Everyone has heard of analytics. This is the data about how people are using your website. How many visitors? Average pages per session? Acquisitions based on source? And so on.
Think of this as the “forest” of data. Journeys are the “trees” — the stories of individual visitors that have come to your website. Journeys are easier to relate to than aggregated data — as long as you are looking at the right ones.
Once you look at some of the journeys from your website, we’re sure you’re going to find them interesting. But are they useful? Are they actionable? Yes! Here are some ideas for how you’ll want to use them.
Evaluate Your Campaigns
You work hard to bring visitors to your website — through advertising, organic search, email marketing, content marketing, and more. How well are those various campaigns succeeding? You can (and should) look at aggregated data to evaluate campaign performance. But nothing compares with looking at specific examples.
Suppose, for example, that you launch a new AdWords campaign and you get 15 clicks through to your website on the first day. In Navu, click on Campaigns and select this campaign from the list. Bingo! You’ll see those 15 visitors listed under the “All” tab. Click on a few of these and review those journeys. You’ll probably be surprised on some of these. For example, some of those clicks may be from visitors who had already been to your site before. Some may have immediately converted, while others may have drifted around your site. Pay particular attention to those that engaged but did not convert. Those are most likely your lost opportunities.
If you click on the Campaigns button again, you’ll notice that we list all of the campaigns we’ve seen recently on your site. For each one, we report acquisitions, engagements, and conversions. That’s already a nice quick way to evaluate your various campaigns. Sure, you can do that in other ways. But isn’t that easy?
Make Your Case
You’re probably investing a lot of money and team effort on your marketing campaigns. That’s because every new lead is so valuable to your company. But how do you answer when someone asks you to justify this investment?
Or maybe you have a theory about where you should make a new investment.
Your argument will be greatly improved if you can show others specific examples of how real visitors have behaved on your website. So in your next team meeting, pull up one or two specific journeys and drive your point home!
Help Your Sales Team
At some point, you are going to pass along a qualified lead to your sales team. A sales person is going to use that lead to try to close new business. Every sales person will tell you that the more they know about a lead, the better the job they can do in selling them.
Imagine that part of the information you provide to your sales people for each lead is a complete story about what that person has done on your website. Perhaps they spent a lot of time on a specific blog post, or reviewing a certain product. That’s going to be useful in the sales process.
When a person fills in a form on your website with their contact information, we update the journey to reflect that information. So that means that when you’re ready to hand off a lead to your sales team, you can also grab the journey for that lead and share a link to it along with the other lead information. Don’t worry. Your sales person doesn’t need a Navu account to review these shared journeys. To find the journey, just enter the email address in the Navu Journeys search box.
Evaluate How Content is Performing
Your content marketing efforts are expensive. You should see how this investment is working. One way to do that is to look at how visitors who get to that content behave.
In Navu, paste the title or URL of a page on your website into the Search box. We’ll find all of the recent journeys where visitors have been on that page. From there, you can study examples to see if and how they engaged, where they came from, where they went to next, and so on.
Monitor Conversions
How many conversions do you get on your website on any given day?
If you’re like most of our customers, these signups are your most valuable asset. You should keep an eye on them as they happen. Just open Navu and click on the Conversions tab. You can watch as new conversions happen.
If you’re smart, you will make sure someone on your team is looking at each and every Journey that results in a conversion. These successes will tell you what is working. But they’ll also give you ideas about where do look for the lost leads. You’ll probably want to start poking around in the Engagements tab looking for journeys that haven’t converted, but should.
Review What People Search For
One of the best signals that a visitor is engaged is when they use your site search to look for something on your site. What someone searches for tells you a LOT about what they want from you. These searches can give you great clues about what content to consider adding, or what messaging to change so as to line up with the language your customers are using.
Navu can easily find recent journeys that include site searches. Click on the advanced tab (with the checkmarks icon). Check the “search” box and it will show you all journeys that include site search. If you don’t see a search option it is because we don’t have any recent journeys that include site search.