Making money off your site’s visitor info

​Here at Copel Communications, we create a lot of content for our clients. Videos. Blogs. Case studies. You name it. 
 
Most of this ends up on their websites (as well as other places). 
 
So while this may seem like “the water’s edge” in the content-creation biz, we do often get insights from our clients' website and email traffic reports. It helps us raise our game, and continually improve, as we see what works, and what doesn’t work as well. 
 
In this article, we’ll share some info we’ve seen from some of our clients, in order to help you profit from it. Naturally, we’re going to anonymize everything we discuss, but you’ll easily detect the patterns in the noise. 
 
An SEO caveat
 
Before we dive into these weeds, we’d like to be nice and clear: Here at Copel Communications, we are not SEO experts. We doff our hats to those who are; indeed, we often work shoulder-to-shoulder with our clients’ SEO teams. 
 
That said, we specialize in the human side of the equation. We can’t tell you if Google will rank a certain paragraph higher than another, but we can easily discern whether or not it engages the reader, and compels them to, oh, make a purchase decision. 
 
So. We were screen-sharing with a client of ours recently, and they dove into their website analytics dashboards for us. 
 
What we saw was very interesting. 
 
All you need to know about this client of ours is that they toil in the high-tech B2B space. And they blast out a lot of content (which we help create), extolling their virtues and showcasing their ongoing successes. 
 
In any good website dashboard, you’ll be able to sort visitors by the platform they use to visit your site. In other words, “mobile vs. desktop.” 
 
Now, in this day and age, everyone’s gone mobile, right? If you judged only by the volume of Verizon and AT&T ads on TV, you’d assume that cords, and big computer screens, have all gone the way of the buggy whip. 
 
Well guess what we saw when this client clicked the tab? Turns out that 90 percent of their visitors were on desktop machines. It wasn’t even close. 
 
Ninety percent. Think about that. It tells you a couple of very important things: 

• These are people sitting at desks, with big machines. They’re either in an office or working from home with a serious setup. 

 

• They certainly have mobile devices, but they’re not using them for work.

 

• Importantly, they spend their days staring at screens with a lot of real estate. “Above the fold” is comparatively huge for these people, vs. tiny little phones or tablets. 

 
This one data-point alone dictates a ton of strategic and tactical considerations for our client: 

• We can assume that these prospects are sitting in an office when they view our stuff. We can even mention it in our materials. 

 

• We can safely tailor our website design to be desktop-first; what a delightful rarity these days!

 

• This speaks to the navigation, the amount of copy in each section, and even the number of pages and connecting links. 

 
If you haven’t checked this one little point of info in your own website dashboard recently, it’s time you should. 
 
Globe hopping
 
Here’s something else we discovered with this client: The majority of visitors, not surprisingly, came from the U.S. 
 
But quite surprisingly, these Americans accounted for only 44 percent of all visitors! Granted, our client does provide global offerings, but they are definitely U.S.-centric. Fortunately, the number-two country for visitors, clocking in at an impressive 27 percent, was the UK. 
 
It wasn’t enough for us to change all the spelling on the site to the Queen’s English, but still. 
 
Incidentally, drilling down to the top cities of visitors yielded London as number one, and New York as number four. Very interesting.
 
Dwell time
 
Here was another interesting insight. One particular blog article which we created for this client was consistently at the top of the hits. That’s fine; perhaps it simply has some good keywords in it. 
 
But no. It was more than that. Much more. Whereas most pages would be visited for one minute, this blog entry held readers for seven minutes. That means they read every single word of it. That’s huge. 
 
This helps to dictate other good (read: “similar”) topics for future blogs. It also provides indisputable data on how much time an interested reader will spend on valuable content. 
 
Nights and weekends
 
Last bit of data porn from this deep dive: Traffic on the site would spike early in the week… and then again on Saturday nights.
 
WTF? 
 
Turns out that this company (our client) sends out weekly emails (yep, we help with those, too), which go out early in the week. So, many recipients click on those emails’ links when they get them; thus the early-week traffic spike. 
 
But the website dashboard revealed a subtler, more interesting pattern. Many of the targeted email recipients are busy executives. Know what this means? 
 
It means that they get the emails from this company, early in the week. They don’t open them. They don’t delete them. They don’t mark them as spam. Rather, they save them for later reading, you guessed it, on the weekends. 
 
That’s how time-constrained these targets are. Knowing that helps us to craft focused content. It’s also reassuring to know that these people consider our materials “worth the wait,” too. 
 
Good content works
 
The takeaway here is that diving into your dashboard data will provide actionable insights and feedback. This is clearly a link-in-the-chain scenario: If, for example, the materials we provided this client sucked, then all the numbers would tank, too.
 
That’s clearly not the case here. We’ve helped this client. And we can help you, too. Simply contact us today to get started. 

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