All visitors are equal, but some visitors are more equal than others

Most website analytics tools treat website visitors alike, luckily some a/b testing tools allow you to test a specific returning or new visitor. But would it now be great if you could target and test specific groups of high potential visitors and offer then special promotions? You could test if these promotions, using an a/b test specifically targeted on this group, this process is called lead scoring.

Scoring website visitors is important and a know process that you know from email marketing tools, can be applied. You setup a drip campaign to trigger when links are clicked in a newsletter and step by step a lead nurturing campaign brings in a new client. On you website you can do the same, triggering evens and define stages of a visitor’s life cycle all the way to stimulate giving you a name and email so the marketing automation process can start. So how does online visitor scoring work?

Online Visitor Scoring

Your analytics tool shows what historical path a lead took before entering the marketing automation funnel. It could be something like this:

1. New visitor
2. Returning visitor
3. Read six pages or more this month and came back three times in that period
4. Signed up for newsletter or downloaded a whitepaper
5. Product sale

So in every stage you can focus on getting the visitor one step closer to a whitepaper download or newsletter sign-up. We can use lead scoring for that. For example we give new visitors 1 point (in Reedge we call this VisitorPoints), Returning visitors get 10 points, in stage 3, the reading of 6 pages and came back three times in one month scores 50 points and signing up for a newsletter of whitepaper download gives them 200 points.

1. New visitor (1 point)
2. Returning visitor (10 points)
3. Read six pages or more this month and came back three times in that period (50 points)
4. Signed up for newsletter or downloaded a whitepaper (200 points)
5. Product sale (500 points)

Your business might be using different parameters to define VisitorPoints, most professional tools support: geotargeting (continent, country, state, city), time one time, time on page, viewed specific pages, searched keywords, etc.

Segmentation of visitors

Knowing what you visitors are looking for is important. If a person comes back 3 times a week to your news section and looks for new Android news, add this user in segment: Android News. Grouping specific visitors of your site in specific segments would really help later targeting.

Target by VisitorPoints

It’s worth testing on specific groups if you get you loyal visitor to convert to the next stage of the funnel by changing banners, adding a promotional pop-up. Your right block with related content might be better used to promote a fitting whitepaper or an attractive newsletter sign-up form.

Combining a person’s interest (Android News) and mixing that with the VisitorPoint 260 points gives us a loyal visitor interested in Android News. Maybe a top 10 of Android News related items offered as a whitepaper could trigger these users to trust us with his email.

Summary

Even though looking at pageviews, bounce-rates and visitors gives the impression you need to work hard on your entire site, it might be worth having a diverse strategy for each of the visitor groups within that site. Because everyone know that now all visitors are equally important to the revenue stream.

Creating segments with groups of users that fit a specific profile makes it easier to create actionable data from you otherwise static analytics.