Analysing your website visitors is one of the great exercises in marketing today. It genuinely excites me to follow who they are, where they came from and what they do on my website. I never had this level of insight into the customer with any traditional marketing technique. But there’s another fascinating exercise which online marketing has given us, and that’s the ability to test everything easily. We’re all daft if we don’t find the time to do it, if only because it was so much more difficult to do in the past (testing direct mail pieces, for example).
In Experiment or Die. Five Reasons And Awesome Testing Ideas on the always compelling Occam’s Razor blog, there’s a whole list of things you can test on your website to see what works best. The article is written in fairly excitable US English, but there are a lot of ideas to take away for even conservative UK industrial websites. Be bold! You only have to expose a small number of visitors to your riskier ideas.

One or two people commented on the post about GoogleTrends for Websites to say that they didn’t realise such useful tools were available, so presumably many of you may not have come across Google Insights For Search either. This is introduced comprehensively in the article Competitive Intelligence Analysis: Google Insights for Search on Occam’s Razor so make yourself a mug of coffee and have a read. This tool is a fascinating insight (of course) into what people are searching for, and where.

Google Trends for Websites is a relatively new - free - offering from Google which allows you to track the clickthroughs from Google to any site on the web. This means you can compare how you’re doing against your competitors, which is always fun. Unfortunately, you have to get a certain amount of clickthroughs to register on the graphs, which might not make it very useful for lower-traffic sites, such as many industrial companies. However, a really good, in-depth introduction to Google Trends for Websites appeared on the Occam’s Razor blog recently, and it gives you a good flavour of what this tool can do. Have a read.