Knowing your customer is a science with a touch on softer aspect.
How to use Technology to Your Advantage?Behavior in itself is intangible, which means measuring it becomes even more difficult. To solve the problem we need to identify actions that would help us to identify on how a person will behave or take an action. These actions ultimately would help us bucket a set of similar behavior as well as develop personnas of each visitor vising our website. This in turn will become a powerful feedback mechanism that can help us shrp target our customers.
The customer could reach to the website from various sources like social media, google search, other websites, paper ads, hoardings, inorganic traffic, etc. So identifying from where the customer came (the referring page) and what creative brought the person to the website is good starting point on what you would like to show to the customer and what content would be useful.
The sourcing creative type (Static/ Video/ Carousal), the creative message
The device mobile/ desktop/ tablet, The IP, any unique information for future reference
Events capture like scroll, content seen (div), time spent div wise, referring page,
internal click or exit.
Traffic source.
The creative source is a good starting point on what was the reason that the customer visited the website. Now we need to ensure that we present information around that particular creative. So if a person is looking to build a second home if we share information around it and share that information we would end up increasing the time spent on the website. The requirements of a second home or a pure investment are totally different. So the sourcing creative, referring URL or information is a critical point.
Knowing about device may help in various ways, the first is the layout which will help in terms of showing what creative will create an impact. A simple hover which looks attractive on desktop becomes invisible on a mobile. Different creatives and user interface can be created for different devices. The bandwidth is the other part as usually a mobile would be used to browse using a mobile network. Which is slower than a wifi or wired network. Capturing unique identification would help from a first time user or a returning user. Creating or understanding on how a returning customer can be served or primed Further for better conversions.
Placing the events strategically to understand the visitor behavior throws unlimited power to us, these events could help in understanding the visitor better, it could help frame our marketing strategy better or to frame it better sharp targeted, identifying purchasing events (behavior), creating patterns. To touch a little on Technology it could be checking the scroll data of the visitor, the div element read, time spent on the content, preference of videos, static, text, etc. Finally, developing a dynamic website that changes as per the vistor needs. A flow that matches the visitor's need. Helping us create a content that appeals to the our customer (The one who is finally going to buy our product). All this will also help us in our content strategy over a period of time. Where we should concentrate our efforts.