How to analyse visitors to a specific website page, where they came from, and which pages they went to next

People landing on your website page will normally be as a result of a form of marketing that you have implemented, including:

• Paid advertising (e.g. Google Ads).
• Organic traffic (e.g. visibility in organic Google search results).
• Email marketing campaigns.

In some cases you don’t need people to go further than that landing page (e.g. there may be a form to complete or another call to action for them to take) and so your measure of success would be how many points of contact you received from the total number of people who landed on that website page.

In other cases, you may expect people to go off to other parts of your website (for example, they may look at a service you offer and then a case study related to that service, followed by your contact page).

For people you expect to take action on the landing page

If people aren’t engaging or are going further than your landing page (instead of taking the action you want them to) then there must be a problem with either your landing page or the marketing that is bringing them to that page.

Your first action would be to closely analyse the form of marketing visibility that brought people to that landing page.  Here are a few reasons why that marketing may be off-target and people don’t take action:

1. In paid advertising (e.g. Google Ads), the search terms are off-target. This is very common in cases where the business doesn’t understand that the click they got for their keyword is not what the person searched for.  For example, the keyword ‘plastic widgets’ got the click but the searcher had actually typed ‘plastic widget jobs’.  8/10 Google Ads campaigns I look at have been experiencing that problem (which is thankfully easy to resolve).
2. Also in paid advertising such as Google Ads, the advert text used attracts the wrong type of clicks. For example, a scanning services  company is visible for the keyword phrase ‘3d scans’ but fails to include reference to them only working for corporate clients and not at all focused on consumers who want something small scanned.  End result: people skim read the advert, don’t see anything to deter them, click through and ultimately become a wasted click because there was a mismatch between what they meant by ‘3d scans’ and what they discover the business is offering.
3. Organic search engine visibility could be making the website page visible for search phrases that aren’t relevant enough. For example, the widget manufacturer has used the wording ‘some of the jobs we’ve worked on’ within their page text, Google has misinterpreted that and when someone searches Google for ‘widget jobs’ their page appears in the organic search results and the click is gained but from someone who was looking for work.

Only after eliminating the possibility that your marketing efforts could be bringing the wrong people to your website, would you be looking in more depth at the landing page itself.

If the intention is for people to make contact from that page, but they don’t, or they click further into your website, then it’s highly likely that there was something lacking in the page they landed on.

So the question then becomes: what’s missing on the page?

The answers to this will be varied depending on the page, but here are some more typical reasons:

1. The call to action to make contact doesn’t have assurances that you won’t spam them after they complete their details.
2. The product or service you’re offering is not supported by numerous case studies/testimonials (related to that product or service) that people would be impressed by.
3. There is no live chat on the page (to allow people to ask quick questions).
4. There is no form of guarantee or USP that would encourage people to submit their details.

In short, if your marketing is bringing the right types of people to your landing page but you’re not getting enough enquiries from those, then it means that the page itself is lacking in some way.

For people you expect to click further into the website pages

It’s often better to get people to click off to other supporting website pages, including giving people the option to look at other elements of your business.

Your marketing may have brought someone directly to your product or service page and so, as long as the marketing is bringing in the right types of people, you may expect people to click off to other pages as part of their natural process of finding out more about your business.

As an example, someone searches for ‘widgets manufacturer’ and clicks through to your landing page that provides people with:

1. Brief information about your capabilities.
2. Plenty of case study summaries, allowing people to click off to deeper case study pages within the website.
3. Reference to your USP’s, which takes people to another website page where you focus on them in more detail.
4. A link to your contact page, where they can get a quotation or make contact.

Here, for example, is a video showing (using the software I recommend) someone landing on a page from an organic Google search, and them going off to look at specific case studies related to that page, plus also the page showing more about the company (which is normally a good sign of people thinking about engaging) …

Sometimes it’s interesting to find out what brought people to your website prior to them finding their way to your website page of interest.

For example, someone may have got to your red widgets page and they became an enquiry for you.   By using website analytics you can see the source of the website visitor, the page they landed on, and which pages they looked at before getting to your website page of interest.

I say ‘using website analytics’ but Google Analytics can’t give you that specific (page by page views of each visitor) information, although you can get this from the software you can see within the videos on this page.  Just let me know if you’d like to try that out free for a month.