When a visitor lands on your website, you want to be sure you deliver the best possible experience to push them to become a customer or spike their interest enough to warrant a return visit in the future. 

To deliver a truly remarkable customer experience, it’s crucial to set up fully compliant website visitor tracking. Not only will this allow you to find out more about who your customers are, but you’ll get a view of which actions, content types, and marketing messages are driving conversions and better understand how you can improve user experience on your site. 

In this article, we’ll explore what website visitor tracking is, the benefits, and how to stay compliant. 

What is website visitor tracking? 

Website tracking allows you to get an understanding of who has visited your website (e.g. demographic and geographic information) and what they’re doing while they’re there. 

At a very basic level, website tracking happens with programs like Google Analytics where you can understand the volume and type of traffic on your website.

More advanced website tracking tools like Ortto allow you to get a deeper understanding of the user experience, how existing customers are interacting with your website, what kind of content visitors are engaged with, and even details like the company name of site visitors.

What is session association?

Session association allows you to identify visitors using activities that help with identification, like email clicks, capture forms, or starting a checkout in Shopify. When session association is set up, these activities will be attached to your known user’s profile and will be identified as a known user session rather than an unknown website session. 

Session association helps you capture people who sign up to your website in Orttto without requiring a dedicated integration. Plus, by identifying the users on your page, you can send more targeted capture forms. For example, if they are known you will be able to show them a relevant deal. If they are unknown, you might prompt them to download an eBook or watch a demo.

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How does tracking website visitors help my business? 

Modern digital marketing relies on website visitor tracking to deliver personalized experiences not just on your website, but through retargeting campaigns on social media or search, email marketing, and more.

It's important to note, however, that universal tracking scripts can be unreliable, and you could miss out on gathering valuable data on users as a result of content blockers. Unlike universal tracking scripts, Ortto's first-party tracking script can't be blocked by Adblock, email servers and browsers, allowing you to gather more reliable data.

Here are just some of the benefits of implementing website visitor tracking: 

1. Track known and anonymous visitor activity

All website visitors have a unique ID number and are initially treated as anonymous. With a tracking code, once a visitor has interacted with your website, they become ‘known,’ automatically transforming them from a stranger into a customer.

By tracking your known customers, you can generate a customer profile and record the entire journey they take with your product or service. All this information allows you to trigger them into the right customer journey for acquisition, onboarding, or retention.

2. Capture leads and contact data

With a tracking code in place, you can collect customer data through tools like web forms and automatically enter that data into your marketing automation software. With that data, you can trigger website visitors into a customer journey and start converting them from a lead into a buyer.

For example, when a visitor opts to sign-up for your blog, you can use a web form to capture their email address and, with a customer data platform like Ortto, your new contact will be automatically entered into a relevant audience segment and sent a welcome email, beginning their customer journey. 

3. Identify popular posts and pages

By knowing what pages your visitors land on and the content they spend time with, you can identify what’s working and what’s not. With all your data sources integrated into one CDP, you can start to figure out which content types drive traffic or conversions, and replicate them to drive growth. Content that has a high bounce rate, you can consider optimizing titles, metadata, and load time to improve results. 

Every post and page on your website should be optimized for search, and have a purpose within the customer journey. If you discover a page that no one lands on or reads, consider how you can update it for relevancy or search. You can also use A/B testing to trial different messaging and see which marketing messages or content types drive the most conversions. 

4. Find the source of your traffic and leads

By implementing website visitor tracking, you can see the source of your traffic, whether it’s from direct, organic search, referral, display, social, backlinking efforts, advertising, or something else entirely. You can even break down traffic sources by geographic location, gender, demographics, interests, mobile, and more.

Understanding where your visitors come from helps to create targeted marketing strategies, like a location-specific promotion or a customer referral campaign. You can also start to track where your highest-converting traffic comes from and attribute revenue to different traffic sources. 

5. Enable automatic UTM parameter tracking

UTM parameters are snippets of text that, when added to a link, tell tools like Google Analytics or Ortto more information about the visitor. You can track information such as where the visitor came from, what medium they engaged with, and what they’re interested in. When visitors click on one of these custom links, the unique parameters are displayed on your account for easy viewing.

Website visitor tracking and automation of UTM parameter tracking help when creating specific campaigns to convert users from leads to customers. For example, a UTM parameter can tell you which campaign led to sales and how many customers converted from a specific advertisement. These insights are crucial to making data-driven decisions about where to invest, and where to redirect.

6. Segment and score contacts based on website visits

Once you know how your customers are interacting with your website, you can start segmenting and scoring them based on behavior. With marketing automation software, you can create specific journeys that trigger when a known customer performs specific actions on your website.

For example, visitors who viewed the pricing page, but didn’t make a purchase could receive a promotional email a day after their interaction. In another scenario, a visitor who reads three or more blog articles could increase their lead score by one. This is especially beneficial for growing sustainably since email marketing has the highest return on investment. (Campaign Monitor, 2019)

7. Display personalized messages

Given that 71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal, giving your visitors a personalized experience should be top priority.

As your visitors start to browse through your website, you may want to give them an extra nudge or help guide them along on their journey. When combining a tracking code with marketing automation software, you can integrate pop-ups, forms, or chatbots that display in-app or on-site messages.

For example, you could automate a notification that explains your latest product release for any visitors scrolling through your features list. You could also give them the opportunity to fill out a form requesting help from your customer success team.

Alternatively, visitors who spend some time on a specific blog could be targeted with a form pop-up that offers them a free eBook on a relevant topic, enticing them to hand over their email address in exchange for the content. Or, like the Thrive Market example you see below, you could entice visitors who show exit intent with a free gift or offer.

How to stay compliant when tracking your website visitors

It’s important to ensure your website is compliant with all data compliance laws and that you stay on top of any new developments in the space. There are different laws around website tracking in different countries and states, including GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD. In addition, it’s important to ensure that data is stored and managed correctly. 

When it comes to website tracking, staying compliant requires you to:

• Declare usage of tracking technology
  Your cookies policy, privacy policy, and terms of use should be easy for website visitors to locate, with clear statements about how the data you’re tracking is being used. Users in certain regions should also have the ability to turn off tracking. Ortto customers can configure this easily using the tracking opt-in form which is designed specifically to meet the GDPR framework. 

• Follow rules around email and data protection laws
  There are different data protection laws in place in countries that are governed by GDPR or in states like California where the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is in place. 
  
  Do your due diligence to ensure that data, including email addresses, is stored and managed correctly. At Ortto, we are SOC 2, meaning we have been audited by an independent third party to ensure our customer’s data is protected and kept private from unauthorized users. 

• Give leads the opportunity to opt-out of marketing communications
  Email and SMS subscribers, for example, should include an unsubscribe option. All of the standard email, SMS, and email footer templates in Ortto include this option to ensure every message sent is compliant.