‘Digital Footfall’ Data: What it Means and Why You Need to Use it

SEO / 10 Feb 2022

Retail businesses with physical premises track footfall to gain meaningful insight into customer behaviour. They do this for all sorts of reasons, like saving money, tracking sales conversions, and improving store layouts.

Digital businesses must do this too. Your website is your shop window, and if it doesn’t sell, it’s not doing its job. Leaving you vulnerable to competitors and missing out on valuable opportunities to convert prospects into clients.

Unbeknownst to many, website analytics hold a wealth of digital footfall data you can use to identify kinks in your customer journey and improve conversions. You just need to know what, where, and how to use it. Data-driven digital marketing know-how is just one of the many skills in our agency wheelhouse.

Sitting comfortably? Then, let’s begin.

Where to Start?

Analytics Data

We’ve already talked about Google Analytics, Search Console, and the top SEO metrics to track optimal website performance, so we won’t dwell on this too long.

Critical footfall data you need to review and analyse regularly (all available for free from Google Analytics and Search Console) includes:

• Visitors: the number of people that visit your site.
• Sessions: the number of site visits (whether people return more than once).
• Average session duration: the time people spend on your website.
• Bounce rate per page: people who click onto your site and immediately click away.
• Exit rate per page: when and where traffic leaves your site.
• Search queries: which Google searches are you appearing in, and what search terms are bringing customers to your site.
• Behaviour: what visitors do once they’re on your site.

Why it Matters

Regular analysis of your website analytics gives you unique insights into the behaviour of your site visitors – those that become customers and those that don’t.

This is incredibly valuable intel. You can use it to discover when and where prospects leave your site, hypothesise why, and test, test, test until you find the winning formula.

Footfall Data Can Flag a Technical Problem

A high bounce rate on a particular page or poor core web vitals can indicate an error. Perhaps a page takes too long to load and prospects aren’t willing to wait, or your site isn’t sufficiently mobile-friendly. Worse still, your site isn’t search engine optimised – a real problem for any digital business.

In many cases, your web visitors are aware of a problem before you are. Footfall data brings any issues to your attention – making it possible to fix yourself or bring in the big guns (AKA, us).

Footfall Data Can Show That Your Copy Isn’t Compelling

Savvy marketers build effective inbound marketing strategies on attraction, engagement, and conversion.

Without compelling copywriting, you can’t achieve any one of those things.

Maybe your messaging is off, you’re not writing about the right things, or your tone of voice needs work to attract more ideal clients. Whatever the problem, it needs rectification. Sharpish.

You can’t afford to risk running a lead magnet that doesn’t attract, a blog post that doesn’t engage, or a sales page that doesn’t convince. Who knows how many potential opportunities you’d miss?

It’s far better to know something isn’t working, own the problem and resolve it than to stick your head in the sand waiting for leads that aren’t going to materialise.

Footfall Data Can Highlight a Mediocre Customer Journey

A website is more than words on a page. It’s your opportunity to woo a prospect into working with you. Welcome them into the fold, show you understand their problems, demonstrate you’re the best in the business, and inspire them to act on their impulse to work with you.

That’s a lot to pull off. Using the footfall data you already have means you can understand your visitors’ journeys on your site: how they enter, where they go, what they read, and where they leave. Are they leaving where you’d expect (after checking out)? Or somewhere you wouldn’t expect (middle of the funnel)? How can you enhance their user experience and encourage them to make that crucial purchase decision?

Footfall Data Gives a Holistic Picture

It’s not all doom and gloom. The flip side of these negative observations is that your footfall data can show you what’s working well on your site – as well as what’s not.

If particular pages or posts perform especially well, you can compare them against those that don’t, make a plan of action, implement, then gauge the results.

Improvements in footfall data are all helpful indicators that your SEO, copywriting, and content marketing efforts are paying off. If things stall or decline, you’ll need to adapt your strategy.

Talk to Us

Whatever your website’s footfall data uncovers, we’re here to help put you back on the straight and narrow.

Our copywriting services, white label SEO support, and digital marketing skill sets are available and at your disposal. For straightforward assistance you can trust, book a call.