June 2013 Newsletter - Understand your website visitor behavior

Get to know your content

Online visitors exist virtually on the Internet. Unlike our daily face to face communication with our customer, we would not be able to identify the needs of our website visitors. It will be even more challenging when we want to improve the user experience in using our website to look for information. Thus, we need to find a way to get their review or comment while using the website. Besides that, as the owner of the website, we also need to understand deeper in term of the popularity page as well as the audience demographic.

Start with Google Analytic (free)

Just get yourself started and sign it up at https://www.google.com/analytics. You will need to follow its instruction to add your website into your account profile. After which, you will need place a code snippet to your website in order to start to analyse your website traffic. It provides a very comprehensive report and overview of your entire website. You will know your audience by its demographics, behaviour, technology and etc. For a beginner, you can use the default report and it is adequate enough for the insight of your website performance.

Using alternative script for website analysis

For some advance user, you might want to get more information of your website audience. Hence, we wish to recommend you to use a free tool called bbclone. You could check it out at: http://bbclone.de/. Even it is a very simple tools, it could provide us some useful information to help us to optimize our website as well as real-time tracking for visitor who is misusing our website. It can serve as a security measurement for our website as well. It is very simple to use because you need not setup any database but just add the tracking code into your website only.

Prepare a questionnaire or survey

Another way to understand your user experience is via questionnaire. You could use service like SurveyMonday (http://www.surveymonkey.com), Perception Solutions (http://www.perceptionsolutions.com) to achieve your purpose. The approach is very simple, just prepare a list of questions which you want your visitors to comment. Please make sure your question is simple and concise, too complicated questions may hinder your visitors from answering. Finally, just add the tracking code to your website and it will do its work automatically.

Use third party plugin like zopim (free / paid)

Using a passive approach, you can install online support plugin to your website e.g. Zopim. With this, you will be able to help and get your customer feedback directly in order to improve better. Since it is free and does not affect the overall user experience, it is no harm to install on your website. Just make sure someone is available and online during work hour in order to provide online support to the customer and understand their needs. They provide both free and paid version, you will need to use the paid package if you are using it with more than 1 agent. Most of the recommendations discussed above do not required a deep understanding of technical knowledge for implementation. You could try it out yourself or contact us for consultation.