A Tale of Two Visitors: How to Segment Web Traffic

Not every visitor to your website is the same. They all have different goals, different expectations, different ranges of patience. Broadly, though, there are two important types of visitors that must be  considered separately. The first is a local visitor. This is someone who is directly connected to the system. Maybe they live in the service area, or are taking a class, or are somehow connected to the library system. A good rule is that these individuals will go to the website directly or through another local link (say a course page) because the have specific expectations of the site (that it has e-journals, or course reserves, or a online catalog).

The second visitor is a remote visitor. These individuals stumble upon the site through a web search or through links that are not directly related to them or their region. These visitors often are trying to find a specific item not a specific service.

Each of these broad visitor types will have very different behavior on the site. And each should be considered unique when developing a website.

Local Visitor

Expectations: They often have specific needs and expectations of services. Our job is to figure out what they want, where they expect to find it, and how we can best communicate and provide it.

Metrics: The metrics that can help us best learn this information are

1. Top Content: There are often many “home pages” and users may often go directly to the page that is most useful whether through personal bookmarks or links that they have received from someone else. In addition, this tells you where users spend their time. And you can find out how long (although this is deceptive. Did they spend time there because it was useful or confusing?).
2. Click Density: This is a nice guided tour to your site. This will show how users navigate, where they go and what they do. This is a great way to see what navigation paths work and are intuitive and which aren’t.
3. Time on Site/Page: This is similar to #1. Users that are local are using the site actively (hopefully). They are more likely to spend more time on different resources. Time on site/page helps determine which ones are useful (because they spend a lot of time using them) or confusing (because they spend a lot of time using them). The difference is hard to tease out and is best determined with surveys or other forms of qualitative study.

Remote Visitors

Expectations: A lot of remote visitors come to the site to find a single piece of information. They may want a electronic document, a phone number, information about a unique collection or other items. They do not necessarily expect to spend a lot of time using the site and working from it (although for rich digital collections, this may not be true).

Metrics The goal here is to find out a) what the user wanted b) if they could find it

1. Bounce Rate: This is a measure of those who went to the page and then left right away without viewing other pages. Remote visitors will push up the bounce rate very, very quickly. Why? Because they are likely browsing the web to find an answer. A quick glance at the page may tell them it is not what they want and off the go. However, if they go directly to a site that has the information they want and then leave immediately, it is still a bounce so you need to check bounce rate along side . .
2. Keywords: This is great because you can see exactly what the patron was expecting. Combine this with bounce rate and you have a good indication of whether or not they received what they wanted. By looking at the keywords, you can build an understanding of what users want from your site and how that can be incorporated.

Reports

This was a quick look at a few key metrics for different visitors. Next week, I’ll show how to make custom reports to help isolate the data about each of these visitors.

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/88448902@N00/478136767/