money.
Because We Were Flying BLIND!
Because we were making assumptions about our market instead of actually seeing reality.
Content pages that we thought were just filler were attracting the eyes of qualified visitors. (We never thought theses pages would be popular.)
So the people were coming and looking at information we didn’t think they’d care about.
What were all of those pages missing?
Anything to move the visitor to the next step in the sales process. No call to action… no opt-in box… NOTHING.
It took 10 minutes to increase our conversions simply by observing what was happening right in front of our eyes.
What’s even better, is that now we can piece together exactly what goes through the minds of our visitors.
We can watch how they come in on the landing page… spend a few minutes clicking on things… and then go in search of CREDIBILITY. Something that convinces them they aren’t being “taken.”
Once that happens, they go back and start digging. Once that emotional switch is flipped and they’re thinking, “this guy MIGHT know what he’s talking about…” THEN they hunt for the facts to backup their hunch.
And it’s EYE OPENING to be able to watch as it happens. Turns out it’s also very profitable.
High quality knowledge about your market can always be turned into profit.
So If That Makes Me a Peeping Tom, So Be It
Actually, it’s not quite like Peeping Tom. He was watching people in their homes. This is more like watching them in yours.
If you aren’t using something like this, you’re missing out on a whole lot of information about your market.
And it’s a lot harder to make money by trying to guess what your market will do. It’s much easier to watch what they do and plan accordingly.
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