Getting to know your web site visitors

by Wes Hooper

13th February 2009

Published in: Web Marketing

We've just put an update to Moobiz live, overhauling the individual visitor details page in Moobiz web analytics reporting.

Our aim was to add 2 new useful bits of information - last visit time for repeat visitors and ecommerce basket details (when available) and also tidy up the visitor feedback link we'd previously added to the page quickly some time ago.

We started off with something like this:

First off, lets add a nice plain English message saying when the returning visitor last had a look at your site. This lets you know whether someone has been spending time recently researching your site, compared to an existing customer coming back to check on latest news or another recruitment agency going through their database again after 3 months (we know who you are!)...

Next, add any basket and feedback details for the visitor. Done.

The page title isn't really doing much, so we moved the date and location in to make better use of the space. Likewise, the number of page views fits naturally in the heading below. The table is now looking a bit pointless, so a few short paragraphs instead with the key information highlighted were next:

We don't really need the list of pages viewed in a collapsible fieldset and the title could be a little stronger. Giving less weight to the page addresses and putting them underneath the page titles also looks neater:

Moving the summary / introduction text over to the right helps give focus to the pages the visitor looked at, while also adding consistency with the rest of Moobiz. If the visitor has placed an order on the site, an obvious button to quickly get to the order details saves time too.

Most of the time we don't need to know the more technical details about the visitor, so we can hide them by default. The link to order details belongs better underneath the visitor summary, as the focus of the page is the visitor. A link to any feedback left is even less important, but still accessible.

Lastly, we moved the page addresses back into their own column of the table, but without showing the domain names to keep things short and allowing the majority of rows to be 1 line high, instead of always 2 lines. A green status label brings out the Basket and Feedback events and the summary text is even more concise, with the less important ISP info moved to the end.