How to Improve Your Content by Analyzing Visitor Behavior (infographic)

One of the best ways to move forward and grow is to mind the old. Not dwell in it or idolize it, mind you, just study it to improve for the future.

That’s why you must review your existing content to improve the new. Look at what you’ve created, study the reaction and patterns your audience has to it and compare it to the competition.

When you review visitor and audience behavior it’s called qualitative analysis or qualitative research. It’s one of the best ways to find out the impact your content marketing strategy really has.

Why Analyze Visitor Behavior?

As soon as you understand the motivations and behavioral patterns of your audience, you can use it to optimize your content.

For instance, by knowing page views, visit times, bounce rates and post popularity, you can create targeted material. You want to provide targeted information that resonates better with your audience and speaks to them specifically.

This will boost engagement ratings on your site, hopefully bringing in new traffic, too.

More importantly, it can help you improve your marketing strategy and produce better material moving forward. This will keep your audience happy so they come back for more. This is crucial, because you can’t have success without a supportive audience.

In a recent survey of B2C marketers, 10 percent think analyzing visitor behavior is beyond effective, while 28 percent think it’s just effective. B2B marketers share a similar sentiment – 6 percent say it’s very effective, and 24 percent say it’s just effective in general.

What does this tell us?

A decent number of content marketers have already figured this out. That explains why platforms like Google Analytics exist and why they’re so popular.

How to Use Visitor Behavior Data to Improve Your Content

It’s all in the data you collect. How you want to improve your material and site will determine what visitor behavior you should be paying attention to.

For example, to get your visitors to stay on your site longer, you’ll want to take a look at traffic patterns. What are your visitors doing when they land on your website? What pages or content do they look at first? Where do they spend most of their time? After they hit your landing page, where do they go from there?

In Google Analytics, you can use something called the Behavior Flow report to see this data. Once you have it, you can improve your existing content – and future content – by offering visitors more of what they are looking for.

Zillow – a real estate search tool - uses internal visitor data to improve its content. In the past, it has done this to create pieces like 10 Best Cities for Love This Valentine’s Day, or Where Can Millennials Afford to Buy Homes?

Another form of visitor behavior to analyze is where people are coming from. What is driving visitors to your site? Is it your paid ads, or your social accounts? Is it your rating on search engines? Are there other sites directing people to yours?

This information will help you understand who your visitors are. Are they looking for help with a particular topic? Are they coming from a targeted site that focuses on one topic over another?

For example, is a stay-at-home mom’s blog driving traffic to your product pages?

You can use this to identify your demographic, which certainly helps you tailor content. You know just who you’re creating for.

Case Studies

The American Cancer Society saw donations for Cancer.org rise 5.4 percent thanks to improvements made with the help of its visitor behavior data. That data was collected and reviewed via Google Analytics, just as we’ve described. For a society that raises millions of dollars, 5.4 percent is a huge jump.

CJ Pony Parts found that people were landing on their page by searching for products of car brands that they didn’t currently sell, like the Ford Bronco, F-150, and Chevy Camaro. They then realized that there was a demand for those products, and began selling them. Without doing that research, they would have missed out on a lot of sales.

You can use visitor behavior to find your best – and most popular – content. Look at social likes, shares, comments and any other form of engagement that shows people were interested in a piece of content. This is another indicator of what your audience wants.

If your infographics garner more likes and shares than text posts, then prepare more of that type of content in the future.

When you can get inside the heads of your site visitors, you can more effectively provide the content they’re looking for. That’s an effective way to market your business and drive sales.

Bonus infographic:

Why analyzing visitor behavior is the perfect content hack

Infographic courtesy of: Salesforce / Top image: shutterstock