After hiring a search engine optimization company to increase their web traffic, too many remodeling contractors look at their site traffic numbers and if they see the number of visits going up, think things are just great.? Well, they can be, but are not always.? Not all web traffic is from potential prospects.
Here are a few of the ways you can look beyond these gross traffic figures to see what part of the traffic most likely includes potential prospects.
First, you need to be using a good web traffic analysis system. Google Analytics (GA) is free to use, is robust, and is used by many (and I am using GA in this example), but these approaches can likely be used on some other robust quality web traffic tools.
The web traffic analysis approaches suggested below are not hard to use and they can provide you greater insight into the value of the traffic you get.? They do, however, require a little bit of technical know-how in order to configure the GA settings.? If you use a web development firm, SEO firm or marketing firm, they should be able to set up your web analytics system for you.
Filtered and Unfiltered Profiles
Within your Google Analytics (GA) account for your website, you can set up ?profiles?. Profiles allow you to look at your site in different ways.? I always have one unfiltered profile track all of the traffic to the website.? For most of the other profiles I set up, I filter out the following types of traffic so the information I get is not distorted by traffic that will never bring my clients a sale.
I suggest you filter out:
- Traffic coming from your (the remodeler) business?s office
- Traffic coming from your SEO company
- Traffic coming from your web developers
- Traffic from anyone who writes blogs for you or works on your website on your behalf
- Traffic coming from anyone in your company that is likely to visit the site regularly for reasons other than showing the site to a prospect.
Since most businesses have, or should have, what is called a ?static? IP address for their internet connection (meaning the number of the IP address never changes), you can use the static IP addresses assigned to those sources above to filter out traffic from them.
Set up the profiles early on because, unlike some other filtering tools in GA, you cannot retroactively use ?profiles? to filter out traffic in historical data.? I suggest you set up at least 6 profiles, one unfiltered and 5 filtered with the above IP addresses when you set up your GA account.? You may only use one or two but you will have the rest in case you need them later.
Segment the Traffic by Your Service Area, Region, US, and World
Using something called ?Advanced Segments? in Google Analytics, you can look at the traffic from certain segments of your traffic. You can also use these segments for looking at historical data, unlike the profiles above.
There are many different segmenting approaches provided by GA. One of the ones that I like is to create different geographic segments for your local service area, greater service area, the entire US and foreign country traffic.? To do this, the set of advanced segments to use are the city, state, and country segments.? (If you select the US as the country segment, then the total of all your traffic minus the US traffic is the foreign country traffic.)
Why is this important?? It?s nice to see that someone from New Zealand spent 15 minutes on your website learning about your unique green, aging-in-place, universal design approach to remodeling, but chances are they aren?t looking for a remodeler in your area.
If you work mostly for local homeowners, you are probably much more concerned about the traffic that is coming to your website from your local service area, a bit less concerned from the state and less concerned from the country as a whole. You can define your immediate working area by selecting the cities in which you work as one advanced segment.? You might wish to use the state or states within close proximity to your location if you have people moving into your area from other parts of your state or an adjacent state.? You can also segment the US to pick up anyone who might be looking for a remodeling contractor in your area but who does not live there.? Each of these advanced segments will contain a higher proportion of potentially qualified prospects as you get closer to the region most of your business comes from.
If you work on vacation homes, you might be more interested in traffic coming from states and localities other than your own.? You can set up the segments to track a group of states or a segment per state if you are targeting vacation home owners from a specific location.
Examples of How These Techniques Help Improve the Value of the Information You Get
Filtering: Since most remodeling contractor websites get hundreds to thousands of visits but not tens or hundreds of thousands of visits per month, it is very easy for the web traffic stats to be thrown off and be misleading if someone in the company, SEO firm or web developer is visiting the site regularly, working on the site or in some other way affecting the site statistics.? With hundreds of visitors a month, it doesn?t take much to ruin the value of the web traffic data generated. Filtering out these visitors helps you get better, more helpful information.
Advanced Segments: Some remodeler websites have truly great information and, either on their own or through search engine optimization, draw a lot of traffic.? We know from experience that some of this traffic, sometimes much of this traffic, can come from people too distant to be prospective clients.? With quality and optimized information on your website, it would not be unusual for half of your web traffic (or more) to come from areas you do not service. ?This will not hurt you unless you are factoring these visits and their site behavior into your sales projections, web sales close ratios, etc.? By setting up advanced segments for geographic service areas, you can tell what part of the traffic is coming from homeowners with the potential to be qualified prospects.
Using this advanced segmented information, you can also work on building traffic from your service area instead of building traffic that comes mostly from outside of your service area.
Total traffic to your site is not as important as some of the above segments.? However, traffic that is not local may still provide some value to you. Some search engines will rank more popular sites higher in the search results than those websites with less traffic.? So while that visitor from the other coast or New Zealand may not be a prospect, these people coming to your website because of the quality of your site?s content may help your search engine ranking.? Knowing where the traffic is from helps you determine what type of value the traffic provides.
Bonus Tip
With advanced segments, you can even track the local traffic that is coming to your site because of search engine optimization vs. those visiting for other reasons.? This is great info because you can use the non-search engine traffic to measure the impact of ads, direct mail, and jobsite marketing while the search traffic can measure the use of search engines and your SEO efforts.
In the example above, the green line shows total local traffic over time to your website. The blue line is that part of the local traffic coming to you from people searching for you on line and the red line is local traffic coming to you from non-search sources such as referral sites, jobsite signs, post cards, etc.? Site traffic in this chart does not show total US or Global traffic but for a remodeling contractor, that traffic is generally of much less value.
Notice that local search traffic (blue) builds over time, which is what you want.? Local direct traffic (red) spikes in month 11.? If you did a major mailing in month 11 this would indicate it caused people to go to the website ? all things being equal.? If you do regular mailings or ads, you will want to look at the web traffic by month and look at each day?s traffic.? It will provide you with more useful information.
David L. Alpert is cofounder and president of Continuum Marketing Group LLC, a marketing firm which focuses exclusively on remodeling contractor marketing. David has been involved in marketing the remodeling industry since the mid 90s. David and his firm provide a wide array of strategic and tactical marketing services, some unique in the industry. David is recognized as an expert in remodeler marketing and has been published and/or quoted in leading remodeling trade publications. His knowledge and experience include traditional remodeler marketing such as branding, direct mail, jobsite marketing, and sales literature as well as online marketing such as website development, SEO (search engine optimization), website optimization, social media, e-newsletters, etc. David is also an expert in integrated remodeling contractor marketing and is the developer of the ASPIRE-CM ? remodeler marketing methodology. Additional articles by David can be read by getting a free subscription to Continuum?s remodeling contractor marketing Marketing Matters e-newsletter.
To contact David call 703-759-0106 or e-mail dalpert@continuum-mg.com or reach out to him on Twitter?, Facebook or reach out on his blog.?
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